My great-grandfather Heber Ashton came across the plains in the second wave of pioneers, in 1851, and ran cattle on shares with a man named John Seely on the south end of what's now Sanpete County. Heber kept a journal. I have it on the shelf in the barn office. There's a line in it from June of 1853 that I keep on the wall:
"We drove the cattle, but we did not herd them. We pointed them toward the place where the Lord meant them to go, and we asked Him to keep our hand steady, and we let the cattle move themselves."
That's the whole practice right there. You don't herd. You point. You ask. You let them move.
I came to UAV work through a neighbor's emergency in the spring of 2019. He had a commercial bird go down in a wheat field he was leasing out near Aurora and the survey footage on the card was load-bearing for a deal he was trying to close that week. He called me because I had a horse and a tracking radio left over from elk season and he didn't know anybody else who had both at the same time.
We found the bird in about four hours. I charged him a hundred dollars and a tank of gas. He paid the hundred and added two hundred more on top of it and told two friends. They had their own emergencies. The phone hasn't really stopped since.
I worked for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems on the side for a couple of years through that early period, which is where I learned the technical end of the modern fleet — flight control systems, autonomous operation, GPS denial behavior, telemetry. I left the company in 2022 to run this shop full time. They still send me referrals when somebody calls them with a problem that's too small for them to take but too real to ignore.
The shop runs out of a barn I built with my brother-in-law Royce in 2019, on the south end of a forty-acre piece my granddad left me. Royce works the point on most drives. My hand Travis runs the follow truck and most of the field maintenance. My wife handles the books and the schedule and tells me when to be home for supper.
I'm an active member of the Mount Pleasant 3rd Ward and a former counselor in the Sanpete Stake Young Men's presidency. I won't preach at you about it and I won't apologize for it. It's part of how I run the shop. It's also why I don't take Sunday calls except for genuine emergencies — meaning birds in the air, livestock at risk, or people in distress. Anything else can wait until Monday morning.
I take Saturday calls. I take 6 AM weekday calls. I take 9 PM weekday calls. I don't take 10 PM weekday calls because by 10 PM my horse is asleep and so am I.
If you want to work with me, the first call is free. Tell me what's going on. I'll tell you whether I can help, and if I can't, I'll tell you who can. That's the practice.
