GILLETTE — Rocky was having none of it. The 5-year-old alpaca stubbornly dropped to the ground with his brown and white spotted face firmly planted into the grass as if trying to hide from his owner, Tri Nation, who tugged on Rocky’s harness.
“Come on, boy,” Tri said, to which Rocky promptly ignored.
Instead, Tri’s son-in-law, Vincente Lopez, jumped in to give him a hand, prodding Rocky’s hindquarters until the animal leapt in indignation and hopped a few feet before planting himself back down.
He wasn’t going to make it easy. It was almost as if Rocky sensed that the dozen or so people milling around the Nation's upper corral that morning had something to do with him.
He was right.
That Saturday, June 7, was annual shearing day at Tri and Heidi Nation's Spirit Nation Alpacas, and Rocky was about to get several inches of wool lighter, but he was going to make the shearers work for it.
Rocky continued his up-and-down antics for the next 100 or so feet as Tri tugged him into the pen.
Waiting for Rocky and the 15 other alpacas to be sheared that day was Corey Bricker, who was assembling his clippers. It’s more difficult than it looks as Bricker tightened the brushes and blades into place a few times before getting it just right. If the blades aren’t sharp enough and combs snag and pull, animals – especially those with strong legs like alpacas – tend to kick, which Bricker has learned the hard way.
This is the fourth year of shearing, Heidi said, and she’s hoping for a drama-free day from the alpacas who look forward to it as much as they do rain or dogs, who for whatever reason, they innately disdain.
Over the past four years, Heidi has learned most of their quirks – including their propensity for spitting – which in her mind does nothing to detract from their overall cuteness.
She has a point. There’s something appealing about the way their curly bangs hang over hooded eyes and the impassive way they stare back with yellow-toothed underbites.
Rocky resists as owner Tri Nation and Vicente Lopez attempt to lead him to the corral. (Jen Kocher, Cowboy State Daily) 
Corey Bricker sets Betty White free after being sheared. (Jen Kocher, Cowboy State Daily) 
The alpacas chattered and spit as they voiced their discontent for shearing day. (Jen Kocher, Cowboy State Daily) 
Heidi Nation holds one of the baby alpacas. (Jen Kocher, Cowboy State Daily) 
Heidi Nation always wanted to alpacas and was pleasantly surprised at how cheap and easy they are to raise. (Jen Kocher, Cowboy State Daily)
Famous Four
Heidi, who grew up around cattle and horses, always wanted alpacas though her herd began somewhat unexpectedly.
The Nations had moved out to Oriva Hills, a subdivision of ranchettes roughly 11 miles northwest of Gillette, in 2021. Feeling isolated, Heidi initially had “this weird breakdown” after moving out of town.
“I mean, what is out here? There was nothing,” she said. “There was no grass or anything. I thought what am I going to do?”
She started asking the universe and her spiritual guides for ideas, when two weeks later, four alpacas literally showed up in her yard.
She and Tri closed the gate behind them to keep them secure and put a notice on their group Facebook page to try to track down the owner. It turned out the four alpacas with famous monikers – Betty White, Gary Busey, Kevin Hart and Wanda Sykes – belonged to former Campbell County Attorney, Mitch Damsky.
Heidi saw it as a sign and asked Damsky if he cared to sell them. It turns out he did, and the Nation's herd grew from there.
Damsky also clued them into a money-making opportunity that had nothing to do with their sheared wool.
In fact, Heidi will end up throwing the wool away because she can’t find a buyer for it. Unlike sheep wool, alpaca wool lacks lanolin, a natural grease that lubricates and softens the fibers.
Though the lanolin-free alpaca wool has its own benefits including being light weight, durable and hypoallergenic, it’s also more costly to process because it requires specific technique. Heidi said she would have to send it off to another state to be processed, and her alpacas don’t produce enough wool to be cost-effective.
Turning Poop Into Profit
The real money in alpacas is their poop, or “beans,” which makes amazing fertilizer.
The manure has several benefits because it contains a healthy balance of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and unlike other animal manures, it doesn’t require composting or aging and can be applied directly to the soil.
It also doesn’t contain weed seeds because the alpacas’ three-compartment stomachs are capable of digesting seeds.
Better yet is that it doesn’t even smell bad, Heidi said.
The alpacas also make it convenient for her to scoop up because they instinctively poop in community piles in neat, round circles. Several such circles littered the Nation's alpaca pasture, where even the babies innately know to go within three to four hours after birth.
Heidi then goes around and scoops up the poop into tea bags, which can be soaked overnight in one or two gallons of water to be poured directly onto the plant or garden.
A patch of bright green grass in the Nation's lush front yard is proof of its effectiveness. She’d applied it to that one section when she planted the grass seed, which is shockingly bright green in contrast to the rest of the yard.
She has a growing customer base as word spreads about the poop’s effectiveness, which she sells for $10 for 15 tea bags or $25 for around 30 pounds on her Spirit Nation Alpaca Facebook page.
Her daughter, Samantha Lopez, has told her about another potential money-making endeavor for the alpacas. Apparently, they make great backdrops for weddings and parties and increasingly people are renting them out for this purpose.
Heidi hasn’t looked into this yet but isn’t too concerned about them pulling their weight because they are so easy and cheap to raise, she said. It costs them about $2,000 a year to feed them alfalfa and hay.
Currently, the Nations have 19 alpacas including babies, which they’ll start selling off in pairs soon when they’re around 1 year old. She never sells just one to a buyer because alpacas are herd animals, and they need company.
Nervous Chatter
Meanwhile, the alpacas hummed nervously amongst themselves as the rest of the crew got ready for the shearing to begin. They were vocal about their discontent with several spitting into the wind, so one had to be diplomatic about where they stood to avoid being showered.
Bricker got his clippers ready as Tri set up the shearing table that he’d made himself based on one he saw selling for $3,000 in Australia. Instead of paying that price, he’d called the company and asked about dimensions and ended up building his own, complete with a gym mat on top for padding and adapters to hold the alpacas’ arms and legs in place to allow the animal to be easily lifted and lowered.
The table was a game-changer, Bricker said, and made his job much easier. Otherwise, they’d all be on the ground holding the animals still and shearing.
It’s year three for Bricker shearing of the Nation's alpacas, which he finds to be very similar to sheep, and in some ways simpler because their fibers are soft and easily combed and cut, but harder, because they’re much larger and tend to kick, which he’s learned the hard way.
A Gillette couple enjoys raising alpacas, a challenging line of work given their stubbornness and tendency to spit and kick when cornered. That’s especially true on shearing day, which happens once a year. (Courtesy Spirit Nation Alpacas) 
A Gillette couple enjoys raising alpacas, a challenging line of work given their stubbornness and tendency to spit and kick when cornered. That’s especially true on shearing day, which happens once a year. (Courtesy Spirit Nation Alpacas) 
A Gillette couple enjoys raising alpacas, a challenging line of work given their stubbornness and tendency to spit and kick when cornered. That’s especially true on shearing day, which happens once a year. (Courtesy Spirit Nation Alpacas) 
A Gillette couple enjoys raising alpacas, a challenging line of work given their stubbornness and tendency to spit and kick when cornered. That’s especially true on shearing day, which happens once a year. (Courtesy Spirit Nation Alpacas) 
A Gillette couple enjoys raising alpacas, a challenging line of work given their stubbornness and tendency to spit and kick when cornered. That’s especially true on shearing day, which happens once a year. (Courtesy Spirit Nation Alpacas)
Social Media Star
As far as shearers go, 48-year-old Bricker is something of a rock star in the social media world with some of his shearing videos reaching up to 100 million views.
In the four years since getting onto the platform, he’s amassed more than 1.5 million fans on his “Coreybricker” TikTok page with an additional nearly 900,000 subscribers on his “Freshly Peeled Sheep Shearing” channel on YouTube.
His channels are filled with videos of docile sheep placidly sitting up on their backs with limbs splayed as Bricker runs his shearer in neat rows along their belly and legs, removing the fleece in one piece in most cases.
In the videos, Bricker deftly holds the animal with his left hand, moving it in sync with his shearing hand without so much as a flinch from the animal.
Bricker said that the docility of the sheep depends on their experience being near humans with some who spend a lot of time grazing in fields being pretty skittish to the touch. Shearers also wear a special type of moccasin shoe, he said, to keep the sheep from sliding away from you.
Invariably, a shearer gets away from you, Bricker said, which elicits good-natured mocking from his peers.
From ‘Cringey’ To Rock Star
Bricker was floored when his first shearing video went viral. As a father of five kids, Bricker said he initially got onto TikTok to track them and see what they were up to. Then, he decided to post his first video to join in the fun.
“It was cringey,” he said.
Then he decided to post a video of himself about four years ago at a sheep shearing. It went viral by the time he got home.
He was floored.
“It was almost a million views by the time I got home, and I was like, ‘whoa, what’s going on?” he said.
He thinks he was one of the first creators sharing these types of videos, though now there are several others doing it, too, and his channel is not the largest.
What makes these videos so appealing? Bricker is hard pressed to answer, though he’s been told viewers find it mesmerizing, particularly for those outside of the ag world.
Sensing he was onto something, Bricker began improving his video quality and adding popular TikTok tracks and began sharing them on other platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
He doesn’t make a ton of money on his channels because there are not a lot of big advertisers in that space but can usually pull in a few hundred every month and sometimes into the low thousands when one of the videos takes off.
Along with the positive comments on his channels, Bricker also has his fair share of critics from animal rights activists who find the work barbaric as well as from seasoned shearers – primarily in Australia – who give him lots of critiques on his techniques.
He doesn’t take it personally, he said, because there’s always the old-school purists who believe they have the right and only way of shearing. That said, one of his bucket list items would be to do a shearing circuit abroad in England and Australia to learn more from some of the master shearers.
Born Shearer
Despite how easy Bricker makes it look, shearing is the hardest job he’s ever done, he said.
Bricker was born in Gillette but moved to Belle Fourche in the late 1980s when his dad bought a ranch in South Dakota.
His dad was a sheep shearer, and he grew up tagging along with his dad’s crew and helping since he was a little kid.
He started shearing in high school and did three seasons before moving to Rapid City, where he worked as a cabinet maker, before getting married and moving back to Gillette where he made a living as a real-estate loan officer.
After getting divorced, he moved back to Belle Fourche in 2013 and fell back into sheep shearing. Now, he works full-time for Mooney Sheep Shearing and just finished up another season.
On any given shearing day, he estimates he shears about 140 to 160 sheep a day on average, which translates to about two to three minutes per sheep.
He’s recently added alpacas to his repertoire, which he does on the side off-season.
In many ways, alpacas are similar to sheep except they’re bigger and require more than one person to hold them down unlike sheep that can be done with one hand. The alpaca wool is also softer and cuts beautifully, he said.
The hazard, however, is that alpacas have strong legs and tend to be kickers as Bricker has learned from experience.
But not the Nation's alpacas, which he said were really well behaved.
Key Is The Clippers
With the table in place and about a half dozen hands on deck to help, a startled Betty White is coaxed into the corral by Tri who buckled her onto the table and turns her upright ready to be sheared.
Betty White is one of the original four, and by now is no stranger to the annual shearing, though she didn’t appear to be comfortable with it as she jerked her legs in indignation as the guys secured them with winches on either end to keep her from kicking.
First up was a manicure as Bricker painstakingly clipped her yellowed toenails back to a manageable length even with her hooves, before turning on his clippers.
Soft-spoken with a gentle demeanor, Bricker slowly cut rows of wool off Betty’s stomach in one big swath that was quickly gathered into a garbage bag by Sally White, one of the helpers.
The key to a good cut is all in the clippers and steadiness of hand, Bricker said.
The clippers contain both comb and cutters, which Bricker sharpens on a specialized grinder to get them sharp enough to cut through the wool.
If the comb and cutters are not perfectly aligned for a clean cut, it leads to pulling and pinching the skin which the animals don’t like.
As Bricker sheared in a pattern to remove the fleece from Betty’s belly, she seemed to relax as Heidi rubbed her neck to soothe her.
Less than 15 minutes later, a now much skinnier Betty is lowered to the ground, where she took a few tentative steps before staring back at the table as if confused by why she now feels pounds lighter.
Neat ridges line her freshly shorn, pink skin as she walked into the pasture in her new summer coat.
The animals seem to appreciate losing that heavy, hot wool, which makes his job that much easier as the next alpaca was led to the table for their turn at the fun.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
