Form is Temporary, Class is Permanent: CCNF Archangel, 4/30/03 – 10/1/21

Though father time will, of course, wait for none of us, we are nonetheless sad to announce the passing of CCNF Archangel. Arch passed naturally, within 30 feet of the very pen where he was born over 18 years ago. It has been weird to go up to the Main Barn these past couple of days and not have him holding court anymore. That said, we are feeling far more appreciativeness than we are sorrowful. May we all have a run like The Arch. The crazy bastard still has his own clothing line, after all, and is pretty much memorialized everywhere one looks here around the farm.

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From the time he was roughly three months old, we had co-owned Archangel with a series of different trusted friends and allies here in the US: first with our friend Pat Badger and his father Al of Alpaca Grove, later with that lovely lot in Maine at Tripping Gnome Farm, and most recently with the dear folks at Stillmeadow Farm, who now make their home in Bend, Oregon. My favorite random trivia and a now-it-can-be-told factoid about all of our partnerships with Arch were that there was a clause written into all of his co-ownership contracts that said that if either partner ever wanted to sell their half of him, it first had to be offered to the other, remaining partner for the grand total of $1. Though the clause was, of course, waived on two occasions, it was both a guarantee of no one ever getting stuck with a partner they didn’t essentially choose, as well as enduring proof of how much Archangel was loved and valued here at his birth farm.

A member of our much-heralded birth class of 2003, the funny origin story about the Arch, was that he almost didn’t happen. We would love to tell you that his arrival here that spring was some pre-ordained coming based upon an early mastery of alpaca breeding theory by some aspiring but still relatively raw breeders. Instead, Archangel’s creation had more to do with his dam, Abby, being open and reproductively mature the previous year, and the then newly arrived Snowmass Legacy Gold, on whom we had just spent a King’s ransom the previous year to acquire half interest, looking for work. When you have just purchased a new, shiny Ferrari, you don’t leave it parked in the garage after all. You take that sucker for a spin.

Anyway, the rest is history, as they say. After a successful and head-turning show career where he enabled us to compete at heights we’d rarely reached beforehand, Arch went on to essentially become the foundational white/light Herdsire of our entire breeding program. If you are an alpaca breeder anywhere in the world with light-colored, CCNF genetics in your herd right now, there is an above-average chance that Archangel is at play somewhere in the background.

The other curious thing about Archangel is that he ultimately accomplished his stamping of our breeding program almost exclusively through his siring of high-end daughters. The only son he ever sired that we deemed worthy of bringing back into the genetic fold in a serious way was TKO’s King of Ladies. Kinger — named after a song on Extreme’s (whose bassist is the exceedingly talented Mr. Badger, then still moonlighting as an alpaca farmer) then most recent album — was ironically born to our friends in the Young family. It took months of haranguing Scott and Ann to get them to sell us half interest in a male from our genetics. It was honestly just Karma’s way of balancing the scales for the Young’s missing out on the purchase of Abby in ’02, while she was pregnant with the very subject of this obituary. You really can’t make this stuff up.

Arch’s top daughters born here at CCNF, on the other hand, have been nothing short of game-changing: let’s take Ascension, Pristine, and Eliza, to name the big three. Together, the members of that trio are the dams or grandams of a majority of our working Herdsires: CCNF Elixir, CCNF Centurion, CCNF Idris, CCNF Priam, CCNF Perceus, CCNF Bataclan, CCNF Declan, CCNF Spittfire, CCNF Sovereign-Legacy, CCNF Triumvirate, and CCNF Snowking. So, you know, Arch’s legacy is in more than good hands. The fact is that whenever we grab one of our 2021 crias, we’re often seeing the face of our old friend there in the background. While we have had to bid farewell to our original talisman, his beat very much goes on. The King is dead. Long live the King.

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