JOBS MAGA'S WON'T DO:

ENGINEER PASS, Colo. -- The baas, bleats and bells were fading ever so slightly, and the shepherd's trained ear detected that his flock was veering off the path home, for this was the soundtrack of his life in the Rocky Mountains. "The sheep must be herded," he said in Spanish, as he quickly ascended a hill overlooking a meadow.

Then the herder, Ricardo Mendoza, whistled loudly, commanding his two dogs to coax his 1,700 sheep closer to his campito, a tiny shed with a single sun-bleached word -- "HOME" -- over the door. His employer had hauled it up a winding, unpaved road used by 19th-century miners to this 13,000-foot pass shortly before Mendoza arrived with his horse, pack mule, dogs and sheep, ready to settle into the last outpost of his seasonal nomadic journey, about 65 miles north of Durango in western Colorado.

Mendoza, 46, has spent most of the past decade living in these rugged, remote mountains, herding sheep raised for wool and meat from spring to fall. "You live in complete solitude, just you, your animals and your thoughts," he said, gazing at the wind-swept tundra below the soaring Uncompahgre and Wetterhorn peaks.

He is among some 2,000 herders, most of them from Peru, whom the American sheep industry depends on, brought to the United States on temporary visas designated for people who do grueling agricultural work that many Americans shun.

In the high deserts and mountains of the West, men like Mendoza dwell in tents and tiny campers for months on end, without running water, toilets or other basic conveniences. They often follow their flocks' peregrinations on foot, like previous generations of immigrant sheepherders, performing a job that has endured since biblical times.

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