Mission Viejo Cowboy Vice President Twirls Mean Rope, Runs Tight Ranch

With characteristic calm, the silver-haired man on horseback twirled his rope to his side in a large loop and then flung it deftly around the back two legs of a large black calf.

“That’s what is called the California loop. It is his favorite shot and a beautiful thing to watch,” gushed a cowboy Monday at the Rancho Mission Viejo roundup.

The man receiving the praise was Gilbert G. Aguirre, 57, both a cowboy who wins roping and riding competitions and senior vice president of ranch operations for Rancho Mission Viejo, which he has managed for 26 years.

The O’Neill family, which owns the 35,000-acre ranch near San Juan Capistrano, credits him with both cowboy know-how and a keen business sense.

As a cowboy, Aguirre can rope, doctor and sell cattle, and as a senior vice president his responsibilities range from land management and conservation to making deals with gravel operators and other leaseholders on the ranch.

Raised on a ranch in Tucson, Aguirre can barely remember when he didn’t ride a horse.

“Where I come from, 7- and 8-year-olds were breaking colts. You learned by doing,” he recalled.

Aguirre, whose Basque ancestors herded cattle in the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, supplemented his home-grown abilities by studying animal science at the University of Arizona.

Aguirre, who raised his family on the ranch, still drives the range every day in his Jeep Wagoneer to see how everything is doing, bristling when he hears about increasing problems with urban trespassers who break down a fence with a motorcycle or shoot holes in a water trough.

He has seen the effects of urban encroachment up close.

When he came to work at Rancho Mission Viejo in 1967, he recalls, there were 52,000 acres of ranchland for cattle. Now only 35,000 remain.

To be a ranch manager requires flexibility. During the last six years of drought Aguirre reduced his herd to reflect the loss of forage. And he has bent to market demand by changing the breeds of cattle he buys for the ranch to reflect the health-conscious consumer’s new taste for leaner varieties of beef.

But what people like most about Aguirre, they say, is his devotion to old cowboy traditions, like standing by cattle sales made on a handshake and taking care of his cowboys who live on the ranch as if they were family.

Efrem Malagon, 63, one of the cowhands who has raised his children on the ranch, remembers that during the storms of 1969, Aguirre took Malagon’s feverish infant daughter in his arms and rode across swollen San Juan Creek on his horse to get her to a doctor.

Cattlemen, meanwhile, marvel at Aguirre’s talents as a cattle salesman.

Arnold Bolander, a livestock broker in Chino, recalled with amusement: “One December I took a friend to the ranch to look at a truck for sale, and instead Gilbert sold me 2,000 steer, to be delivered in the spring.”