Katherine Heltzel Gabriel, born February 5th, 1939, passed peacefully on her farm early Saturday morning, October 30th, 2021.

She was born Katherine Margaret Heltzel in Salem, Oregon, the oldest of four, to Charles and Muriel Heltzel. In 1960 she represented Oregon at the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C.

She graduated from the University of Maryland's nursing school in 1962 with a BSRN and went on to work many years in the ICU.

She was a natural with nature, great with dogs and horses and in the garden. Her hobbies stemmed from her work, as she was attracted to the healing and growing processes of life. You would often see her deep empathy and respect for life at play, from an arriving patient to a sick child to an injured animal or a dying flower.

She took on photography and became a master of early analogue technique. She excelled at capturing the wonder, beauty and people of our world.

Katherine lived just over half of her life on Weston Farm, where she raised three children, filled in the gardens and set the horses free in the forest and fields with the cows that brought fresh milk into the home. Her love for the Long Green Valley compelled her tenacious effort to place it in preservation.

She took an old herd of Montadale sheep and bred them up into an award winning flock. Her healing and nurturing instincts flourished with the sheep and the flock flourished back. Each summer she would pack up a pick-up truck with her children and a gooseneck trailer filled with livestock and drive out to the Midwest for the show and sales.

Little got in her way and woe to that which did. She was a born general but found her calling in Weston Farm where she transformed the land over four decades into her manifesto, a treaty of fragrant flowers and tall trees elevated above the yearly bloom of azaleas; the leaf mulch and compost piles caringly rising each year to rot and return to the garden beds; the green fields spotted with cumulous sheep and their constant calls back-dropped with the baying of a full heifer and the heckle-peckle of hens and the raucous rooster's crow.

Inside the home were fresh eggs and fresh milk, the kitchen humid with simmering broth and the hustle bustle of a day yet finished. When she would come through the kitchen door after dark, her overalls coated in lanolin and her boots of the barn floor, the scent of bag balm mingling with a resting stew meant it was time to eat.

Katherine was an avid conversationalist, surgical in many ways, comedically descriptive and wry. She was competitive and confident and deeply governed by an unshakeable internal code. She had a flair for the dramatic and held an edge in debates. She was the daughter and sister of lawyers, yet never lost a case to them.

At times, you might find her hiking up the winter night hill to aid the ewes in lambing, or transplanting bulbs in the garden, or organizing a food booth at a fair, or shearing sheep, or driving cross country, or mowing the fields, or cooking a dinner, or reading by the fire.

At times, you would find her entranced by some seemingly innocuous show of nature, perhaps a dragonfly amongst drops of water on a leaf that you missed, and she would slowly raise her camera, cautious to not disturb, and then click-click-click, she would back away smiling, knowing this by-chance delicate scene will be held in hand.

Katherine is survived by her three children, their father, four grandchildren, two brothers and thousands of sheep that have bred out across the country. May her hearth stay warm and the home fires burn. She is missed.