HOME ON THE RANGE
AT THE BEST DUDE RANCH
Thinking about that spring holiday? NICHOLAS WOODSWORTH of the Financial Times recommends a horsey break.
High in the sagebrush hills of Wyoming, at Bitterroot Ranch, horses are everything. About 180 – pure blood arabs and quarter horses, mostly – out-number ranch guests by about seven to one. By day they wheel over the open range or mill in the corrals and paddocks by the ranch house. In the evening, when they thunder in a herd up the dusty slopes to spend the night in open grassland, they make Bitterroot feel like the horsiest place short of the Cheyenne rodeo.
Oddly, though, when I cast my mind back it is not all that magnificent horseflesh I think of first – what comes to mind is a single, bright, wriggling fish.
It was on the third day of my stay at Bitterroot, when most of the other guests had gone out for an afternoon ride, that Bayard Fox and I went fishing. Fox, who has been welcoming equestrians to Bitterroot for the last 18 years, has horses in his blood – a lean, wiry and energetic rider at 70, he grew up watching his grandfather, a country doctor, make daily visits on horseback. But he also had fishing in his blood – when he is not leading a ride out from the ranch he can usually be found, fly-rod in hand, standing in some cold and trouty mountain stream not far away.I, on the other hand, have neither horses nor fishing in my blood. Unlike my fellow guests at Bitterroot, most of them more experienced, regular riders. I get on a horse just once or twice a year. On this particular day, in fact, the only place I was really feeling the sensitive contact that exists between horse and rider was on my bottom. I felt like tenderized steak. Happily, there are other manly Wyoming sports, such as fishing, that are done standing up.
The surroundings were superb. Not far from the ranch, the East Fork Basin of the Wind River sits perched in high alpine country at 9,000 ft. above sea level – its mountain meadows are cool and green on even the hottest day. Sometimes Fox brings riders up here to check on Bitterroot's far-ranging cattle herd. But today we were checking up instead on cut-throats – the lovely trout, distinguished by the bright red band under their gills, that are native to the American Rockies.
I was not doing well. Describing great, lazy parabolas of line with what seemed no energy whatsoever. Fox was dropping his fly far upstream and raising trout with almost every cast. Try as I would, I could not get my own fly to sail out more than a few yards before it dropped on the water with a long trail of line collapsing on top of it.
"You are trying too hard, just the way some riders try too hard," Fox said after watching me quietly for a moment. "You are putting too much force, too much speed, into your forward cast. Let the rod do the work for you. Let it do what it was designed to do. Put a little more spring into the back-cast, and wait until the line is all the way out straight behind you. That way your rod is loaded – all you have to do then is pull forward nice and easy. It's all in the timing, not the force."
I tried again. The fly dropped into the current a good way ahead of me, and floated gently downstream. I was so excited with the cut-throat that lay flashing and wriggling in my hands a few moments later that I forgot Fox's allusion to horses. Only later, on spotting a single file of returning Bitterroot riders, tiny on a distant, grassy ridge, did I think of it. What in heaven's name, I asked, did horse riding and fly-fishing have to do with each other?
"Most dude ranches out west cater to people who don't know a damn about horses. The riders want to control things. They interfere with the animal; they pull its mouth around; they shift about in the saddle. And they end up confusing themselves and their mounts. Horses who have grown up here don't have to be told how to negotiate sage and rough terrain – they have done it naturally since they were colts.
"If you keep your seat, don't interfere with your animal, and let him do what he was designed to do, he'll give you something you can't produce on your own – a good ride.
As with fishing rods, so with horses. Fox's philosophy is indeed one that sets Bitterroot a great distance apart from the generic western dude ranch. There is no ersatz-old-west experience here, no employees in 10-gallon hats singing old-time cowboy songs around stage-set camp-fires. Instead, there are exceptionally well-looked-after horses. There is breathtakingly beautiful Wyoming countryside. There are guests from around the world who take their riding seriously. And there is the job of learning, Fox-fashion, how to let a horse give you the best in it.
Were my hands soft enough on my horse's mouth? Was I posting on the trot, raised in my stirrups on the gallop, not giving confusing signals with my legs? High up in the hills with Fox and five other riders the next morning, a breakfast table of blueberry pancakes and bacon left far below at the ranch house, these were my thoughts.
I was a long way from the demanding world of English dressage rings, severe English saddles and proper English riding attire. Cowboy boots and jeans, a deep western saddle, and a solid quarter horse named Banjo were instead the order of the day. You cannot get any deeper into Marlboro country than the rugged hills around Bitterroot.
None the less, it was the eagle eyes of Mel Fox, Bayard's wife, that I was really thinking of as we climbed upwards. Years ago, Mel came to Bitterroot as a wrangler from Kenya, where she developed a love of horses on her father's Mount Kilimanjaro farm. She so impressed Bayard that he married her.
Her love of horses is still there, and so is the discipline and respect for horsemanship that goes with it – today Bitterroot is the only dude-ranch-style establishment in the US recognized by the British Horse Society. In the schooling ring or on fast gallop through flats of sagebrush, Mel can tell you in two seconds if you are letting your horse do the best job it can.
And the rewards of getting it right? With Banjo climbing ever higher through the crisp air, I could see the answer better every minute: the vast and untrammelled country of the American west. By the time we stopped at a lookout high over Bitterroot, I was surveying a panorama that took in everything from hot, dry sagebrush flats in the valley bottoms to the snowy peaks of the Continental Divide.
Banjo rested, I reflected. I could not imagine for a moment that that small, wriggling trout I had caught the day before had enjoyed my learning to fly-fish. But that, I hoped, was where horse riding differed from fly-fishing. As we pick up the pace across a long, open, grassy meadow, I would have liked to think that Banjo was having as good a time loping through the hills of Wyoming as I.
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