Part Thirty Seven

     August 10th to 13th             West Yellowstone                       (Go to Pt 1)

The Ranch
There wasn’t much we needed to do in West Yellowstone aside from restocking our food supplies but I did have friends, Jill and Joel Leadbetter, who lived on a ranch just north of Yellowstone. After we had gotten ourselves somewhat reorganized, I rang them up from a pay phone on the street corner (remember those?) and they drove down to pick us up.

Their family ranch was just outside Virginia City and was as spectacular and real as a Montana ranch can get. Sprawling pasture lands of cattle interspersed with tall stands of lodgepole and ponderosa pine, backed by the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and fronted by the spectacular Madison Mountain Range. 

Click on the map for a larger image

We spent a couple of days at the ranch and had a blast!  Naturally, they liked to ride horses (a lot) so Craig and I gave horseback riding a shot and rode like a couple of guys who didn’t even know horses could be ridden; it was all pretty comical.  ​

Jill, who grew-up on a horse, kept galloping out front, coaxing our horses into a gallop, then she’d laugh and laugh watching us get butt-slapped around in the saddle, hanging on for dear life.  She was patient, though, and tried to show us how to ride but it didn’t matter much, that saddle continued to spank me all afternoon.

Then next morning Jill wanted to show us how to saddle-up our horses before going on a ride and since that sounded like something a couple of seasoned horsemen like ourselves ought to know how to do, we all wandered down to the corral to give it a go. 

The horses were loose in a barn next to the corral and Jill had to go inside to unlatch and swing open the large barn door; what she wanted the two of us to do was stand out in the yard in front of the door and “spook” the horses from “wandering” out of the barn while she was getting the door secured. Okay, good enough.

So Craig and I stood at the ready, fairly confident we could ‘shoo’ any horses that might try to stray out of the barn as the door was being secured until the door actually swung open and we were face to horse-face with three, gigantic beats, prancing up and down and rearing back on their hind legs, who saw daylight and all at once blew out of the barn in a thunderous explosion of dust. 

Not at all what I had expected; if we were supposed to intimidate these mad creatures into staying in the barn then, yeah, I don’t think so.  We were a couple of guys who got chased away by ants not so very long ago and there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell we were going to do anything but get the fuck out of the way of those horses; I leaped to one side of the barn door and Craig the other.
 
The horses bolted for the pasture as Craig and I stood frozen to the ground, watching them go like a couple of stunned tourists, while inside the barn Jill was trying to control her outbursts of hysterical laughter.  Supposedly, the beasts would have settled if we’d just held our ground, or at least that’s what she said.

That evening we were thrilled to sit down to a fabulous home-cooked meal with all the family and a couple of the ranch hands. We got peppered with a few questions about our trip but dinner conversation mostly revolved around ranch business.  

What I really remember about that evening was the wonderful variety of food spread out across the table because my taste buds had been sorely depraved and this smorgasbord that was constantly being passed around the table was an absolute flavor orgy.  
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By the time supper was finally over I was stuffed to the gills but when I took a glance at all the tasty leftovers in the kitchen it was all I could do not to ask for a to-go box.  I don’t know, maybe I mentioned something.

Craig Dunn and Kip Rusk, 1977

The next morning as we were preparing to leave, Jill and Joel’s Mom came outside to see us off, handing me a paper sack containing a full meal of leftover goodies.  As I thanked here for the bag, I looked over at Joel who was standing by the truck, grinning ear to ear, “Nobody’s allowed to leave the ranch hungry!” he proclaimed.  I peeked inside the bag and smiled “Thanks, man!” 
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Back in West Yellowstone we still had grocery shopping to do and I thought about running my saddle-worn shorts through the laundry but then thought ‘why bother’.  We got a motel room where we could stage our packing then sat down to review the maps for Yellowstone.  

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Go to Part 38

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