I’d traveled through all timezones in the past two days and the jet lag caught up with me. I was exhausted before the sun came down. After my experience sleeping in my car at Antelope Canyon and Bryce National Park, I thought nothing about climbing into the back seat of my truck at Glacier National Park for the night.
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| Golden fields on both sides of a gravel highway for miles on end! |
The next morning I journeyed from West glacier to east Glacier. However, the park was on fire in many places and the smoke destroyed the visibility. I’m sure here were mountains behind the think white fog but I couldn’t see much anything.
I drove from glacier hitting up all the major towns on the way. Did you know there are only three Best Buys in the entire state gigantic of Montana? I needed one for my camera battery charger. Had to go all the way to Billings to get it. Anyway, along the way I kept being delayed by free grazing live stock. First thing I thought was to ind the farmers and alert them that their cows were out like I’d do back home. But then, there were no houses in sight. That’s just how they do in Montana. Cows have freedom to roam. Make sure you are driving the speed limit. These cows come out of nowhere.
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| Finally getting to see the American Buffalo! |
After a day of driving then stopping in Big Timber for then night (really friendly sweet folks at River City End), I made it to the ranch in Absarokee. Then the boredom just vanished. When you are on a ranch, you never have a shortage of things to do.
Not a Dude Ranch
Agro-Tourism is being coming the newest trend in travel. I explained the concept to a friend who said he already knew all about it from an episode of, The Office. It’s basically activity-based tourism to experience agricultural life first hand. As some of the locals explained, I basically came on vacation to do the type of chores that they grew up dreading. I guess it did kind of have the Tom Sawyer feel to it… just like paying to white-wash a fence.
Now, when I made booked the trip with Montana Bunkhouses, Karen, the organizer, wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into. She organizes hands-on ranching, experience vacations for a community of twenty Montana cattle ranching families. Karen basically served as my Montana travel agency telling me how much time to spend in the different national parks and which ranch will serve my goals.
She emphasized this wasn’t a Dude Ranch. Dude Ranches, as she explained, was the Disney land version of ranching. Although it is a great experience, it is all entertainment focused. A working ranch is authentic to real life on a ranch without the fanfare, glitz, and Hollywood, romanticized glamour of a Dude Ranch. On a working ranch, you are going to get dirty. After explaining some of the experiences I could expect, I had to assured her that I was a southern country girl and totally fine getting dirty. Besides, I wanted to see the difference between Montana ranches and Kentucky farms.
I’ll be honest. I was a bit in shell shock when I first arrived on the ranch. The folks were already in the mists of worming sheep. Let me tell you a thing or two about worming sheep. First you have to catch them. Which takes team work and athleticism. You may think you caught one, then it keeps running off with you on his back. I don’t think there’s much of a special technique to do it. Just grab one by the wool. If you have cowboy skills, you may be able to rope one. While forcing medicine in his mouth, it is also a good time to trim the poop off his bottom. You see, balls of poop collect in their wool which will eventually attract maggots to their tails. So two must wrangle and hold while the third brave soul clips the poop balls off. That way, you can tell who has been medicated by who has a clean bottom. Doing this for 300 sheep takes the better part of a day. There is no way to do this without getting dirty. Sheep sh!t is also a challenge to get out of jeans. Don’t wear your best.
If you have ever seen the cute film “Babe” from back in the day, I now can attest that sheep are definitely stupid, just as they said in the movie. They just run about in packs tripping over stuff making a bunch of noise, getting their heads stuck in fences. I’m not all that impressed with them. They are kinda boring creatures.
The chores on the ranch change by the season. In the
spring, the calves and lambs are born. They need help during delivery, vaccines, and weening. In the summer it’s important to maintain the health of the animals. Bringing the cattle home is a highlight of the fall happens globally except in Montana, it’s without all the fests as in the Alps. Then there’s fence fixing and overall maintenance and management. Of course, daily the all the animals on the farm need to be fed.first thing in the morning and then as the sun goes down. Chickens, horses, cows, sheep, and goats can be quite the undertaking. My favorite chore was feeding the adorable orphaned calves. Then there was a this attention hog of a goat. He couldn’t stand for the calves to have more attention than him and he forced my hand to rub on him. He was such a sweetie, I obliged. He reminded me of my dog back home.
Now country girls and cow girls are not synonymous, however, with a little work a country girl can make a graceful transition into a cowgirl. Scarlett O’Hara was a country girl. Annie Oakley is a cowgirl. Being a cowgirl is a workout in itself.
Should’ve Been A Cowboy
On one occasion, we rode up into the mountains to look for lost cows. The cows had come down from the pastures in the mountains but not all of them came home. That’s when I realized I have never ridden a horse with a purpose before. Any other time it was purely entertainment…like on a boring trail or in an arena. Here, I was doing some real cowboy stuff. There is more to cowboying than the 1791 Supply Co. swagger. It’s a lot of physical, time consuming work. We had to ride because there was no other way to get up into the altitude. You couldn’t four-wheel it, couldn’t drive it, and definitely couldn’t walk it. We drove bout an hour to the trail head of a national forest. Tiny, the man of the ranch who wasn’t at all tiny, gave me a quick safety briefing. “If Lorena sees a bear, just turn her around real quick away from the bear.” Record scratch…and pause…ummm…a bear!? What is happening? What have I gotten myself into! I had not even considered there were bears in the region. Apparently, a horse has the tendency to panic, buck the rider off, and keep going at the sight of a bear. We took a small band of real cowboys, and aggro-tourists up into the mountains then separated into two smaller groups in different directions off the trails looking for the lost cows. At this point, the lyrics to Toby Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” play over and over in my mind. My horse was awesome. She responded well to commands. My partner’s horse, on the other hand, had some anxiety attacks attacks going on. While it was a good horse for working with cows, it wasn’t the best for riding also steep rugged terrain. Well, the temperature dropped in the mountains and the rain began and honestly…cowboying stopped being fun. Rain or shine, the work of a cowboy must get done.
Ranch vs. Farms
Just as there are different jobs in the medical community, or in the defense community, there are different jobs in the agriculture community and the differences between ranchers and farmers end to get muddled. I arrived on the ranch thinking perhaps it was just a regional vocabulary difference, but no, the functions are entirely different. Ranchers raise cattle or sheep. Just two animals. Ranches tend to be out west where the soil is unsuitable for crop-growing. Farms have a variety of fruit and vegetable crops and pigs, poultry, dairy cattle. As a child, I climbed and used my imagination on farm machinery. Noticeably missing from the ranch was all the machines. There were no harvesters, balers, tractors tucked away in farm storage buildings. Ranchers use horses to do a lot of their work, or pack mules to carry loads into the mountains, or 4-wheelers. On a ranch you may have several Ranchers’ livestock may free-grazing with other ranchers’ which is why branding your livestock is more prevalent than on farms. Farms use tagging (and perhaps also branding). Farmers divide their operation up by fields or paddocks, ranchers by pastures. Fields tend to be smaller than pastures and geographically closer together. Like when we on the search for cattle that never came home, we were an hour away from the house. Ranchers wear cowboy hats while they work. Farmers wear baseball caps while working and may whip out a cowboy hat when they go dancing. So, when you’re at the dinner table blessing the hands that made your family’s meal possible, you are blessing the hands of a farmer for your grains, dairy, fruits and veggies, and a rancher for your lamb and beef!
This ranch is pretty dynamic in a business aspect. In addition to raising and selling livestock, providing ranch vacations, the farm also offers trail rides and fishing trips under the business name, Paintbrush Adventures. Of course, this is just part of a day’s work. Even getting dozens of horses settled and ready for rides is a bit of work but it’s always fun when work disguises it’s self as play.
