Pony tales from Wyoming

10 April 2012

Like so many girls, my school days were spent hoping for holidays on horseback. Living in London, the high price and poor proximity of stables meant that most of my horse riding happened in my imagination.

So the idea of spending six hours a day in the saddle for a week, pretending to be a cowgirl, never really lost its romantic appeal.

I lived vicariously through characters in The Saddle Club books who took gentle summer vacations on a dude ranch. Teens now will no doubt have dreams of scenes more like those in the Wild-West-slaughter-fest video game Red Dead Redemption or the upcoming Daniel Craig blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens.

When I clambered up into a 7ft tall pick-up truck that would taxi me two hours from Jackson Hole airport to the ranch of my reverie the driver warned me that he "owned over 100 firearms" - and I began to worry that a slaughter-fest might just be what I was in for.

I was heading for the Bitterroot Ranch, Wyoming, not far from Yellowstone National Park. Owned and run by husband and wife team Bayard and Mel Fox, it is also the remote childhood home of their relative, Lost star Matthew Fox.

The nearest town - a 30-mile drive away - is a tourist village that attracts hunters. Originally known as Never Sweat because of its dry heat, it was later re-branded after an Idaho senator, Fred Dubois.

Rejecting the French pronunciation, the locals call the place "Doo-boyce".

I arrived at the ranch in the frozen, dead, night to be warned about a grizzly bear on the prowl, but with no gaping bullet holes in me. By that stage the only right place for me was bed, so I snuck off to my warm and ample log cabin.

My first introduction to the other guests took place over breakfast. At one table sat a 10-strong Irish/Brit clan of fox-hunters and racehorse breeders. Their leader is Robin, their loudest Nigel and their lewdest Tim.

I joined Alex, the wife of a peer and her 18-year-old daughter Georgia at another, along with American sisters Andrea and Brenna here with their 87-year-old mother Sally. With this kind of company being a lone traveller is no problem. The gabble was the first sign of a boisterous week to come. The fresh fruit, apple cake, eggs, bacon and pancakes were the first tastes of the hearty three-course feasts of clam chowder, chilli and cornbread, hot pots, brownies and key lime pie that would expand our waistlines.

Out at the corral, our horses were ready and waiting. At so many ranches riding is secondary to spas and golf but at Bitterroot the horses are everything. With a herd of 135 Arabians, Appaloosas and Quarter Horses each rider is assigned several appropriate mounts for the week.

The first morning, I rode Naji but that afternoon I would meet Destiny, and later in the week Lightning and Pemba. After a riding assessment we set out on our first trail ride - with steep terrain to navigate, it's clear that rotating the horses is important to keep them fresh. This place is straight out of the movies - although not like Brokeback Mountain, which was set in Wyoming but filmed mostly in Canada. The land is parched here in comparison.

This is Butch Cassidy country (filmed one state over, in Utah). Each day as we rode out across the countryside, led by one of the expert ranch wranglers - spotting elk and coyotes and weaving across plains, up slopes and through aspen groves - I kept wondering if Paul Newman might just ride into the frame over the horizon.

If you believe the tales, one of the trails takes you up to a supposed hideout of Butch Cassidy himself, who is known to have owned a ranch in Dubois from 1890. But then 81-year-old Bayard Fox is full of stories. There's one about a friend who crash-landed his light aircraft at Bitterroot with Bayard in the passenger seat. "Did you break anything?" asked Alex. "Yes," said Bayard. "My sunglasses."

In his quivering drawl,Bayard imparts his tales to his guests in teasing episodes out on the rides, so that Nigel would be wriggling for his next opportunity to say: "Tell us what happened next, after you shot the bison in the backside." And the fable would continue that the "cranky critter" chased him all the way back to the ranch. "I thought I must have lost him, looked behind me and he was two feet from my ass."

On the fourth day we tested our horsemanship with a cattle sorting task. Teams of four had just four minutes to get 10 cows from one end of an arena to the other - one by one and in the correct order. A demo from the wranglers (who can do it in two minutes) made it look easy but we soon discovered that blocking enthusiastic cow number eight's early dash for it was no simple task.

My zealous mount, Naji, liked to bite the cows on the rear to get them moving but I was warned that true cowboys would never allow this lest it bruise the meat. Keeping him in check was just another tricky thing to think about. In the end just one of our four teams prevailed (and not mine).

By the fifth day, Georgia had fallen so in love with Bitterroot that she approached Mel for a job as a junior wrangler for her university holidays.

And how I wished I could join her - because Bitterroot ranch turned out to be my Saddle Club dream turned reality.

Details: Wyoming

Far and Ride offers seven nights at Bitterroot Ranch including six days' riding from £1,301pp to 1,531pp full board, between May and September.
farandride.com

United Airlines fly from London Heathrow to Jackson Hole or Riverton (Wyoming) from £650 return.
unitedairlines.co.uk

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