An English country girl in California: August 2013

Sunday, August 25, 2013

First tale from the Wyoming wilds

It is Sunday in Wyoming, our one day off, and a blessed chance to switch off the alarm clock and luxuriate in the sleep that becomes so valuable when one’s days begin at 6.30am and end at 5.30pm, or 7.30pm if it’s your turn to move the horses for the night. Hence the delay in publishing this blog - I tend to collapse after dinner these days! It's jolly hard work being a wrangler on the Bitterroot Ranch, and it took me a week or so to settle in feel at home, but it is definitely worth it. Arabian horses, spectacular landscapes and some terrific people make this a truly wonderful place, and even though I do miss San Francisco, I'm so glad I came here. It's an adventure!

Me on Rasara, at the Lookout Point with the Wind River Mountains in the distance

Evening sun from the East Fork Road

The Bitterroot Ranch (http://bitterrootranch.com/) lies deep in the valley of the East Fork River, between the Absaroka and the Wind River Mountains, at the very end of the 17-mile dirt track that leads from the main road to Dubois. Every morning, nearly 200 horses clatter down the dusty track from their overnight pasture on the hill, the cheekier ones stopping to graze among the sage bushes. Once in the corral, some are gregarious, standing in a large bunch, others stay in tight knit groups or pairs. Three Appaloosas, Lakota, Millie and Marcus, are always together at the back, bony chestnuts Bandana and Dancer stick to each other and the young grey Arabians haunt the area near the water trough. Some pairings are unlikely – old paint Injun adores his Baskatrina, a pretty Arab whose delicately sculpted head is half the size of his own. Newcomers take time to find their place in the herd – handsome Hondo, a buckskin mustang, is still shunned by all but fellow newbie Ranger, a raking grey who protects Hondo from the grumpier matriarchs. It’s a rare collection, dominated by the Arabians, many of which are bred on the ranch and who captivate guests and staff alike with their dished faces and high-set tails. They're set off by the stockier mustangs, rangy quarter horses and enormous Percherons, plus a collection of Welsh mountain ponies for the children. Most are trustworthy guest horses, and the rest are youngsters, being broken or getting used to going out on the trail, guest horses in waiting. Oldest of all is gentle Spec, a gaunt grey Arab who spends the day in pen with his own hay, but who still trots out eagerly when the herd charges up the hill at the end of the day.

Injun and Baskatrina - true love

Grey Arabs in the morning light

From the valley of the Bitterroot, trails lead off in every direction, stretching enticingly to the distant hills. This really is a country where one could ride for days and not see a soul beyond one’s companions. Most days are split into two rides, morning and afternoon, with lessons or jumping on Tuesdays and Thursdays for guests who request it. Every Saturday and occasional midweek days, picnic rides are taken to the Shoshone National Forest (http://www.fs.usda.gov/shoshone), which borders the ranchlands and stretches for 2.5 million acres northwards. The ranch’s 400-odd head of cattle roam the southern borders of the forest from June to September, being moved each month to different grazing. They don’t tend to have a great deal of respect for boundaries, however, and frequently have to be driven back to where they’re supposed to be, which means taking guests out and giving them the chance to try their hand at real cattle work. If it’s only 20-odd cows that know where they’re going, it’s easy, but if it’s more than 100 that need to be moved across rivers, up hills and through forests, it’s extremely hard. A more relaxing prospect is the weekly team sorting, a cowboy game that involves separating one cow after another from a group, in numerical order, with two people sorting and two people blocking any rogue cows that make a break for freedom. It’s utterly engrossing, although the key is not to get too excited and work the cows up into a skittering mess - something easily forgotten when the clock is ticking!

Returning to the ranch from the Shoshone National Forest

Team sorting - my new favourite game

Some 30 guests can be accommodated at the Bitterroot at once, of all ages and abilities. There are six wranglers, of which I’m one, and our duties involve calling the horses off the hill at 6.30am every morning (we take it turns, teams of three), collecting those required for riding, grooming, tacking up and leading rides, then untacking and turning the horses out again, with doctoring and giving extra feeds where needed in between. It sounds straightforward, but there are an awful lot of horses’ names to learn, and when you’re dealing with lots of near-identical small grey Arabs, it can be extremely difficult! Western saddles are far heavier and more complicated than English saddles, and sit a lot further back, which takes some getting used to. Guests ride different horses morning and afternoon, but keep the same saddles all week, as their horses tend to be similar sizes and shapes, and the pads (pbm cb, ceq or lpd with space, plus cc or bc – yes, those seemingly random letters do come to mean something eventually), are changed to ensure a good fit. Western saddles are bigger and spread the weight more easily than English saddles, and assigning guests to saddles is a lot easier than changing the stirrup lengths each time, which has to be done from the ground, and there are a lot more horses than there are saddles!

The horses returning to their overnight pasture

It’s extremely hard work, but satisfying, and there's little I'd rather do than spend all day every day with horses in a spectacular landscape. Already, the end of the season seems far too close, with the fall round-up being the last adventure, and I will have many more tales from the Bitterroot to tell before that day.

The valley of the East Fork River

Lion's Head Rock, a favourite picnic spot

Shoshone National Forest, looking north towards Yellowstone National Park

Moving a very well-behaved group of cows

Can we have some breakfast?

Me and fellow wrangler Hannah White working with young Arabian Tamu

The view from the back of Singida

Grazing outside the main lodge

Party of five

Newcomers Ranger and Hondo

Grazing with Castle Rock behind

Nevada and Lightning - a true bromance

Dutch and Hank, big boys' horses

Tiny Tim and friends

Little Destiny - otherwise known as The Unicorn

Evening at the Bitterroot

Monday, August 19, 2013

Across America on the California Zephyr

The California Zephyr trundles across America at much the same gentle pace as the wind whose name it bears. Yet I would have it no other way, for the landscapes deserve to be absorbed to the full. I left San Francisco in the early morning, travelling to Denver, Colorado, via the Amtrak sleeper train (www.amtrak.com) that crosses California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Iowa and Illinois on its way to Chicago. It is a breathtaking journey, and one that cannot be accomplished without thinking of the astonishing feat of engineering and perseverance it took to build a railway across the empty wastes in the middle of the 19^th century.

There are many more photographs at the end of this post!

The California Zephyr waiting at Grand Junction, Colorado

Soon after the Zephyr left Emeryville on the shores of the East Bay, the fog receded to leave clear blue skies. The first part of the journey is prosaic enough, through the urban sprawl that joins Oakland and Richmond, but soon becomes memorable, leaving farmland behind to climb into the Sierra Nevadas. Forest clad and gentle at first, the track soon winds along precipitous cliffs, great ravines opening up below the train’s wheels to scare the feeble and thrill the adventurous. (I leave it to you to decide my reaction!)

Through the Sierra Nevadas

Nearing the California/Nevada border, the hills receded to reveal a fast-flowing, crystal-clear river, tumbling down through green-shaded banks, with the odd fishermen trying a cast and neat houses set on the far bank, with horses desultorily swishing their tails in the sun. On reaching Reno, the train was consigned to a trench, shielding the townspeople from its rattle and allowing passage from one side of the city to another. All fair enough, but it was a shame not to be able to see anything. We slid out of the city centre and passed industrial sidings and warehouses before heading to the hills and finally into the Nevada desert.

Leaving Reno behind and heading to the bare Nevada hills

It was a land of mere earth, rock and (not much) water, like Narnia before Aslan had called up the grass and the trees. The desert stretched to the horizon, the metallic blue of the sky reflecting back the heat of the sun to the parched ground. In England, the landscapes of East Anglia seem to go on forever, but they are as nothing to the vastness of the American west. The early settlers must have had great reserves of stamina and faith to have kept on travelling, ever hopeful that some more promising land lay beyond. The dusty prairie is familiar from Western films, and I kept expecting to see the silhouette of cowboys fighting on the roof of the train and a cloud of dust from their accomplices whipping their horses to match our speed, but, sadly, the only things moving in the vastness were lorries thrashing their way along Highway 80. A dust storm blotted out the horizon, telegraph poles whipped past, casting ominous shadows in the dust, and occasional homesteads, straggly trees offering some semblance of shade, hunkered down against the eternal wind. As dusk began to fall, Nature’s power was revealed in the shape of huge, red, striated cliffs, rocks pushed up over centuries. It is an elemental landscape, bare of even of the most basic needs of Man.

The Nevada desert

I slept extremely well, rocked to sleep by the soothing motion of the train, and woke to the strange shapes of the rock formations in the Utah desert - we had passed through Salt Lake City overnight. Rocks towered above sandy dry waterways, in every shade of ochre and gold and red, steep striated slopes rising beyond. Before long, we crossed into Colorado, and after threading our way through the Colorado River gorge- a mere shadow of the Grand Canyon it will reach later, but nonetheless impressive - began the climb into the Rockies. The backbone of North America stretches from Canada to New Mexico, and draws thousands of skiiers, hikers, riders and white-water rafters every year. The railway passes through thick forests and river valleys, alternating between wide grassy banks and dramatic ravines where the track clings impossibly to the rocky sides, occasionally passing through tunnels when the slope becomes too steep. Sometimes, the landscape would open up to reveal vast meadows stretching away to snowy mountains, beckoning the traveler to set off into the unknown. The next minute, incongruous above green grassy hillside, ski lifts would hang motionless, a reminder of the hugely popular ski season to come later in the year. The train crawled along, chugging gradually downhill until, suddenly, we emerged from a valley to see the great plain of Colorado stretching to the horizon, broken only by the Denver skyscrapers, glittering like an oasis in the flat expanse.

A rainbow breaking free of a storm over flat Colorado

The last few miles were excruciatingly slow, apparently because the day had been so hot on the plain compared with the chilly mountain air that the rail tracks had expanded and the train had to go extremely carefully to avoid derailing. Thus, we were about an hour late, but the soft evening light on the ranchland in the foothills made for a gorgeous view to finish. I cannot recommend the California Zephyr more highly, as although the basic sleeper cabins would be a squash for two, they are extremely comfortable for one, and the staff are all notably friendly. Considering that we were dining on a train in a desert, the food is good, with clam chowder for lunch being my favourite. Travelling alone, I was always assigned a seat at a table with others to fill up the car, and met some interesting people, including a young father travelling with his French wife and young son who turned out to have been to St Andrews University the year before I arrived, and a pair of delightful teachers from Iowa who shared my love of landscapes, cars and travel. There was only one slightly awkward moment when a vehement lady from deepest Oregon told me she had a calendar to mark the days until President Obama could be ‘got rid of’. We swiftly changed topics!

Approaching Denver

Every mile is a feast for the eyes, from desert to mountain, and it is definitely the most relaxing way to travel. It is only dangerous for the waistline – as life on a sleeper train consists exclusively of eating, sleeping and sitting still. Fortunately, life on a working ranch in Wyoming is getting rid of most of the extra pounds. The next instalment will be from Bitterroot Ranch, as soon as I can keep awake long enough to put metaphorical pen to paper.