Readuponit: Travel and voracious reading

Jael Kampfe, of the Lazy E-L Ranch, Roscoe MT.

Sometimes I experience a moment that I know is transcendent. It’s a combination of where I am, what I am doing, and what it all means when put together. About 3 o’clock this afternoon, I was riding a docile horse named Domingo on the wide open countryside outside the Lazy E-L Ranch in Roscoe.

When I looked around at those dun-colored hills, at the sun glinting off the stand of gently waving aspen trees, and in the distance, the striking peaks of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wildnerness Area, I knew it was a moment worth cherishing.  I watched two mule deer scurry up a hill in the distance, and watched the two dogs chase a hare, following his upright white tail; then saw a blue heron stalking his prey in a marsh.

The moment was perfect. It was glorious in its beauty, and feeling the horse beneath me and the comraderie of riding with a group, it got me feeling tremendous gratitude, and happiness for realizing it for what it was.

The Lazy E-L Ranch lies at the foot of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area.

We were riding with Jael Kampfe, a 40-ish woman who runs the Montana ranch with a brood of relatives and a staff of wranglers.  Jael is warm and friendly, the perfect personality to be in the business of taking her guests on these rides in this glorious country. She’s still as blown away by the beauty as newcomers; she gushed about how much she loved it and she’s grown up in this place since her family settled in the early 1900s.

She’s figured out a smart niche in the cattle business. She brings up to 2200 head of yearling cattle to her 12,000 acre ranch and fattens them up on the rich grass there between May and October, then sends them back and collects a fee. She also hosts families and couples seeking a real working ranch vacation, and takes them out on cattle drives and fixing fences in her huge back 40.

All of the land in the vast distance we could see is about a third of the land; her holdings also include five miles of the pristine trout-filled West Rosebud river, where no road comes anywhere close.

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Baked sandwich at Red Lodge Ales, Red Lodge Montana.

We drove out of the airport after arriving in Billings and the first thing we saw were a giant wall of mountains, which we learned were called ‘The Rims,” dramatic brown bluffs rising up from the flat land.

The weather was bad and as we drove 65 miles to Red Lodge, our car was briefly pounded by hailstones. “I had my herb garden trashed by hail the other week,” said one of our guides.

Our tour of the small town of Red Lodge stayed mostly on the one main drag. It’s a town that hosts up to 10,000 motorcycles each July, and we saw plenty of riders tooling down the street with their free flags flying. No helmet laws here.

Our Red Lodge hosts told us about how the town almost died in the 1930s when the coal mine shut down and the economy collapsed. It took the building of the Beartooth Pass, in 1936, which created a road to Yellowstone, to the south, that transformed the town into what is now– a robust tourist-fueled economy.

That means that besides the bikers, there are the requisite cutesy shops like a former movie theater filled with candies and shops selling art and crafts. One shop sign said ‘open by 11′ and another advertised a little house for $39,900!

I also got a kick out of the giant Montana mansion offered for sale  as an “Extreme Makeover 2007 House.”  When the much-deserving residents found out how much the taxes were going to be on the house that Ty and his gang built, hey, I guess they decided to bail out.

At Red Lodge Ales, the brewmaster does quite a bit to keep green. The have Montana’s largest solar arrays on the roof, they use bio-diesel from restaurant waste oil  in their delivery trucks, and they give away their spent mash to Montana cattle.  Oh, and they put their sandwiches under the broiler and  call them ‘baked.’

Dancing Indians at the Red Lodge Cafe, Montana.

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As we drove up from Billings to Red Lodge, Montana, I asked our guide Joan about what people were talking about here in this small city of about 100,000. Two topics came up, which were familiar discussions people have been having in other states.

The city of Billings two years ago passed a law allowing the sale of medical marijuana, and now there appear to be thousands more patients for the drug then ever before.  A total of 27 marijuana dispensaries have opened up in the city, one of which is right next to a school. This is inspiring city officials to try and come up with ways to fence in the dispensaries, and to keep more from opening up. So far the number will stay at 27, but this has definitely become a can of worms that some people wish was never opened.

The other topic further south when we got to Red Lodge was bears.  There have been 21 bear break-ins so far this year in this small town of about 2000 people.  Bears get creative since there is a law requiring bear-proof dumpsters. So the animals break into homes. One woman made 100 cupcakes for a wedding, stored them in her garage, and came home to find a bear had gorged on them all .

In the restaurant where we had dinner tonight, the owners take used fryer oil and place it in a well secured 55-gallon drum outside. Despite being chained down and surrounded by rings of truck tires, a bear managed to pick up the giant can and guzzle his fill of fryer oil, leaving the ground wet and sticky. The owners had to bring in new gravel and steam clean the whole area.

On a scarier note, two people have died in bear attacks in Yellowstone, one involving a sow and calves. The old story about a bear and her cubs is true.  Grizzlies are much larger than the bears we often see in the east, in fact the mischievous bears in the stories above were black bears, smaller and less aggressive than the grizzlies.

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