Growing up, when someone in my family pulled A River Runs Through It off our DVD shelf, we’d hit the lights, wrap ourselves in blankets, and for two hours be transported to a place that I had deep in my heart been chasing, up until this year. Even at a young age, the film’s nostalgic Robert Redford narration, the score that sounds like the river itself (and yes, 1992-era Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer) had me taken. But perhaps nothing had me more in love than the Montana scenery.
There’s a fair amount of religion in the film: the two protagonists’ father is a Presbyterian minister and, while he works to instil faith in his sons, he also teaches them a love for fly fishing. Here is where my own religion comes in: nature. After all, what greater power is there beyond a river? Or a mountain, lake, or valley? Is the simple act of standing in the water, amid the current, not the most universal kind of baptism? Then, there is my lifelong love of horses and Old West fascination (while I’d claim being a 7-year-old western aficionado, this began with Mary-Kate and Ashley’s How the West was Fun, versus A Fistful of Dollars), which led to my dream of a ranch.
This past October, I reconnected with this religion: first in Crested Butte, Colorado, with Eleven Scarp Ridge Lodge as my base, then at Big Sky, Montana’s Lone Mountain Ranch. While both properties are different (the first is a five-bedroom mountain town lodge in a remodelled 1880s miner community hall; the second, a 115-year-old ranch offering everything from a summer rodeo to Yellowstone pack trips), they share the quality of being seamless parts of their natural environments.
It was the middle of the week when my best friend Haley and I boarded a small plane from Denver to Gunnison for a trip split equally between two states. “I’m Nick, he’s Dave, we’ve got a place in Crested Butte,” announced a man on board; soon enough, the fleece-clad passengers and crew were doing rounds of icebreakers like the first day of school.
From the second we touched down, it didn’t take long to become enmeshed in the town of Crested Butte. It took less than a week to develop a running route and coffee order, plus inside jokes with residents, including a snowboarder outside the town’s Breadery who saw the wool coat I’d once begged my mother for and asked if I was some kind of nun. Scarp Ridge Lodge is the type of place where you poke your head out the door in a robe to grab the Crested Butte News and check the weather before throwing on hiking clothes – which we did despite the torrent on the day we climbed Gothic Mountain. (Every sleet-slicked step of the near-13,000 peak was worth it). On this very morning, after a breakfast of pumpkin muffins and farmer’s market veg omelettes made by one of the lodge’s super-cool chefs, Mickey, we drove in the rain through the Elk Mountains. In what felt like a scene from a film co-directed by Lynch and Spielberg, we passed through the 97-year-old Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the old mining ghost town of Gothic. Tiny cabins dotted the cloud-wrapped mountains’ base, as part of a field station dedicated to ecology and climate change research. I felt overcome with the need to safeguard it: the minds behind the rain-splattered windows as much as the environment they work to protect. Morgan, an Eleven staff member we met (who was coincidentally from Montana, our next stop), married a scientist she met in Antarctica, and the pair have since spent much time out at the Lab.
It’s impossible to talk about Scarp Ridge Lodge without talking about the area: they go together. The person making your coffee or marg on Elk Avenue likely knows your mountain guide or fishing instructor, and all share a love for the outdoors. While we’ll be sure to return when the forecast promises sun, the fact that both our fly fishing day and hike happened in a downpour made them that much more rewarding. Pulling on warm clothes was indescribably wonderful after we climbed out of Taylor River with chattering teeth, and when Haley, our guide Ben and I drank chai lattes from local-favourite café Rumours with frozen hands in the car post-trek, I felt Thanksgiving-level gratitude. Later, Ben shared a picture he’d taken of us at the summit, and we laughed at our state, but clocked how irrefutably happy we looked. Ben had told us about clambering around Patagonia and Austria and still, after all this time, chooses Crested Butte.
Then there are the horses. While this element of our trip awaited in Montana, we got a taster at Mount Crested Butte’s Fantasy Ranch: backcountry stables surrounded by aspen groves and wildflower fields. The ranch’s headquarters comprised a hut by a corral with the intimacy of a childhood fort, tacked with newspaper clippings and John Wayne quotes. Here, the sun chose to come out, and even our horses closed their eyes to bask in the beams falling through yellow leaves. “You might wanna hose these down,” Lee, our guide, said at the end of our ride, as he knocked nails off the horseshoes he promised us.
Onto Montana. I challenge anyone to visit Lone Mountain Ranch and not return a full-fledged horse person. I went on this adventure with my best friend, who is more of a twin (our mothers were pregnant together) and until this year, a deep love of horses is perhaps the only thing we’ve experienced on different levels. But after days in Big Sky’s surrounding meadows with Prairie Rose, Superpuncher and Winnie, three of LMR’s horses (each part of a different equine clique ranging from ‘council’ to ‘jail’) Haley draped her arm around the chestnut. “I think I’m feeling it.”
“It’s a cool feeling, huh?” Nate, one of Eleven’s guides, had similarly said to me in Colorado as I held my first catch in the middle of Taylor River, which I dropped back into the current, and it was gone in the blink of an eye.
I’ve always liked the idea that in order for a horse to be yours, he doesn’t have to be yours on paper. Anyone could see that Chaps, the black and grey gelding, belonged to our wrangler, Kate. On a hike on horseback through Big Sky’s overgrown meadows and snow-dusted woods, Natalie, another wrangler, told us of an emotional goodbye she’d had with a former horse. Saying goodbye to a horse is different because – obviously – there’s no keeping in touch as we know it. As a guest who loves Prairie Rose, my guess is that if I come back soon, chances are it won’t be goodbye forever. But you just never know. Lone Mountain Ranch encourages being present with animals and, therefore, with ourselves and those around us. When it comes down to it, not knowing how much time we have isn’t unique to horses, and maximising every step, nose bop and quiet moment looking out at the horizon is something to take with us.
Sure, after a long ride, nothing beats putting Marty Robbins on the cabin’s record player before gearing up for Ol’ Five and Dimer cocktails at LMR’s saloon. Just like a sauna and nap in one of Scarp Ridge’s cloudlike beds prompts the ultimate “ahhh.” But as these lodges count mountains and rivers in their amenities, it makes their man-made ones special additions rather than the point. ‘Luxury’ is an overused word, though from a price point and offerings perspective, it applies to both properties. But there’s nothing materialistic about either. “Perhaps what you connected with at the core was the utter, astounding beauty that nature gives us without asking anything in return,” my mother offered. This connection is everything these places enable.
My cherished memories of Lone Mountain range from early morning flasks of coffee and cream-on-top milk left on our porch – which we’d run out to fetch in pyjamas – to drinking Ghostwood bourbon at the saloon, then singing old country songs at a local dive (which Hamlet, one of the ranch’s legendary, longest-standing employees gave us a lift to) before returning to kiss the horses on their frost-dusted noses before bed. We’d be handed bear spray before runs, which we worried we’d end up blinding ourselves with (a shame given the scenery), so we stuck to roads – and bumped into fifty elk – saving the less-trodden trails to explore with the wranglers. Both here and in Colorado, it’s about chasing that drive for adventure with, and not at the expense of, nature.
Hospitality is a business – there’s no beating around the bush. Haley and I howled with laughter when, upon quizzing Hamlet about ghosts at the ranch, we were told about a spirit (who can only occasionally be found in one cabin) who was “going to need to cooperate because we’ve got a ranch to run!” Still, when you’re in a corner of the world you’ve either yearned for or are newly excited about, making sure the place you’re drying your boots at the end of the day and bedding down makes all the difference. A postcode also means next to nothing without the context of its neighbourhood. When you order a slice of pizza at Big Sky’s Blue Moon Bakery or a house-made cocktail at Crested Butte’s Breadery, you’re chatting like old pals. “Oh, the classic post-holiday blues,” a handful of people say upon my return. But it’s more than that: it’s a need to feel as present as I did there. Then again, that very need makes you more present, wherever you are. As long as you get your dose and keep just enough in your cup until next time.
I’ve been out west plenty and its beauty is that there’s enough for all. After university, an old friend left the east for Utah and has since been doing what she loves amid its dramatic scenery – biking, touring, weekends in Wyoming – while my brother spent summers working at Alberta’s Mount Engadine Lodge, not far from where Legends of the Fall, a film starring Brad Pitt released two years after A River Runs Through It, was shot (despite being set in Montana). Years ago, my family stayed at Skoki Lodge, a no-road-access, 11-kilometre Nordic ski trek from the Fairmont Château Lake Louise – which was unforgettable but, with no running water or electricity in the dead of winter, rustic to the core. Yet I’d go back. Crested Butte is a few hours from Aspen and, if you’re looking for nature plus glitz, go forth. But having experienced Scarp Ridge and Lone Mountain as a first-timer, for that comfort-meets-connection element, I felt something extra special had been sprinkled there. Case in point, whether you’re after the view of the peak or the physical summit, there’s a home for everybody out west. These two places are where I found it.
I learned a lot about myself in Colorado and Montana. I remember Randy, Lone Mountain’s beloved naturalist guide, telling us about totem and spirit animals: while our animal guides change throughout our lives, our spirit animal remains the same – in both the physical and spiritual world. I always thought I knew mine, and out west, that was confirmed.
This corner of the world enabled me to run wild. But above all, it brought me peace. At the end of a three-hour trail ride in Crested Butte’s fields of aspens, we were greeted by a big-eyed quarter horse waiting in the corral, swishing his tail. “That horse,” Lee said, “We retired this year. And for him to stand in these valleys for the rest of his life, have a six-year-old girl say ‘stop the car!’ to come out to pet him, is life enough.”