Yee-haw.
After way too long a stretch riding a desk in the city, I was off to cowgirl camp at the second-to-last spread on Needle Rock Road, west of Crawford.
Four glorious fall days at the edge of the West Elk Wilderness. Horseback rides three times a day if so desired. The chance to learn to rope and fly-fish, and shoot arrows in the company of a dozen other women. Perfect.
I was already in love with Crawford.
It’s at the back door to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, bluesman Joe Cocker’s hometown, and the spot so tenderly recollected last year in Eugenia Bone’s culinary memoir “At Mesa’s Edge.”
As I followed the edge of autumn across McClure Pass and dropped down into the North Fork Valley near Paonia, I thought about the women who pioneered Colorado’s Western Slope and wondered if my cowgirl weekend could possibly resemble their lives on the frontier.
Not a chance.
Linda and Marley Hodgson Jr. said, “Goodbye, city life!,” five years ago when they acquired a 280-acre spread straddling the Smith Fork of the Gunnison River.
The rustic Bar X Ranch had hosted mostly hunters, mostly from Texas, since 1939. By the time the Hodgson family took title, the property was in dire need of tender loving care. It took more than a year to meticulously transform the rough Bar X into Smith Fork Ranch, a swank outpost where every little detail is attended to, but not so that you would notice.
The first day, a handsome cowboy was waiting to carry each cowgirl’s bag to her room, where a sweet bentwood basket was waiting, filled with homemade cookies, fresh plums and apples, and a welcoming note handwritten by Linda Hodgson.
Cocktail hour was handled by vintner Eames Peterson, who talked about wine made at his place, Puesta del Sol in Paonia. Between courses during dinner, ranch manager Chuck Gunther visited with all of the guests, sizing up them and their riding skills and sussing out their interests, gently suggesting a schedule that would allow them to sample everything offered during the annual Cowgirl Adventure without going bonkers.
By the time dessert was served and a two-piece combo had finished the night’s entertainment, everyone was ready to hit the high-altitude hay.
A bunk with a view
Though Bar X Ranch founders Grant and Mamie Ferrier often found themselves spreading out a bedroll under the shelter of a giant spruce tree, the current conditions at Smith Fork Ranch are far more inviting.
Linda Hodgson says she was tempted to summon the bulldozers when the family contemplated purchasing the ranch, but her husband immediately saw cozy potential in the three ramshackle log cabins and aging lodge buildings.
They carefully stabilized the shells of the historic buildings and filled them with restored period furniture and antiques, making sure each guest room included a really great bathroom.
Inside the two-room Spruce Cabin, the smallest guest building on the property, the sitting room is furnished with comfy cowgirl-style sofas and chairs. The slate-tiled bathroom is stocked with fluffy robes and plenty of towels, and fragrant creams and shampoos made by Leroux Creek Vineyard in Hotchkiss, scented with clove and rosemary and infused with grape-seed oil and red wine from their vines.
In the bedroom, thanks to a thoughtfully placed window and a dresser mirror tilted just so, guests can snuggle between a featherbed and a thick, down comforter and get a clear view of aspen-covered Saddle Mountain without raising their heads.
Not that a cowgirl really wants to spend all her time in bed.
Learning the ropes
In truth, the only cattle at Smith Fork Ranch are a dozen roping steers that hang around the arena. They’re there for team roping shows by a neighboring rancher and his son, and for team penning attempts by cowgirls brave enough to race on horseback from one end of the arena to the other.
Still, wranglers can work on your horse-handling skills if you’re uncertain in the saddle.
And you can learn to properly toss a lasso on the lawn in front of the lodge. Gunther has a bunch of plastic steer heads affixed to hay bales, and he and the other wranglers patiently explain how to create a loop, wind it up over your head and let it fly, overhand, toward the bale.
Beginning fly-fishing starts much the same way. A guide gathers guests on the lawn, where they learn the casting motion in the hopes that eventually the coveted J curl will gently unfurl, carrying a line across the grass.
Cowgirls are advised not to worry about “catching” a too-interested barn cat; the line is hookless while on land. The next lesson is on the stocked trout ponds. Several in our group manage to catch – and release – even though the pond we worked held the most savvy trout on the ranch. Those people move on to the Smith Fork, which is considered some of the Western Slope’s best trout waters.
Dinner bell signals meals
Although cowgirls are called to their three squares with the clang of a huge, forged-iron dinner bell, you can hardly call it grub.
Like everything else at Smith Fork, meals are a sophisticated take on classic Western cooking. Executive chef Bob Isaacson broke culinary trail for the ranch and Patrick Walley followed with a repertoire of fine cuisine made from locally sourced, mostly organic ingredients.
Breakfast is served in the funky Dinner Bell dining hall. It’s a smallish, wood paneled room, lined with booths, but cowgirls fuel for the first ride of the day together at a long table down the middle of the room.
You can serve yourself from a buffet heavy with fresh fruit, camp-made granola, cold cereals and tender pastries. There’s also a menu of hot, stick-to-
your-ribs combinations of eggs and flapjacks, locally made sausages and bacon.
One of the best morning treats of the cowgirl weekend was port-macerated cherries drizzled over tangy organic yogurt (oh, what a beautiful morning that was!).
And for the record, coffee at Smith Fork Ranch is dark and French-pressed, not boiled over a campfire in a tin pot.
Around noon, just about the time a cowgirl has worked up a serious appetite with a morning ride, perhaps followed by a fly-fishing lesson, the fires come up on the outdoor grill. You might get burgers or chicken, always three or four tasty salads to sample, and a delicious soup to start. Eat indoors, in the Pavilion or take your plate out to the deck to dine in the sun.
Dinner is a more formal affair – clean jeans and a pressed shirt, please – served on the Pavilion by staff who hustle wearing cowgirl gear protected by long, white aprons. Supper might start with Smith Fork’s beloved sweet-corn soup garnished with strips of roasted green chiles, which could lead to a tangy spinach salad and then a huge, perfectly grilled rib-eye poised on a nutty mound of quinoa. The desserts are to die for. Cowgirls can wind down the evening with coffee sipped from a huge mug branded with the Smith Fork logo, or select from a box of exotic teas from Two Leaves and a Bud in Basalt.
Or they can continue long into the night, keeping the alcohol-fueled alpenglow going with selections from the ranch’s very large, very diverse cellar developed by Marley Hodgson Jr. and his son, Marley Hodgson III.
Draw rein on overdoing it
It’s tempting to giddy-up and go, go, go at cowgirl camp because it seems as though there’s a chance that some of the scenery or fun might slip away if you pass on a ride in favor of a calming massage or a soothing facial or, heaven forbid, a nap. But part of the appeal of a fantasy ranch retreat is doing things to break the frantic real-life routine, so there’s no reason not to indulge when the opportunity to self-pamper is offered.
Down in the basement of the Pavilion, Helen Highwater, the long and lean bass player in the Paonia band Three in the Morning, freshens parched complexions with special anti-aging potions from the luxe Swiss skin-care company Pevonia. For the cowgirl weekend only, Highwater worked up an exfoliant activated with an infusion of prickly pear cactus. (And no, it wasn’t an acupuncture/facial combo.)
In the next room over, a massage therapist unkinked city knots and smoothed muscles made sore on the trail.
By the time Sunday at Smith Fork rolled around, I was well fed and mentally refueled, and like at least one other cowgirl, frantically trying to figure out how to extend my stay, or at least get back to camp again someday.
Robin, a Washington, D.C., restaurateur at camp with her 8-year-old daughter, phoned home to ask if her husband wouldn’t mind if she spent one more day in Crawford, but ended up compromising with one last trail ride through the changing leaves before heading over the hill to the Aspen airport. Susan, a horsewoman from Eng-
land back for her second cowgirl retreat, was sitting tight until friends she met at the ranch last year showed up a day later for another week of retreat.
In the end, I drove off into the sunset, feeling like I could face the urban frontier with a little cowgirl power in my pocket.
The details
Smith Fork Ranch isn’t always about the cowgirl experience.
Although the Hodgsons organize a few specialty programs to support the fall shoulder season – such as Cowgirl Adventure and the annual Culinary Weekend in September – most weeks Smith Fork Ranch operates like a summer camp for adults and families looking for a place to settle in and let someone else handle the vacation logistics.
The ranch typically hosts about 28 guests. The entire property can be reserved for private retreats.
Peak-season prices range from $5,800 for two guests staying a seven nights in a room in the guest lodge to $19,500 for six guests in the River Cabin. The Cowgirl Adventure ran $2,400 for three nights, including a facial and massage. Alcohol is extra, and a 15 percent gratuity is added to your bill at the end of the stay and divided among the staff.
Everyone is assigned a horse at the beginning of the week. Meals are served three times a day. Beyond that, what visitors do with their time is up to them. They can chose from fishing, riding, hiking or just lounging.
The Smith Fork staff will personalize things for guests too. Although meals are served in a dining hall, if a couple just wants some time alone, the chef will bring a meal to their cabin, or – if they’re staying in the elegant River Cabin, which has a kitchen – will prepare it there.
The ranch is family-friendly, especially in July and August, so a lot of work has gone into providing programs for children under 7 who can’t really do the same ranch activities the bigger kids and their parents can. The ranch runs what amounts to day camp for the shorter set at the Old Homestead Hangout, where they might do arts and crafts, play games, go frog hunting, play in a treehouse, pan for gold or play in a Ute tepee.
Guest ranch season officially ends Oct. 15 of each year (it will reopen May 25), but harking back to the origins of the Bar X, the doors to Smith Fork Ranch stay open for elk hunters headed into the national forest and wilderness area.
Information: Smith Fork Ranch, 8 miles west of Crawford on Needle Rock Road; 970-921-3454, smithforkranch.com.
