When chef Philippe Shapiro began to describe the breakfast entrees, the guests seated at the long, dark-honey wooden tables quickly fell silent.
Clearly they didn’t want to miss anything crucial that might sway their decisions one way or another. Huevos rancheros with textbook-perfect, over-easy eggs, a side of seasoned black beans and cinnamon-walnut Danishes, or a souffle of Gruyère and grana padano cheese with raspberry streusel muffins and fresh fruit? Pulp-flecked, just-squeezed orange juice, or another piping-hot, expertly crafted latte?
By now the guests at the Home Ranch, 18 miles northwest of Steamboat Springs, knew the choices were going to be tough. After just one evening of appetizers passed during a meet-and-greet cocktail hour and a memorable dinner of such delectable dishes as pan-seared free- range chicken with risotto soaked in a chanterelle essence and flaky, sauteed rouget — a sweet-fleshed fish — served with house- made arugula pasta in a sauce of basil and baby artichokes, it was clear that chef Shapiro’s cooking featured delightful palate- pleasers.
“I could hardly move last night,” said first-time guest Sarah Gray, who was visiting the Home Ranch from London with Gavin Simms of New York. “That was quite the meal.”
The rest of the 21 diners divided among the two communal tables offered up their enthusiastic assent. Bruce and Cynthia Kosakowski, a couple from Marblehead, Mass., who have been coming to the Home Ranch for several years, said that for them the meals are one of the big draws. “The food is just amazing,” Bruce said. “We always know we’re going to try something new, and every time, we’re just bowled over by what comes out of the kitchen.”
It wasn’t the food, however, that first attracted the Kosakowskis to this 1,500-acre Relais & Châteaux property, which has the Elk River running through it and borders the Routt National Forest. “We wanted to ride horses,” Cynthia said. “We were looking for a ranch that had a strong horse program, and we loved it so much here after our first visit that we came back. It’s quiet, and it’s just so beautiful.”
The Home Ranch, owned by Steve and Ann Stranahan and their partner, Ken Jones, since 1978, is one of the few dude ranches in Colorado that allows guests to ride — conditions permitting — year- round. Most turn the horses out to winter pasture and shut down the riding operation until spring; some even send their horses to warmer climes.
A few retain a couple of teams for sleigh rides, which the Home Ranch also offers, using their mules and a spacious feed sled. On star-sprinkled nights, with not another light for miles, wranglers take blanket- wrapped guests out to visit the horses and around the seemingly endless property to enjoy a time-honored tradition — sleigh bells ring, and the cold, crisp night air is broken only by the sounds of the sled itself and the mules’ hooves hitting the crunchy snow, as there’s not much else to make noise around these parts until you hit the next property acres and acres away.
Preservers of open space
The Stranahans have been instrumental in helping to keep the land along the County Road 129 corridor held in trust so that future generations can continue to enjoy one of the few remaining open valleys in Colorado. It sometimes seems as though other popular resort areas have long since forgotten that that’s often what draws people here — not more ridgeline condo developments. The Home Ranch guests spent quite a bit of time talking about how good it is to “get away.”
“We picked a ranch because it’s peaceful, and the setting is pretty likely to be good,” said Doug Andrews of Portland, Maine, who wound up at the Home Ranch when the place he had booked in Montana was damaged during summer fires. “Places like this are going to have good people who care about the land and the animals; they’re going to be our kind of people, usually.”
Winter activities at the Home Ranch, like many in Colorado, include cross-country skiing — on 24 kilometers of on-property groomed trails, or in the next-door backcountry of the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area — and snowshoeing. They also have a rare on-site tubing hill, where kids of all ages can zip down several tracks on tubes with removable bottoms to accommodate a variety of snow conditions. In the warmer months, the opportunities include fly-fishing for a variety of trout in the Elk or the ranch’s stocked pond and hiking to places such as nearby Hahn’s Peak or biking through the forests.
And at any time of the year, guests can gather around the barn to eagerly await a matchup with the equine companion with whom they will share a ride or two, or during the summer, when a seven-day minimum stay is required, a week’s worth of quality time. That’s when ranch general manager Johnny Fisher, along with his staff of wranglers, seriously sizes up each guest and carefully chooses the right trusty steed.
“I like to see the guests come away from their time here feeling like they had a good time, but also that they had a meaningful time,” said Fisher, who has been in the dude-ranching business for 35 years and at the Home Ranch for five — and as Steve Stranahan tells it, a “master storyteller all his life.”
“You just get Johnny started, and it can be hard to get him to stop,” Steve said with a chuckle. That’s just part of what makes the gruff-voiced, affable Fisher — who with his worn boots, jeans and dusty cowboy hat looks as though he just stepped off the set of a Western — indispensable for the end of the day at the Home Ranch, when everyone is sitting around the fireplace with a glass of wine after riding horseback for hours through the wilderness.
It’s also about people
Spend enough time at dude ranches, and you come to realize that as much as the food and the horses are a big part of the experience, it is the people who set the tone. Which is why Sundance Trail Guest Ranch near Red Feather Lakes has a rather laid-back, nurturing feel to it — owners Dan and Ellen Morin are former nurses in hospice care who took over this 140-acre spread in 1999, and they have a lighthearted approach that makes a stay here all the better for it.
For instance, chatty Dan Morin, who leans toward bright plaid shirts and sports a handlebar mustache, may pop over to the nearby Shambhala Mountain Center to get in some meditation practice between chores. Ellen, meanwhile, with her quiet, gentle demeanor, can go only a day or two without climbing onto a horse before she just starts to feel “not good.”
The couple had been riding and visiting ranches for years and always knew they wanted to own one, and finally it was a matter of “right place, right time, right things happening,” Dan said. Their son Gary Morin plans to take over the operation one day; until then he and his fiancee, Lucy Bink- ley, help out, often running errands and helping to maintain the property — which in the summer offers one of the most popular Frisbee golf courses around, as well as white-water rafting on the nearby Cache La Poudre River, trap shooting, rock climbing and hiking, and in the winter, because the area gets so little snow, can feature some snowshoeing, but mostly is still about the horses and the hiking.
Gary also does some of the cooking, and what cooking it is. As at the Home Ranch, three squares are included in the rate; at Sundance Trail, the meals are down-home and comforting, filling and guaranteed to prompt at least one guest to beg for the recipe, which Gary happily will provide on the spot.
“Oh, the secret there is Craisins,” he said about the spinach salad with mandarin oranges that had sweet little bits of cranberry in the vinaigrette. The salad was a side to enormous rib-eyes cooked to each diner’s temperature specifications, along with Gary’s just- baked cheese muffins, baked potatoes with all the fixin’s and buttery, steamed snap peas. For dessert: blueberry crumble cake just out of the oven, topped with freshly whipped cream. The meal was served with home-brewed iced tea or lemonade (you can purchase wine or beer), and in case it wasn’t enough, a sideboard held tempting jars of molasses cookies, gingersnaps and peanut butter blossoms.
“We have a regular chef who comes in the season,” Dan explained. “But Gary fills in nicely, don’t you think?”
Dan doesn’t do too badly himself; he cooks all of the breakfasts, and so the next morning we’re treated to orange French toast — “I came up with that one because so many people can’t do milk these days” — and chocolate- chocolate chip muffins, fruit cocktails served in wine glasses and crispy, smoky bacon.
Safety first
After breakfast on the first day, first-time guests must watch Dan’s half-hour training video, part humorous look at horse behavior — filmed in the corral, it features one animal spending most of Dan’s discussion trying to prove the point about a horse’s tendencies to try to see who’s boss — and part serious safety talk. Then it’s out to the barn to get hitched to the horse love of your life.
Wrangler Bryce Niles was our kind of cowboy: sporting a few body piercings but intensely polite, a transplant from Vermont and as kind but stern as a cowboy should be to keep everyone in line. He took us up along the rocky, tree-lined trails of the Roosevelt National Forest that adjoins the ranch, taking us to an overlook that affords awe- inspiring views of the Mummy Range and sharing the titillating tale of “Lady Moon,” a famous turn-of-the-century moonshine runner who once lived in the area.
And then after we had been riding for a while, he really got our attention: “So, after this, would you gals like to shoot some guns?”
So we headed over to the firing range, where I had the uniquely disconcerting pleasure of watching my daughters fire a .22 pistol and rifle before nearly knocking myself off the planet by trying my aim with a 12- gauge shotgun and a .50-caliber muzzle loader. I couldn’t hit anything to save my life, but my kids ran some bad cans out of town.
Nothing like a little shootin’ to work up an appetite, and dinner that night was another winner — Gary had made enormous pans of lasagna, and the garlic bread was fresh out of the oven; we ate until we were about to burst. A dude ranch is no place to be shy; we got to know fellow guests Larry and Ruth Winzenried from Casper, Wyo., who had brought their friends of 35 years, Lola and Doug Wolf. The Winzenrieds have been coming to Sundance Trail a few times a year since 2000, when they visited to celebrate Larry’s aunt and uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary.
“We’ve been to other places, but there’s just something about the casualness of this one, the way you can kind of come and go as you please, and everyone is always in such a good mood,” Larry said. “We try to get here every chance we can get.”
Ruth said that even though they have been to Sundance during every season, the winter is special, even though it is cold, and every once in a while bad weather might keep them from going horseback riding.
“Some of my favorite times have been when it was snowing,” she said. “I’ll never forget one morning, I woke up and it had been snowing all night, and we were going out for one last ride, on a Sunday. There weren’t any footprints on the trail, and it was so, so quiet. It was magical, really, just us and the horses, and their breath was visible as we rode. So beautiful, almost spiritual. There’s just nothing else like it.”
Kyle Wagner: 303-954-1599 or travel@denverpost.com
Insider’s Guide
The Home Ranch, 54880 Routt County Road 129, Clark, 970-879-1780, home . Four-hour drive from Denver; free shuttle from Yampa Valley Regional Airport. Lodge rooms or cabins with private hot tubs, no TV or telephone. Communal hot tub, swimming pool, separate building with game room.
Winter-stay rates: (two-night minimum, Dec. 17-Mar. 30) start at $430 per night, per couple for lodge room and $535 for cabin (includes daily meals, cross-country skiing and snowshoe equipment, lessons and guides, on- and off-ranch skiing, horseback riding and children’s and teens programs).
Summer rates: (seven-night stay, June 8-Oct. 9) $5,175-$5,410 per couple for a lodge room and $5,725-$6,575 for a cabin (includes daily meals, horseback riding, guided fly-fishing and lessons, guided nature hikes, and children’s and teen programs).
Sundance Trail Ranch, 17931 Red Feather Lakes Road, Red Feather Lakes, 800-357-4930 or 970-224-1222, sundance . Two-hour drive from Denver. Lodge rooms or cabins; no TV or telephone. Communal hot tub, separate building with game room, TV. Massage available.
Mid-September to mid-May is low season, with bed-and-breakfast rates starting at $126 per night per couple (includes dinner night of arrival and breakfast) and country inn stays starting at $180 per night, per couple (includes all meals during stay and daily horseback ride).
Summer rates are for a six-night stay; rates run $1,320-$1,760 per person depending on time period (includes all meals, daily horseback riding and activities such as rock climbing, riflery and archery ranges, white-water rafting, Frisbee golf and evening entertainment). Dogs and horses welcome; call ahead.
