Imagine you're a 12-year-old girl. Ponies and clothes are your favourite things. You've just been shopping and you're wearing your new cowboy boots, new jeans, a blue checked shirt and a real cowboy hat. You've had breakfast – blueberry pancakes with crispy bacon, just the way you like them – and now you're walking across a sunlit meadow, filled with gently grazing ponies. You're feeling pretty good.
A tall cowboy with a slow drawl asks if you'd care to help him round up the ponies into the corral so you say yes, as casually as you can. The ponies neigh and toss their manes, kicking up dust and jostling as you lean over the wooden rails to share your apple with a fine chestnut quarter horse called Rudy. You lead him into the yard, feed him and groom him, saddle him up and get ready to go for a ride in the mountains. If you're imagining it properly, you're about as happy as a 12-year-old girl can be.
Which is not bad if you're her father, either. I'd taken my daughter to The Ranch at Rock Creek, a 6,000-acre spread in Montana which opened to guests last year and may well be the ultimate place to live out those cowboy dreams, whatever your age. That was certainly the intention of Jim Manley, a New York financier who bought it after a 40-year search for a pristine stretch of wilderness with a river, native forests, elk and deer but no grizzlies or rattlesnakes. He wanted somewhere he could hike, ride and shoot. Somewhere he could encourage others to adopt the frontier spirit – while making sure they didn't miss any of the comforts of modern life. As I settled in to a proper Western-style saddle and rode out beside my daughter across Rock Creek, it was as clear as the rushing river water he'd done a pretty good job.
We followed a trail out past the cottonwoods and alders along the river before heading uphill towards the high forests that faded to the Pintler range in the distance. In the thin mountain air – the ranch is 5,500ft above sea level – a faint tang of wood smoke, drifting across the valley from a forest fire 20 miles away, tickled our throats. The only sounds were the crickets, the creaking of our saddles and the whispering of our ponies' hooves among the summer-scorched grasses. We were glad of our wide-brimmed hats until we reached the shade of the pine woods, where our ponies patiently picked their way among rocks and fallen tree trunks with just an occasional touch of the reins to keep them moving in the right direction.
This is big, empty country where much of the American cultural identity was forged by tough, no-nonsense pioneers. Explorers, such as Lewis and Clark (the first white men through Montana), and mountain men, such as Liver-Eatin' Johnson, who waged war single-handed against the Crow Indians and won. Tom McCombs, the senior wrangler at The Ranch (straight out of the pages of Lonesome Dove), told us tales of grit and grizzly bears by a mountain stream as we ate our lunchtime sandwiches, wrapped in red and white checked handkerchiefs. Together we'd tracked elk, found where a brown bear had been hunting for food and trailed a bobcat away from a kill.
Tom treats his wranglers, ponies and guests with the same kindly but firm hand – the skills involved in calming a spooked pony or a fearful visitor seem remarkably similar.
It's a long way from City Slickers, the film where rough-riding cowboys went to great lengths to prove to townies how soft and puny they really were. But neither are the ranch hands waiters in cowboy boots – these are people who know an awful lot about rodeo, fishing, shooting and the history of where they live, and are itching to share. On my first attempt at fly fishing, I managed to catch a fine cutthroat trout, which says a lot more for the skills of Alex the fisherman than for mine.
At the shooting range, Max coaxed my daughter from being gun-shy to shattering eight clay targets in a row with a .410 then hitting bullseyes with a Smith & Wesson revolver. Just like Annie Oakley.
We rode past an old log cabin by an abandoned mine, the last vestiges of another family's efforts to scratch a living here a hundred years ago. It's hard to know what those early pioneers would have made of the ranch's well-appointed spa, the swimming pool or the "Mercantile", full of upmarket clothes where my daughter bought her cowboy boots (we got the working version rather than the $3,000 snakeskins – Primark it isn't).
The pioneers would have recognised most of the ingredients in chef Josh Drage's cooking – he spends a couple of days a week on the long Montana dirt roads, buying fresh meat and vegetables from the farms farther down the valleys. You imagine they'd appreciate a wrangler's laconic answer as to whether The Ranch has a gym; "Nope, but we got plenty of firewood needs splitting."
They'd like Jim Manley's Silver Dollar Saloon, too. With saddles for bar stools and real silver dollars in the bar top, serving local whiskey and microbrewery beers such as Moose Drool and Cold Smoke, evenings at The Ranch can be as wild as the West ever was. The cowboy film 3:10 to Yuma on the big screen, Nascar racing and American football on various televisions, my unforgettable rendition of Purple Rain on the hi-tech karaoke system, simultaneous games of darts, shuffleboard and ping pong and the owner demonstrating his life-threatening swan-dive technique in the four-lane bowling alley… all heaven for me, but my daughter (before being tucked up in bed) insisted the next evening was spent toasting marshmallows round a campfire. After a long day on horseback, I readily agreed.
The ranch house is new but feels just like a home built of logs ought to. Downstairs there are crackling log fires, leather-covered sofas, guns and animal skins on the walls, baskets of home-made cookies and books about pioneers. Everyone has their own mountain bike for their stay with the name of their room hung on it, and you're invited to borrow hats, coats and cowboy boots whenever you need them. Someone's paid attention to almost every detail, from fresh flowers next to the swing seat to "Howdy" made of horseshoes over the back door.
There are other places to stay on the property that offer fewer people and more of the silent outdoors. Along the river are frontier-style canvas cabins, with underfloor heating in the stone-built bathroom, furs on the bed and the soothing soundtrack of the creek outside. There are a couple of secluded family-sized ranch houses, and for real isolation there's Trapper Cabin, which comes with its own Jeep to get you to breakfast.
Around the corral some of the original farm buildings have been turned into idiosyncratic rooms – the Bunkhouse is exactly that, with six bunk beds, while the Loft has an antique bath under an enormous chandelier. Gingham curtains, walls of local pine and old frontier photographs, the style stays the right side of pastiche – comfortable and appropriate without becoming kitsch.
Standing on the porch, coffee in hand, looking across the early mist on the river to mountains touched gold by the sun, the sheer beauty of Montana that struck Lewis and Clark stays with you. And somehow Rock Creek makes you feel as if you belong there. My daughter swears she will be back. As soon as she's old enough she's going to join Big Tom as an apprentice cowgirl.
THE INSIDE TRACK
Gene Kilgore’s website, ranchweb.com, details many ranches, farm stays and b &bs in Montana, including sleep-in-the-dirt cattle drives.
Even in remote Montana, ranches can get full of families in the summer holidays – after Labor Day is quieter.
For the luxury wilderness experience, book the Trapper Cabin by Rock Creek (it comes with a Jeep to get you to breakfast).
Ask your guide to take you hiking to the abandoned mine for a look at how mountain men and women lived a century ago.
Western-style riding lessons before you go will make your first long ride more fun. But don’t worry – you can also just relax, sit back and let the horse do the work.
Go on a ghost-town tour of abandoned mining communities – spooky, and you’ll probably find some sapphires.
