Montana ranchers turn to tourists to supplement income

Twisting south from Interstate 90, Bridger Creek Road cuts through sand-rock foothills studded with ponderosa pines as it follows a creek laced by cottonwoods and chokecherry bushes.

By DONNA HEALY, The Billings Gazette

Compared to the postcard perfection of the nearby Boulder and Stillwater drainages, Bridger Creek is a plain Jane stepsister.

The area’s small, family-run tourist operations seem to share some common threads. Two were forged by ranch families looking to supplement their income and remain on the land. Two grew from families that settled here and turned to tourism to make ends meet. Each relies on family members to do what needs to be done – from wrangling dudes to cleaning cabins or cooking homestyle meals.

At the Bunkhouse Bed and Breakfast, Janis Maclean hauls tractor-loads of stone from a nearby ridge. The lichen-colored rock will cover the foundation of the new log cabin guest house that she and her husband are building in the woods along the creek.

At the Stoney Lonesome Ranch, where the road climbs out on to the wide-open prairie, two grandsons help wrangle horseback rides, while a granddaughter helps fix meals.

Two miles off I-90, Bridger Creek Road rises beside a hay field. Cottonwoods curl along the creek bank, hugging a pair of ranch houses. One house, a tidy two-story, was built by Terry Terland’s grandfather, who homesteaded along the creek in 1907.

Four generations of Terlands have lived on the 11,000-acre Range Riders Ranch. Terry’s father, Telmar, who is 81, lives in the house in which he was born. Terry’s house sits a few yards away.

Squeezed in around Terry and Wyoma Terland’s breakfast table are Steve Churchill, a government employee from New Jersey, and his horse-loving 12-year-old daughter, who lives in Maryland. The working ranch kitchen sits just off a mud-room entryway, filled with dusty boots, hats and chaps.

”We can ride horses where we live, but I wanted an adventure,” Churchill said.

Guests savor the Terlands’ horseback rides for what they can and cannot see – a wide-open view of three mountain ranges, a chunk of scenery undiminished by telephone poles or cars.

”We are blessed to live here,” Wyoma Terland said. ”We feel like this is a gift God has given us, that we manage for a while.”

She started doing the rides at the Range Riders Ranch nearly a decade ago to supplement their income. She also saw it as a way to educate city folk about the realities of ranch life. After each ride, she sits guests down for lemonade, home-baked cookies and a chance to talk.

”Pretty soon, they’re asking us all kinds of questions,” she said. Frequently the conversation turns to stewardship of the land and the work involved in raising cattle.

”It’s a chance for them to see it from our perspective,” she said.

During her first summer, in 1994, she took 67 guests on rides. This summer, more than 300 riders will see the ranch from the back of a horse. Nearly two-thirds of them will come back again. This summer, the Terlands added a weeklong cattle drive. They’re planning two drives next year.

Crunch time often hits during haying season.

About a mile from the Terlands, sits the hand-hewn log house built by Janis and Rod Maclean. Although it was finished in 1990, it looks as if it might have been on the place for several generations. Their property, less than 50 acres, was a small chunk of a larger ranch sold by Rod’s parents.

Since they never intended to do a bed and breakfast, the Macleans’ one-room, log guest cabin was originally built as a storage cabin. Rod works as a woodworker for a custom stair company in Big Timber. Janis was working as waitress in Big Timber when they re-examined their lifestyle.

”There was not one day of the week we had time together as a family,” Janis said.

She is a talkative woman who possesses a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy and good humor. Reared in Toronto, her voice still carries traces of a Canadian accent.

By 1995, the family had put together the Bunkhouse Bed and Breakfast as a full-time seasonal business, turning the storage cabin a few yards from their home into a bunkhouse. Janis pampers guests with a gourmet breakfast in the sun room of her home, a place where guests are apt to see deer browsing near the creek or spot black bears when the chokecherries ripen in the fall.

The furnishings in the cabin and in their own home emulate the dude ranch style leather and stick furniture of Thomas Molesworth. Much of it was built by Janis.

”I liked a style of Western furnishing that I was unable to afford,” Janis said. ”If I hoped to have my home decorated in the dude ranch Western furniture that appealed to me, then I had to do it myself.”

She is already working on a sofa for the unfinished cabin, which is tucked in the trees less than 100 yards from their house. The cabin will sleep six and have a screened porch overlooking the creek and an outdoor hot tub. They have done nearly all the work themselves and plan to have the roof on by the end of this fall.

Along West Bridger Creek Road, Pat and Craig Whitlock opened a cluster of year-round cabins in 1999. The Whitlocks, who grew up in Tennessee, had lived in the Livingston area for 17 years.

They named their place The Holler, harking back to the tradition of Southern hospitality. Pat Whitlock is constantly amazed by how often she has to explain the name’s roots.

”Don’t they listen to country music?” she asked rhetorically.

Country singer Loretta Lynn’s backwoods birthplace, Butcher Holler, was immortalized in the movie ”Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

”This is a holler. It’s not a coulee. It’s not a draw. It’s a holler,” she said. As she defines it, a holler is a deep mountain cove.

Their operation includes seven furnished cabins, all with running water, but some with outhouses.

At the Stoney Lonesome Ranch, 15 miles south of the Interstate, the busy season stretches through the fall hunting season. Corky Hedrick became an outfitter 30 years ago to help supplement the ranch income. In 1992, he and his wife, Clarice, started offering working ranch vacations and horseback rides.

”Everybody wants to be a Montana cowboy for just a little bit,” Clarice said.

Corky, who is 70, still leads summer rides, while Clarice doesn’t flinch at the thought of fixing supper for a passing wagon train carrying more than a hundred guests and wranglers.

Their grandsons, Shane Wilson, 21, and Zack Hamel, 10, help take out riders, while their 15-year-old granddaughter, Tiffani Hamel, helps with the cooking.

At first, the Hedricks offered guests an upstairs room in their home.

”That didn’t work,” Clarice said. ”It was too many people for the plumbing and too many people for the house. We didn’t have any privacy.”

The Hedricks renovated a 9×12-foot cabin, which was first used by a homesteader and his mail-order bride. Then they tore down another, larger homestead cabin and rebuilt it near their ranch house.

”We’re still a working cattle ranch first. We don’t want to be labeled a dude ranch,” Clarice said.

Guests appreciate a ranch that isn’t real modern, she said, because most of them have never seen one.

”They come up here, and it’s the real ranch,” she said.

In 1945, Corky’s father bought the ranch, which has since grown to about 5,000 acres. He would still rather be ranching cows than dudes, but he realizes that tourism helps pay the bills.

”Without our summer business and hunting, there wouldn’t be a ranch,” Clarice said. ”You have to do a supplementer some way.”

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2003/09/09/business/e01090703_02.txt