People ask why a working cattle ranch bothers with guests at all. The honest answer is part arithmetic and part something harder to put a number on.
By Jim Johnson3 min read
People sometimes ask why a working ranch lets strangers in at all — why we'd hand a greenhorn a horse and let them ride along on the cattle drive instead of just moving cattle in peace.
Part of the answer is plain arithmetic. Cattle prices rise and fall on forces no rancher controls, and a year can turn on weather you can't argue with. Welcoming guests — for the drive, for a hunt, for a stay in the old lodge, for a wedding under the cottonwoods — is part of what keeps a place like this economically alive. It's the model people call agritourism, and for a lot of family ranches it's the difference between keeping the land working and watching it get carved into lots. Every guest who rides with us is, in a real way, helping keep this country whole.
But the arithmetic isn't the whole of it, and I won't pretend it is. There's a thing that happens when someone who's never sat a horse gets the herd moving for the first time — when a kid from the city watches a bull bugle across a canyon, or a family eats dinner in the old ranch lodge and feels, for a few days, like they belong to a place like this. We get to watch people fall for the land the same way our family did. That doesn't show up on a balance sheet, but it's most of why we keep opening the gate.
The cattle would be here either way. We just decided the country was worth sharing.
