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A small-town Colorado lodge and a century-old Montana ranch brought me back to nature. Then, back to myself.
Growing up, when someone in my family pulled A River Runs Through It off our DVD shelf, we’d hit the lights, wrap ourselves in blankets, and for two hours be transported to a place that I had deep in my heart been chasing, up until this year. Even at a young age, the film’s nostalgic Robert Redford narration, the score that sounds like the river itself (and yes, 1992-era Brad Pitt and Craig Sheffer) had me taken. But perhaps nothing had me more in love than the Montana scenery.
There’s a fair amount of religion in the film: the two protagonists’ father is a Presbyterian minister and, while he works to instil faith in his sons, he also teaches them a love for fly fishing. Here is where my own religion comes in: nature. After all, what greater power is there beyond a river? Or a mountain, lake, or valley? Is the simple act of standing in the water, amid the current, not the most universal kind of baptism? Then, there is my lifelong love of horses and Old West fascination (while I’d claim being a 7-year-old western aficionado, this began with Mary-Kate and Ashley’s How the West was Fun, versus A Fistful of Dollars), which led to my dream of a ranch.
This past October, I reconnected with this religion: first in Crested Butte, Colorado, with Eleven Scarp Ridge Lodge as my base, then at Big Sky, Montana’s Lone Mountain Ranch. While both properties are different (the first is a five-bedroom mountain town lodge in a remodelled 1880s miner community hall; the second, a 115-year-old ranch offering everything from a summer rodeo to Yellowstone pack trips), they share the quality of being seamless parts of their natural environments.
It was the middle of the week when my best friend Haley and I boarded a small plane from Denver to Gunnison for a trip split equally between two states. “I’m Nick, he’s Dave, we’ve got a place in Crested Butte,” announced a man on board; soon enough, the fleece-clad passengers and crew were doing rounds of icebreakers like the first day of school.
From the second we touched down, it didn’t take long to become enmeshed in the town of Crested Butte. It took less than a week to develop a running route and coffee order, plus inside jokes with residents, including a snowboarder outside the town’s Breadery who saw the wool coat I’d once begged my mother for and asked if I was some kind of nun. Scarp Ridge Lodge is the type of place where you poke your head out the door in a robe to grab the Crested Butte News and check the weather before throwing on hiking clothes – which we did despite the torrent on the day we climbed Gothic Mountain. (Every sleet-slicked step of the near-13,000 peak was worth it). On this very morning, after a breakfast of pumpkin muffins and farmer’s market veg omelettes made by one of the lodge’s super-cool chefs, Mickey, we drove in the rain through the Elk Mountains. In what felt like a scene from a film co-directed by Lynch and Spielberg, we passed through the 97-year-old Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in the old mining ghost town of Gothic. Tiny cabins dotted the cloud-wrapped mountains’ base, as part of a field station dedicated to ecology and climate change research. I felt overcome with the need to safeguard it: the minds behind the rain-splattered windows as much as the environment they work to protect. Morgan, an Eleven staff member we met (who was coincidentally from Montana, our next stop), married a scientist she met in Antarctica, and the pair have since spent much time out at the Lab.
It’s impossible to talk about Scarp Ridge Lodge without talking about the area: they go together. The person making your coffee or marg on Elk Avenue likely knows your mountain guide or fishing instructor, and all share a love for the outdoors. While we’ll be sure to return when the forecast promises sun, the fact that both our fly fishing day and hike happened in a downpour made them that much more rewarding. Pulling on warm clothes was indescribably wonderful after we climbed out of Taylor River with chattering teeth, and when Haley, our guide Ben and I drank chai lattes from local-favourite café Rumours with frozen hands in the car post-trek, I felt Thanksgiving-level gratitude. Later, Ben shared a picture he’d taken of us at the summit, and we laughed at our state, but clocked how irrefutably happy we looked. Ben had told us about clambering around Patagonia and Austria and still, after all this time, chooses Crested Butte.
