Among the guests was a family of four great riders from France (Bayard is a French-speaking Francophile whose ranch is well-known in that country); a couple from Ketchum, Idaho (he didn’t ride but fished, she wanted to get over her fear of horses); excellent teenage riders from Illinois whose mother learned enough in a week to trot on a trail; the son-in-law of one of Bayard’s former CIA colleagues, from McLean, who was game for anything, as was I; a Turkish-born triathlete couple from North Carolina; and Bob, another octogenarian horseman from Danville, Va., who joined the three teenage girls on the cross-country jumping course and not only stayed on but rightfully beamed with pride afterward. A class of international equine dentistry students also staying at the ranch livened up cocktail hour.
There are enough wranglers working on the ranch so that the daily rides can cater to the guests’ riding levels, from novice to expert, even if it means that a guest with no experience takes lessons for a couple of days. Overnight pack rides are also available. Bayard or a wrangler leads the trails, and the horses, mostly sure-footed Arabians, stay in a line. This could get a little boring for more experienced riders, were it not for the river banks, streams and dense pine forests through which we traipsed, or the long, fast gallops up and down mountain paths.
“Thank you! Thank you, Bayard!” Frenchman Gery Vaschalde yelled, nearly out of breath, after a particularly thrilling gallop through a meadow, around a bend and up a hill. “Bravo!”
Two- to three-hour rides, in Western saddles, are offered twice a day, each time on a different horse. English saddles are available for the cross-country riding course of about 70 jumps. Nothing is mandatory. Some husbands didn’t ride; they went fly-fishing all day for cutthroat and rainbow trout instead and returned happy and with great stories. I sat out the second ride on the second day because I was so sore.
By then, my daughter had already popped the question: “When can we come back?”
When scouting for a vacation every couple of years that will cost some money, I look for something that puts us in an unfamiliar setting, one risky enough to be a thrill but not dangerous enough to cause injury. This is the way my brain is able to skip out of its normal pattern and onto a path of refreshment and rejuvenation. Sitting still around a pool or the beach just won’t do it. Neither would golf, tennis or a cruise of more than a few hours.
Horseback-riding can be dangerous in untrained hands. That’s why we opted for a trip with Equitours, the company Bayard founded in 1971. It offers loads of references and came recommended by several people who’d taken its overseas trips, which include rides on six continents and some places that you can only reach on horseback, such as the steppes of Mongolia — and parts of the Wind River Valley.
Even at his age, Bayard remains enough of a daredevil to make the rides unpredictable. Take the cattle drive, for example. Having no idea what it entailed, I quickly signed on. It seemed that the presence of a bear had scared off some of the cattle, and they had to be located and driven back to the larger herd. Richard decided where to start looking: in a set of steep, brush-covered hills.
After half an hour, we found the separated cows, encircled them as Bayard instructed and used our horses to push them forward and to chase strays back into the herd. I had a willing partner, Talek, who helped me do things I’d never done before on a horse: leap up riverbanks, blaze a trail, chase another four-legged creature and make a sharp turn to head it in another direction.
I love my job at The Post, but this felt like a second calling, or a previous life, something eerily familiar. I was tempted to reserve a spot in the fall cattle drive from Sept. 24 to Oct. 1, when dozens of people pay to help the Foxes move their cattle for the winter. It can be a rough ride, given the cold, the wind and the snow, but we’re seriously considering it. If we return to Bitterroot Ranch, we’ll join dozens of other guests who for years have regularly made their vacation plans with the extended Fox family.
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