Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West by Bryce Andrews Read Free Book Online Page A

the brim.
    “Plenty of sign,” the second man said, his face all but hidden by a wide-brimmed felt hat and a thick brown beard. “There’s shit all over the place and a bunch of new kills. Couple bears, one sow griz with grown cubs, but mostly wolves. Lots of wolves.”
    “Goddamn,” said the bearded man’s buddy. “Could be a hell of a summer.”
    “Hard to say. We did all right with the first bunch for a couple years, even after the pack got big.”
    “Sure,” said the man with the flaming hat. “But how did it end?”
    He put on a canvas jacket, excused himself, and walked into the night. The bearded man went on drinking at the bar, and on an impulse I went over and sat down next to him. I explained thatI had just started working on the Sun and wanted to learn everything I could about the area, the animals, and the ranch.
    The man, Steve, had worked in the backcountry of the Madison for years, doing wildlife surveys and packing into the Lee Metcalf as a Forest Service contractor. He knew the Sun Ranch well, and as I peppered him with questions, he patiently told me what he knew about its history.
    The Sun Ranch hadn’t always been its present eighteen thousand acres. Beginning in the early twentieth century, it was stitched together from individual homesteads. By the 1930s, the ranch’s remoteness, elevation, and breathtaking panoramas had turned it from a patchwork of smallholdings into a rich man’s paradise. The Sun grew aggressively through the early twentieth century, gobbling up smaller spreads as it expanded. Before World War II, it was called the Rising Sun Ranch, a name that started to chafe after news of Pearl Harbor reached the valley and was abandoned before the war’s end. The Rising Sun lived on, however, in the Sun Ranch’s brand—a four-spoked half circle that looks like dawn in open country.
    After the name changed, the boundaries began to shift as well. The ranch passed through the hands of a series of absentee landowners, expanding or shrinking a bit each time the deeds changed hands.
    Across the river from the Sun Ranch’s western border, a sizable chunk of land came up for sale. The property, once known as the Granite Mountain Stock Ranch, stretched from the Madison River to the timbered slopes of the Gravelly Range. Like the Sun, it was empty and wild.
    The new buyer looked east, saw the late-afternoon clouds catch fire above the scarps of the Madisons, and watched great herds ofcattle and elk move back and forth from the low pastures to the mountains. Recognizing that those things and the cowboy dream that underlay them could be sold, he renamed his spread the Sun West Ranch, drew up plats, and started advertising homesites. New facilities took shape quickly, including a massive horse barn, an indoor riding arena, and a private shooting range. A few dozen millionaires bought into the idea, foundations got poured, and the deal was sealed.
    Though it, too, circulated through various echelons of the ultra rich, the Sun Ranch stayed empty and undeveloped, perhaps because it exerts an immediate, irresistible power over people who come to know it. The Sun Ranch is wild, pure, and untrammeled to a degree that is rare anywhere else. Carving it up would be like scribbling on the Mona Lisa .
    “Nobody would develop it,” I said.
    “I don’t know about that,” Steve replied. “The bottom part of Squaw Creek is platted out for a subdivision. All the paperwork is done, but I don’t think Roger would ever act on it.”
    In any case, the Sun Ranch had managed to stay intact over the years. As time passed and other parts of the valley were gridded out into twenty-acre plots, its vastness and location became ever more important. For wild animals, the Sun provided a much-needed refuge from the constant noise and pressure of man. Pronghorn antelope migrated through by the hundreds, and elk lived and died by the winter forage they found on the ranch’s North End. Moose fared better on the Sun