“I have never found a companion that was as
companionable as solitude.”
Henry David Thoreau
To just vanish, be honest, we
all have at least dreamingly contemplated it; disappearing without a trace into
the wilderness. To hell with the life we have built; impulsively toss it all on
the trash heap of experience and move onto a fresh start; to exist, and maybe
flourish alone, to face life’s challenges alone, to die alone. Can it still be
done today, in a shrinking modern world of amazing and evolving communication,
a world gone crazy viral; GPS, google maps, smart-phones?
Stand here, I am told by my
host, and spread your feet apart wide. To the right is south and my right foot
now resides within the borders of Colorado while simultaneously several feet
away, my left foot is grounded in the great state of Wyoming. Into Colorado, as
far as my eye can see lies gnarled and prickly sage brush broken only by the
outcroppings of copper colored rocks leading to off in the far distance
towering 12,000-foot snowcapped mountain peaks. When I glance over my left
shoulder - north into Wyoming - my view is of the same exact terrain. I can see
for miles.
I am standing in the kind of
place where the legend of the old American West can still be visualized. A
google map image would seem out of place here. The Marlboro man riding by on a
handsome mount of horse flesh would not.
From both states the biting
winds of January swirl over a snow covered land so remote that the howls of a
pack of coyotes is still today more common than reliable cellphone reception.
What creature could possible survive here? What human would choose to live
here?
The never ending wind swoops and soars across what
is described to me by my host and guide as a, “8,200-foot-high mountain
meadow.” A meadow, I ask? Here where we now stand? Where is the green grass? Of
course, it will green up nice in July for the all too short Rocky Mountain
summer haying season Anne Pantle assures me.
Anne is as authentic as they come, a western
rancher in the truest sense of the area’s 100 plus years of bedrock cowboy
tradition. She is introspective and well spoken, possessing a vocabulary that
reflects both a formal college education and an informal life long quest for
knowledge. That she happens to be a handsomely featured female does nothing to
diminish her commitment, efficiency and effectiveness in squeezing out a living
in this most resistant and desolate of lands.
Here in the San Juan Mountains “get it done,” is more than a slick
slogan, it is a catch phrase for survival in an inhospitable land that cares
nothing of Pantle’s gender, only of her grit. A hopeless romantic with callused
hands and Rocky Mountain dirt packed tight under her finger nails, Pantle is a
vivid and passionate spokeswoman for her unique chosen path in life.
“I have had many career paths in my life,” she
tells me. We are seated at the table in the kitchen of her 100 years old log
cabin home. A warm aspen wood fire radiates welcome heat from a corner stove,
taking off much of the mid-January chill. “But this is where I am content,
where I belong, up here with my cattle and my horses. I can’t give a definitive
answer as to why I have chosen this path; it is just who I am and what I do
best.”
We are posed in the middle of her ranch, 30 miles
south of Encampment, WY and 30 miles north of Walden, CO, the two nearest towns
with at least one stop sign. Her husband Kirk and her two children, Christine
and Luke, have contributed over the years to help run this 1000 acres spread,
helped to build it and somehow coax enough of a fickle mother-nature’s
benevolence to survive its long cold winters. Pantle readily acknowledges all
three’s role and contribution. Legally, her two brothers are also inherited and
equal owners of the ranch. But this is her ranch. Listen to her heartfelt
stories and of that one is left with no doubt.
“My dad (Jim) bought 500 of the 1000 acres we now
own here when he graduated from high school in 1939,” Pantle states. “He paid
$7 an acre for it. He went into the Army when Pearl Harbor was bombed in late
1941, but by then he knew this land was his place, his calling in life. He
never wanted to live anywhere else, regretted everyday he was away from this Valley.
He always said he had to survive the war because he had a ranch to build in
land so rough that if he didn’t do it, no one else would. He saw beauty and
potential in this land that others did not,” the 53-year-old second generation
rancher tells me. “I inherited that vision from him. To me, this is heaven.”
Her father, as he had predicted he would, beat the
odds, survived the war and returned home in 1945 to his mountain hideaway. Jim
Pantle flew 52 bombing missions as a top turret gunner in a B-17 over occupied
Axis Europe. Incredibly, considering the high number of sorties he flew and the
dangerous seat he occupied in such a flying fortress, he never incurred as much
as a combat related scratch.
Dropping to his knees to kiss the rocky ground
upon his return to civilian life; Jim Pantle set forth to fulfill his destiny,
to build his dream high country cattle ranch. Fences were stretched, some
literally up and over a mountain that borders the land’s eastern edge. An old
homestead log cabin was upgraded with new windows and a wooden floor. A wife
was added along the way and soon a family followed.
Thirteen years after returning from the war, in
1958, Jim cobbled enough money together to double his land holdings by
purchasing 500 adjacent acres.
“I was born here in 1962 and all of my earliest
memories are of this ranch,” Anne recalls. She is the middle child with two
book end brothers. “It was hard on Mom, living out here. By 1967, with three
kids getting to school age and being snow bound more than half the year, Dad
had to move to town and take a wages job in Cheyenne. Despite how hard he
worked, he couldn’t support a family on this ranch. At the time, it broke his
heart.”
Her father found work as a civilian mechanic on a
bustling Air Force base and moved his family into a nice little subdivision on
the east side of Cheyenne WY, raising his baby boomer tribe deeply steeped in
the normalcy and security of the post war era. He hated it, dreamt only of a
someday return to the solitude of his mountain home.
When forced to sell all of his cattle, Anne
relates to me, her father vowed he would keep the land and would someday, when
the time was right, rebuild the ranch. “We always, in the years growing up and
living in Cheyenne, came back here on weekends and summers. We kept the place
up even though it was for 20 years without any of our cattle.”
Anne Pantle cannot remember a time when she did
not feel a deep and aching love, a unique father/daughter connection for her
dad’s ambitions for his ranch, tucked away up high in these bi-state mountains.
“I was only five years old, but I remember it so clearly,” she says of a
definitive moment that bonded her forever with her dad and his dream. “The day
we sold all the cattle,” she says, “I remember the trucks taking them away and
my dad crying. He tried to hide it from me but I saw him. I cried too. I don’t
know if I really could grasp what was going on, but I knew my dad was giving up
something dear to him and that left an impression upon me that sticks to me,
molds to this day who I am. This land is rooted in me through my dad. I know
that meant a lot to him in his later years, knowing that I was willing to carry
on his dream, to continue what he had built; that he could leave his ranch to
his off spring as his legacy to us. This land may not look like much, but to me
it is family and it is special. Through it my dad lives on.”
Newly married to her Husband
Kirk, 25 years ago the couple purchased 40 additional acres only several miles
south of the one stop light town of Encampment, WY. “We have wintered in town
for the last two years, it has proved to be a very good investment,” Anne
shares. The Pantles have improved their “town” land with a house, barns,
corrals and numerous other out-buildings. “Until two years ago I was teaching
history and art for half a day in Walden across the (Colorado) state line at
the high school and my kids both went to school there, so it made sense,
because the ranch is located between the two towns, to winter on the ranch. The
winters could at times be miserable. Kirk works for the State Highway
Department north of Encampment, so depending on the weather, some nights he
would stay at our house in town and I was on the ranch alone with two little
kids. There were many times we had to park the truck on the main road and walk
two miles to the cabin, with me lugging two little kids often through snow
drifts taller than they were. And remember, winters up here are 8 months of
deep snow.”
Their mountain cabin home,
even today, has no electricity and a sometime on, sometime off primitive system
of running water. In the winter, the family must melt snow for drinking water. A
hot bath requires several hours of heating water on a wood stove. Most winters,
an abundance of snow was a hard reality, up to 100 plus inches falling between
late September and late May.
To this day, when occupying
the ranch cabin, the family cooks their meals on a woodstove while kerosene
fuels night time lamps. In pre-cell phone days, the family depended on battery
driven radios for an emergency life line to the outside world. Today, they
still wash their clothes by hand, drying them in the winter on a close line
strung across the cabin’s main room. I wonder to myself if they keep plenty of
aspirin in stock to buffer against the aches and pains of this primitive
existence? Do they gargle vinegar to treat a sore throat, as my Grandmother’s
family did 100 years ago?
“Our kids have never had TV,”
Anne states. “And that is good. Both love to read and both are very
inquisitive.” Pictures of both children growing up dominate the primitive
interior log walls of the 100 plus year old cabin. Daughter Christine is 23
years old and after graduating the previous spring from the state University of
Wyoming with a degree in Anthropology, has joined the Air Force. After
completing Officer Training school this past summer, she is now stationed in
nearby Minot, ND.
“Christine loves the military.
I would not be surprised to see her make a career of it,” Anne says. “She
breezed through basic training. She laughed at the recruits who would complain
of having to sleep in a tent. She would tell them, ‘I grew up without electricity.
This is a nothing.’”
A framed picture of her
daughter, radiating feminine beauty while adorn in full Walden High football
gear, lies on the kitchen table where we sit. “I love that picture,” says Anne.
“That is Christine, very well rounded. She is the only girl around here to have
ever played high school football. At first she was going to be the manager, but
I knew all along what she was up to. It took some convincing to get her dad to
go along with letting her play. She scored a couple of touchdowns, she was more
than just a stunt, she was a good player and the team was glad to have her,
needed her.”
Eighteen years old son Luke is
a recent graduate of Encampment, WY High School and was the leading scorer on a
Wildcat basketball team who had hopes of challenging for the state championship
in the small school Wyoming tournament dashed with an upset in the Regional
Tournament. “Luke’s dad was a very good basketball player for Encampment and so
was his grandfather,” states Anne, “so Luke has carried the family torch, so to
speak. People would come up at the games all the time and say, ‘Luke looks so
much like his dad when he played’ or ‘Luke looks so much like his grandfather
when he played.’”
The lanky 6’3” protégé played
his first two years of high school basketball across the Colorado border in
Walden, before transferring to Encampment. “I quit teaching at Walden after his
sophomore year,” says Anne, “and since we own property on both sides of the
state line, he could go to either school. With his dad’s family’s history with
Encampment basketball, it was a good move back. Encampment basketball runs deep
in Kirk’s family and Luke needed to play for Encampment. He liked living in
town during the season. It was a lot easier on all of us than when he went to
school in Walden and we lived out here all winter.”
Passing on several partial college
basketball scholarship offers from smaller schools, Luke is now in his first
season at the state University in Laramie, 100 miles to the northwest of the
family homestead. “The academic scholarship they (the University of Wyoming)
offered him was just too good to pass up,” Anne says. “He has walked on to the
basketball team, so he still has basketball. Right now he is not dressing for games,
just being used as a practice player. It is such a big step to playing on the
Division I level coming from a high school with 40 students, but he is
adjusting well. He loves college and plans to major in engineering. He knows
the odds of him ever playing (basketball) regularly are long, but that does not
intimidate him. He is a kid who will not back down from a challenge.”
With her youngest spending
most of the past summer over in Laramie working out with the team and her
daughter in the military, the summer haying became even more of a challenge
than normal. Pantle’s 1000 acres’ ranch will support running 30 cows and a bull
year round. Calving in the spring will produce, hopefully, 30 newborns. The
herd is kept on the mountain ranch through the summer and early fall. The
haying season is very short, but paramount to the economic survival of the
ranch. “It takes about 60 tons on hay to get us through the winter,” Anne
states. “We have about a two month growing season to get the hay put up and
then brought to our town ranch for the winter. We cut and bail it ourselves. I
prefer the small 70 pound bales as opposed to the big round ones everyone uses
today. I do the winter feeding myself and I would rather throw the bales off
the back of the truck than have to move them with a tractor. But bailing small
is a lot more work and takes a lot more time. With both kids grown, for the
most part, I have lost my two best hay bailers and this summer it was pretty
much me alone for the haying.”
Depending on the survival rate
of the thirty head of cows, most of the calves will be sold in the fall at the
age of six months. “If we have a few older mother cows, we might keep a few of
the female calves to add to the herd. We use to keep all the newborns through
the winter and sell them in the spring as yearlings, but the winters were just
so hard. Now we sell them as what are called ‘weanlings,’ at six months, soon
as they are weaned from their mother. Selling them earlier is the best for my
profit. I have to feed them less, and we are limited here with the amount of
hay we can grow. Also, we don’t risk losing them to the elements and other
factors.”
“Few ranchers around here
anymore keep their herds on the open range in the winter, like they used to.
You lose too many, to the snow and to the predators and it is too hard to get
them fed in the mountains when the snows get real deep. One year we sent the
calves all to Scottsbluff, NE for the winter and then brought them home in the
spring. Several times we have wintered the calves at local ranches that are
quite a bit bigger than ours. That is a common practice with the smaller
ranches. I like how we have done it the
last two winters, selling the calves at six months in the fall and then
bringing the cows down to the valley, to our place in town, and feeding them
our hay in the winter. It is more profitable for a small ranch like ours.”
In 1983, Anne’s father made
good on the promise he had made 30 years prior to his impressionable and
precocious five years old daughter - he retired from his town job and moved
back to his mountain ranch. “I graduated from Cheyenne East High School in 1980
and the University of Wyoming in 1984, so the timing was good,” Anne says. “I
helped dad kick start his dream and in doing so, it became my dream as well. We
brought the cattle back and we found a way to make it work. Kirk and I were
married in 1989 and living out here took some adjustment for him, but this was
a great place to raise our kids.”
“I left here for a short time
when I graduated from college,” Pantle says. “I moved to California, Los
Angeles, with a boyfriend. I was really out of place in Los Angeles. When I was
there the Rodney King riots hit LA and we lived right in the hardest hit area.
It was crazy, a little Wyoming girl with not a clue of what she had gotten
herself into. I never felt right out on the coast; the relationship, the
lifestyle, the whole scene. I never felt content, like I do here in these
mountains. The boy stayed in LA but this girl came home to Wyoming,” she says
with a laugh.
Her father passed away in
2007, never fully recuperating from a fall he took off of the roof. “We told
him to stay off the roof, to let someone younger get up there, but he didn’t
listen. He hung on for a couple of years after his fall, but it was sad. He
tried real hard, he wanted nothing but to get back to his ranch, but he just
couldn’t pull it off. He was just too worn out, I guess. Mom passed away two
years after dad.”
Pantle expresses a life-long
love for learning, displaying an inquisitive mind that shifts into over drive
when in the solitude of her mountain cabin. “I do my best thinking out here,
alone,” she shares. “It is strange, I guess, but I never get lonely when I am
out here by myself, and I have spent weeks on end alone up here, especially before
Kirk and I were married.”
What will the future hold, I
ask? “I don’t like to think about that,” Anne tells me with a cavalier shrug of
her shoulders. “Maybe that is not best, but I just don’t waste time worrying
about that. My dad ran this place well into his 80’s. I have a lot of good
years left and plan to be here for a long time. Who does the ranch go to after
me? I don’t know. Christine and Luke; one or both; maybe, but both will have to
find their way back here on their own, if they ever come back. My brothers have
kids who have shown some interest in this lifestyle, but it is not a part time
job. Most just can’t get off the merry go round, once they get on it. You know
what I mean, your job takes over your life and suddenly you have no life. I
have been fortune to avoid that. It has taken some sacrifices and many people
would question the life path I have chosen, but I don’t, ever. I am very
blessed to be able to live as I do.”
“I know you are shocked at how
remote this ranch is. I tried to warn you,” she kindly lectures me, “but I can
tell you are taken back, wondering how anyone could possibly choose to live
like I do out here. I know it doesn’t look like much to you. People tease me
all the time that I keep my barn cleaner and more orderly than my house. But
every piece you see laying around, it all has a story, it all fits, has a purpose
in the grand scheme of my life here. You just have to know how to fit the
pieces of the puzzle together. If a person can figure out the puzzle, then these
mountains become your home and you feel safe, you feel at peace.”
