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Travel & Leisure Magazine THE SIGNS TO BONANZA CREEK Country are modest, and so is the road. It heads north out of Lennep, nearly a ghost town, and seems more a crazed road worker's doodle than a proper route. On one side lies the Castle Range on the other, the Crazy Mountains. In between: a broad valley with the symmetry and power of a furrow between massive ocean rollers. Add 30,000 deeded acres to its National Forest lease and you are sitting on a spread that's well over 100,000 acres. Bonanza Creek Country is the invention of June Voldseth, whose husband's family has held the property since 1877. A few years ago she decided she needed something more than hayfields in summer and hay bales in winter. Couldn't this beauty and serenity be put in the service of something other than cows? David and June Voldseth set out to build a guest ranch much as others decide to add dormers to their second floor. They selected the four attractive cedar buildings from a catalogue. While modest in design the lodge and cabins are welcoming, roomy, comfortable, and appropriately decorated, with art and furniture ranging from Plains Indian to mountain-man motifs. But if the architecture appears to be an homage to convention, everything else at Bonanza Creek is pure extravagance. Take the view from the decks: no cabin is visible from any other. A molten sun rising above the Crazies ignites the morning air. Breakfast in the lodge's spare, light-filled dining room includes fresh muffins and smoked ranch bacon. The riding is not on traditional dude horses mindlessly advancing head to tail, but on honest ranch mounts willing to adapt to your course -- horses that can make a devotee out of a beginner. Most important of all, Bonanza Creek Country imposes no set program on its guests. Accommodating 16 people tops, the ranch is rarely occupied by more than two or three parties simultaneously. "We're flexible," says June Voldseth.
The staff is happy to adjust to your whims: a child's horsemanship lesson in the corral, a daylong ride in search of Native American pictographs, a hike, cattle gathering in company with the ranch "ramrod" (the chief cattleman), a mountain bike ride, a fishing expedition after giant rainbow trout, a drive to the nearby Charles M. Bair Family Museum, or, yes, a good book by the fire. Several evenings a week, after taking an exhilarating gallop, you will come upon the Voldseths and their children gathered around a campfire in a grove of aspen, laughing. You will be invited to picket your horse, pull up a chair, enjoy a glass of wine, hors d'oeuvres. a steak fry, hash browns, peach cobbler. And when David and June, unfailingly observant, have come to understand you, the conversion may turn on galaxies, history, or heifers. At its end, you will know that the extravagance of Bonanza Creek Country is not merely in its great space, but in the human grit that brings it into view. |
