сделать краткий пересказ текста: lan Henderson and his daughter try living on a
working ranch in the Montana mountains.
Imagine you're a 12-year-old girl. Ponies and clothes
are your favourite things. You're wearing your new
cowboy boots, new jeans, a blue checked shirt and
a real cowboy hat when a tall cowboy asks if you'd
are to help him round up the ponies. If you're
magining it properly, you're about as happy as a
12-year-old girl can be.
I'd taken my daughter to The Ranch at Rock Creek
6,000acre spread in Montana which opened to
guests last year and may well be the ultimate place
to live out your cowboy dreams, whatever your age
I settled in to a proper Western-style saddle and
rode out beside my daughter across Rock Creek. We
followed a trail along the river before heading uphill
towards the high forests. We were glad of our wide
brimmed hats until we reached the shade of the pine
woods
This is big, empty country where much of the
American cultural identity was forged by tough
explorers such as Lewis and Clark, the first white
men through Montana. Tom McCombs told us tales
of grizzly bears by a mountain stream as we ate our
sandwiches. Together we'd tracked elk, found where a
brown bear had been hunting for food and trailed
bobcat away from a kill.
These are people who know an awful lot about
rodeo, fishing, shooting and the history of where the
live, and are itching to share. On my first attempt at
fly fishing, I managed to catch a trout, thanks to the
help of Alex the fisherman. At the shooting range
Max coaxed my daughter from being gun-shy to
shattering eight clay targets in a row.
its hard to know what those early explorers would
have made of the ranch's well-appointed spa, the
swimming pool or the 'Mercantile', full of upmarket
clothes where my daughter bought her cowboy
boots. But they would have recognised most of the
ingredients in chef Josh Drage's cooking - he spend
a couple of days a week on the long Montana dirt
roads, buying fresh meat and vegetables from the
farms farther down the valley
The ranch house is new but feels just like a home
built of logs ought to. Downstairs there are crackling
log fires, leather-covered sofas, guns and animal
skins on the walls, baskets of homemade cookies
and books about the history of the place. Everyone
has their own mountain bike for their stay withthe name of their
room hung on it,
and you're invited to
borrow hats, coats
and cowboy boots
whenever you need
them. Someone's paid
attention to almost
every detail.
There are other
places to stay on the
property that offer
fewer people and more of the silent outdoors. Along the
river are cabins with underfloor heating in the stone-built
bathroom, furs on the bed and the soothing soundtrack
of the creek outside. There are a couple of secluded
family-sized ranch houses, and for real isolation there's
Trapper Cabin, which comes with its own jeep to get you
to breakfast.
When you're standing on the porch, coffee in hand
looking across the early mist on the river to mountains
touched gold by the sun, the sheer beauty of Montana
that struck Lewis and Clark stays with you. And
somehow Rock Creek makes you feel as if you belong
there. My daughter swears she will be back. As soon
as she's old enough she's going to join Big Tom as an
apprentice cowgirl