Focus Ranch

Anyone looking for an old?fashioned ranch where there's work to be done should put the Focus Ranch high up on their list.

"We run about 1,300 yearling cattle and we take them from our ranch onto forest permit land and into seven pastures," says Terry Reidy, who owns the ranch. "We move them about 25 times during the summer time. So as a guest, you're pretty much assured of working the cattle. There's very few weeks that we're not moving them. It's about as active as you could want."

Yearling cattle are labor intensive indeed. And teaching guests something about ranching is an important part of the experience at Focus Ranch. It's a place where both kids and adults get into the daily rhythm of ranch chores, which can include bottle?feeding lambs, milking cows and slopping pigs. And the setting is breathtaking indeed. The Focus Ranch sits on the border of Colorado and Wyoming border, about 50 miles west of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It's situated near the top of the Little Snake River Valley, which features in the lore of Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall gang. Sightings of elk, deer, and antelope are common.

"We let our guests ride for a couple of days and by the third day, their muscles are sore and they have a feel for what they're doing," Reidy explains. "That's when we begin to teach them a little bit about sitting up straight and not pulling back on the horse's mouth. If they want to hold onto the horn, that's alright. It's on the third day that we can teach them something so they can help block the yearlings for us as we're moving them. You have to keep moving yearlings from pasture to pasture. It's the most intensive kind of work. And we can't do that without the help of the guests."

Accommodations are in the Focus Ranch House or in the guest cabins, all of them of log construction. Generally, there are about 22 guests in residence, a mixture of families, couples and singles.

"We love having families because kids have a limited time span that they can ride a horse," Reidy says. "But if they're helping move the cattle, they love it. We like families who want to teach their kids something about nature and wildlife. There are no computers or TV's here. We tell them when it rains here, you get wet. Kids get to interact with animals and see what rural life is like."

But Focus Ranch welcomes all sorts of wranglers. There are nine " high?powered women coming out from San Francisco this summer. One is a judge, another is an executive who's flying her own plane out."

Beyond taking care of the yearlings, Focus Ranch has a variety of other activities as well.

"We have great fly fishing for cutbows, which are cutthroat and rainbow hybrids," Reidy says. "And we get a bunch of people who come here for birding. We're right off one of the flyways and we've got about 75 species of birds here, including sandhill cranes. And we have four mountains that people can climb that run 9,000 to 11,000 feet."

Focus Ranch has been around since 1896, and it became a guest ranch in 1938 and "our family was the first guest," Reidy says. "My family ran it a certain way and I run it the same way because I like it the same way."