Otha Barham photoDawn and Wanda atop Douglas Mountain, Colorado. About six miles from the ranch. Wanda died about 15 years ago when her horse's feet became entangled in barbed wire and Wanda was thrown off and suffered a broken neck. She was riding alone in her middle 80s atop Douglas Mountain.

Outside the snow is falling gently, silent flakes landing on a cushion of its predecessors having aged for two weeks. There is no electricity in the house except for that provided by the costly propane generator, so there is no television to bring the news of a failing economy. Actually there is no television signal that reaches within 50 miles of the house anyway.

No airliners pass over low enough to be heard and no small aircraft would dare approach the treacherous winds that swirl over Douglas Mouintain, the foot of which lies just outside the corral. Even the fall steer crop has been hauled away in several large cattle trucks, each with 18 wheels. They came to the closest solid ground ahead of the October storms. The remaining mother cows and bulls are content to dutifully munch their daily ration of hay without so much as a moo or bellow.

Christmas Day will come and go with plenty of time to feel it in your heart instead of in your pocket book and your nervous stomach. There will be no traffic jams here. If the hay trailer sticks in the snow and blocks the miles long road to the pavement, there will be chuckles instead of anger because tonight the road will freeze and become hard enough to free the trailer.

Land of dreams

For a couple of days I have been thinking of Wanda and her daughter, Dawn, who live on this place, “the Brown Place,” where Butch and Sundance often rode up just more than 100 years ago to trade winded horses for fresh ones to continue their hasty retreat from their most recent robbery of a nearby Wyoming freight train. Once Sundance needed a fresh horse and the only one the occupants had to sell was unbroken and Sundance rode off half in the saddle and half in the air – the horse hitting the ground only now and then. The place where Butch gave a nickle once to Dean Chew’s father, Doug, a man I met in the 1980s when he was old and frail.

The old log cabin is filled to overflowing with furniture and other leftovers from its early history. No trash pickup in this part of the world you know. So Dawn and her mother live in a camper trailer with propane heat. The power lines do not reach this far out, 100 miles from, Craig, Colorado where you go to shop. The propane provides lights, which are used sparingly.

The two are building a new house there next to the log cabin that speaks of so much western history. They have been working on it for many months. “We will have a wood stove for cooking of course,” Dawn told me happily. Wood only takes manual labor; no actual dollars like the propane does. Wood in Browns Park is crooked, skimpy little stuff – no big logs that require splitting. Neither she nor her mother, shrink from manual labor as you might suspect from two hardened women who saddle their horses every day and tend hundreds of horses and cattle every day by themselves, seven days a week. There are not enough folks around to form a church.

Recently cell phones reached Brown’s Park, formerly Brown’s Hole in outlaw days. I have been able to reach Dawn three times in over a year – once at the ranch and two times each when she happened to be in Wyoming near some phone towers.

Wanda, 83, is doing well. Her workload is changing form the summer chores of repairing fences torn down by elk, to roundup and branding in fall. All work is done by horseback in tending new colts to feeding some chickens and wild turkeys that show up for a share. A few big bull elk come down to feed with the horses. A few bears and mountain lions join in regularly. The snows have been heavy, ensuring good moisture for spring grass.. Things are rather normal in Browns Park these days.

Going home

Tonight, Dawn will drive the 4WD truck back to the ranch from the gasoline station up on the big road where she stocked up with snacks you can get at service stations. Forty miles of pavement along which she will see not one house, 10 miles of gravel and then several miles of snow covered dirt to the gate and beyond it another mile of rough travel to the camper that sits at the edge of the corral.

All will be quiet tonight unless the wind whips up snow against the trailer. The wintry hush will carry on as always, interrupted now and them with the call of a coyote or a bugle from a bull elk, where once bands of Indians, outlaws and settlers from back East coexisted often depending on each other to survive.

A couple of Christmas cards will be in the mailbox up on the big road when she can find time to get up there, maybe on News Year’s Day; and maybe not. They will smile at the cards that were mailed in a rush over in another world where time is measured by watches with second hands and by appointments scratched on 9 X 12 calendars for every day of each month – doctor visits for blood pressure and heart checks marked in red.

Another world indeed!