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A horseback ride high in the Wyoming Range
The U.S. Forest Service’s plans to put this spectacular part of the Wyoming Range on the auction block for oil and gas drilling are on hold for the time being.
I met up with Gary Amerine, my horseback riding guide-to-be, at his home just west of Daniel, a little more than an hour’s drive south of Jackson. JeCoSa Ranch, Amerine’s spread, sits on the flats of the Green River Valley, an expansive, high-desert basin bookended by the famous crags of the Wind River Range to the east and the less heralded Wyoming Range to the west. When selecting the orientation of his house, Amerine had to decide which view to frame with his floor-to-ceiling living room windows. He chose the Wyoming Range.
“I’ve been in just about every mountain range in Wyoming,” says Amerine, who looks the part of the western cowboy with a buzz cut, bushy handlebar mustache, well-worn denim duds, and a red neckerchief. “By far, my favorite is the Wyoming Range.”
What Amerine loves most about the range is the solitude. “The majority of the time you just don’t see anybody else up there,” he says.
Amerine has rigorous standards when it comes to judging solitude. He moved his family across the Wyoming Range to JeCoSa Ranch after deciding their former home in Star Valley, still rural by most people’s measure, had become too crowded. Now he embraces the relative anonymity of the Wyoming Range, an often overlooked ribbon of mountains with sharp peaks rising above alpine meadows rife with wildlife and wildflowers. Surrounding mountains envelop the rugged, hundred-mile-long range, concealing it from view. On the east side, rolling, pine-covered foothills dampen the visual splendor. On the other side, the more rugged and impressive west-facing slopes stand tucked out of sight, hidden behind the paralleling Salt River Range.
Finding a portal into this veiled terrain can prove daunting, I realize, as Amerine and I bump along a series of unmarked dirt and gravel roads in his truck, with horse trailer in tow. We pass through towering stands of aspens that will turn as blaze orange as the vests worn by the hunters who flock to the area come fall. On this August day, the aspen are still as silvery green as the surrounding sagebrush grasslands.
We meet up with another guide, Dustin Child, at a nondescript Bridger-Teton National Forest trailhead at Dry Beaver Creek—aptly named, given the trickle of water wetting the dusty cobble.
On this day, I’m joining a half dozen other riders, a large group in Amerine’s view. I arrived the day before to spend a comfy night in the guest quarters in his house, bed-and-breakfast style. After a dinner of tacos whipped up by Amerine’s wife, Jenny, I nestled into the peeled log-frame double bed and stared out at the stars, clearly visible through the bedroom window, until nodding off to sleep. The rest of the bunch shared a bunkhouse across the drive. The combination of guest room and separate bunkhouse typically plays host to two couples or a family of up to five. Guests can also arrive on the morning of their ride and find their horses saddled up and ready to go.
This particular ride is a bit off the beaten path even for Amerine, who has agreed to show two Trout Unlimited representatives, a newspaper reporter, and myself a portion of the Wyoming Range the U.S. Forest Service put on the auction block for oil and gas drilling. Amerine has asked Child to join our outing because he also makes his living guiding hunters and other guests around this area. Today, he and Amerine forego their typical objective—stalking wildlife to show their clients—to hunt for a few historic drilling pads to illustrate what could happen should drilling take off here. (Currently, the drilling leases are on hold, due to protests from an ad hoc coalition of outfitters like Amerine and conservation groups fighting to preserve the range.)
This is precisely what makes Amerine’s horseback trips unique: his ability to tailor each ride to a client’s desires, an individualized service most dude ranches can’t offer.
After our guides unload the horses, we hop in the saddle and amble up a decommissioned road, now mostly overgrown except for a narrow single-track. It’s the same path hunters use to reach Child’s hunting camp in the fall. The old road is now closed to motorized traffic, quieting engine buzz and enhancing the experience for backcountry travelers. We pass wildflowers galore, a colorful palette that includes red Indian paintbrush, violet aster, purple fleabane, and pink sticky geranium. The concentration of flowers thins as we climb up steeper, drier slopes. The outfitters point out how the south-facing slopes hold less snow, making it easier for elk to uncover and eat vegetation in winter. That smorgasbord combines with timbered north-facing hillsides that provide cover, creating ideal wildlife habitat.
After a lazy, half-hour ride, we come to an old exploratory well, drilled in the 1970s. Here, nonnative grasses planted post-drilling displace native wildflowers. Although the scarring is fairly subtle, a capped wellhead of cement and metal still sprouts unnaturally from the center of the field. Our guides point out how this swath, still supporting nonnative wheatgrass, hasn’t returned to a more natural state more than thirty years after drilling took place.
“You have no idea the extent of areas they want to drill until you ride through it,” Amerine says, kicking at a rusty rod with his dusty boot. We ride, looking at two more old well sites in varying stages of recovery before leaving behind these man-made intrusions. Now, wanting to have us view the true splendor of the landscape, our guides usher us up Lookout Mountain. It’s a ride just steep enough to thrill a relatively novice rider like myself. (Coming back down we’ll walk the horses part of the way to play it safe.)
Near the top of the grassy peak, we can see north into the Hoback Basin, where an impressive rock buttress nicknamed the Shark’s Tooth juts skyward as part of a ribbon of cliffs rimming the ridgeline. To the southwest, Child points out an alpine bowl just below us where he establishes his hunting camp each fall in a cluster of pines at an elevation of around 9,000 feet. Beyond Child’s campsite to the west, the terrain drops steeply into Horse Creek, one of Amerine’s favorite places to take clients for trail rides. He explains how it takes only a matter of minutes from Horse Creek to reach a vantage point with views of the Teton and Gros Ventre mountains to the north and the Wind Rivers to the east. Wildlife also is abundant in the drainage, with moose often spotted along the creek. In summer, Amerine will listen for mother elk calling to their calves and sometimes manage to get clients close enough to view elk in bunches numbering up to a hundred animals.
Humans, conversely, do not number in the hundreds here. During our day ride, the only two-legged critters we spot are those in our own group. Both Amerine and Child admit that showcasing their “hidden gem” by publicizing it could entice more people to visit. Nonetheless, they say they’re willing to sacrifice a little solitude to save this place from a more industrial fate.
Peering out from under the white straw cowboy hat shading his face from the summer sun, Child says, “I’d rather have people up here than oil wells.”
