Elk Creek Ranch™ offers teenagers a unique summer camp experience in the western wilderness through a traditional ranch setting combined with a wilderness backpacking program. It is a summer of enjoyment, with groups sharing the camaraderie of youth and the recreational opportunities of the West. It is a summer of challenge, confronting each individual with rugged wilderness surroundings and a rustic life style. It is also a summer of involvement, with each teenager participating in a small camp community.
Sunlight Moments August 2011: Highlights from the Summer of 2011
The end of the summer brings a sigh of relief—everyone arrived home safely, the work pace decelerates, and our responsibilities narrow. That sigh is quickly followed by the silence and void left by the ranchers. Fortunately, we can turn to the photo gallery and look back with great joy on some favorite moments. The winter and spring of 2011 left copious amounts of snow in the high country. The first period backpack to Trout Peak had to work around some hard creek crossings and many snow fields.
The work capers for 2011 included the usual suspects—repairing old and building new fences; reroofing cabins, irrigation, working on the interior of the new Trek cabin including wonderful bunk beds, logging-logging-logging, rebuilding the bridge to the ashram, training young horses and caring for the lame and aged, stacking the hay for the winter, etc. What has been true for over 50 years at Elk Creek remained true in 2011—the ranchers continue to build and improve the ranch leaving it ever better for those who follow. The fencing included building over 1600 feet of jack pole fence, which is a Montana variation of buck fence. Next summer we will work on the buck fence on the other side of the road.
The Trek again started in the high lake country of the Beartooth Mountains and then moved to the rugged scree slopes and alpine meadows of the Absarokas. Even though the trekkers hike through the end of July and into August, they still had to deal with many snow fields and ice covered lakes, in which they strangely chose to swim… or at least dunk. At the end they had a three-day school in technical rock climbing. Through it all, they kept their strange sense of trekker humor.
For two years we have been frustrated by Mother Nature in our efforts to take the ranch pack trip into Damnation Basin, one of the headwaters of Dead Indian Creek. It is one of our favorite spots and, so, it was most sweet to be able to make the trip this summer. We actually camped, because of the danger of falling beetle-killed spruce at our old camp site, in the spot where the first Elk Creekers in Damnation camped over thirty years ago. We were not able to do the waterfall contest because the waterfall was encased in a huge snow bank. Our exit over the shoulder of Trout Peak was made all the more special by the herd of elk that escorted us out.
