Transcript for the Piece Audio version of For Sale: The Darwin Ranch

HOST: The Darwin Ranch sits deep in the Gros Ventre River valley. Its physical beauty – untouched forests, snowy vistas, mountains on all sides – is the kind that often draws outsiders to Wyoming. This ranch has been collecting outsiders for decades, and in many cases, capturing those people and completely re-orienting their lives. Wyoming Public Radio’s Addie Goss has this portrait of a community drawing to a close.

GOSS: The Darwin Ranch is an in-holding, an old homestead in the national forest. There are no cattle, and no cowboys. Just a spattering of small log cabins, twelve guests, eight staff, and the silence of being 10 miles from anyone else. Each morning, the sun lights up red cliffs in the Gros Ventre Wilderness. Ground squirrels scramble over frosted grass.

GOSS: A weary horse breathes in the pasture.

GOSS: The ranch feels small, and quiet, because its owner – Loring Woodman – moved here 46 years ago mostly to be alone in the wilderness.

LORING: My fantasy was always to live in the mountains and I would do anything I had to to support myself in the mountains.

GOSS: That had been Loring’s dream since he was a 12 year old in Far Hills, New Jersey. That summer, his parents took him on vacation to Wyoming, where he climbed the Grand Teton.

LORING: And after that, it was never a question of living in New Jersey. Who would want to live in New Jersey if you can figure out a way to live in Wyoming?

GOSS: Loring didn’t exactly take the traditional route to Wyoming residency. His father told him after their vacation that if they found the perfect place in Wyoming, they would buy it. Loring took his dad at his word, and spent the next decade looking. He graduated high school and went to Harvard. The Darwin came up for sale.

LORING: And then I spent the next year trying to persuade my parents that really, we should buy it. And we ultimately did. But my father liked to drink martinis and without the martinis it would never have happened.

GOSS: When Loring moved to the ranch, he was a 21 year old with a bachelor’s degree in Romance Languages. The ranch had only a small lodge and some sunken cabins. Loring wanted to make this a place where people could spend time quietly, observing the outdoors. He set to work jacking up the cabins and installing plumbing, not realizing that the guest ranch he was building would take hold of so many people.

GOSS: At 8 o’clock, a bell announces breakfast. 20 people sit down to pancakes in the lodge with Loring, now 66 years old, with a white beard, a red nose, and a sweater loosely knotted around his shoulders.

GOSS: Guests clean their plates and take off toward the corral or to fish the Gros Ventre River. Nothing is structured here. Meals are served, but people spend their time as they wish. A lanky 77 year old man with a felt hat walks with his dog toward a one-room cabin on a distant hill.

FRANK: My name is Frank Bonn, and I’ve been here, oh, a long time, 36 years in a row at this cabin site.

GOSS: Frank Bonn was one of the first people the Darwin Ranch captured. He found the ranch by accident after getting lost, fishing for brook trout. Every summer the retired political science professor leaves Michigan and returns here, alone, for three months.

FRANK: Now you can say I must be bored with this, but how can you be bored if it’s beautiful? How can you be bored if you have solitude? Besides, I don’t know if a hawk’s going to come by, or an elk, or a deer…

GOSS: Frank looks out over the Gros Ventre valley. The river shimmers as it winds through green meadow. A few yards to Frank's left, there’s a small cemetery for the dogs he’s owned over those 36 years. Frank is a kind of old man of the mountain – watching the land below. And still trying to figure out why this land has called to him for so long.

GOSS: A mile away across the valley, a white-haired man fells a dead tree.

GOSS: When Brad Hendricks met Loring Woodman in 1965, he was hitchhiking through New Mexico. He has worked here many summers since, bringing along his wife and, eventually, his three daughters. Brad says it’s his friendship with Loring that kept bringing him back to the ranch – and the fact that he was free to come back.

BRAD: Like anybody else I didn’t have a life. I mean people who work at the Darwin Ranch don’t have a life. And so when you find you don’t have a life you’re free to come up here and have one. That’s kind of a joke but it’s true – if you’re in a position where you’ve got the ball rolling, you’re making house and car payments, you’re not free to just leave.

GOSS: In the 70s, with a young Loring in charge and young Brad and young guests and young girls as the cabin crew, the ranch was especially free-spirited – there were costume parties and games of charades. In the evenings the guests and the staff would roast in the sauna and jump into the Gros Ventre River. Loring says those were good times.

LORING: It was youth. The enthusiasm of youth and the energy of youth in a beautiful place with friends and sort of discovering the world.

GOSS: The fun took a pause in the early 80s, when Loring decided he should try out the real world. He moved to California to work for Hewlett-Packard. It didn’t last long; he returned to Wyoming a few years later. He'd fallen in love with a coworker at H-P. She’s now in the kitchen, hacking into a half-dozen chickens.

GOSS: Of everyone who’s ever wound up at the Darwin, Melody Lin has come the farthest. She grew up in Taiwan, married an American and moved to California in 1975. She divorced, and later met Loring. She can’t exactly explain how she came here, to the Darwin, to become the cook.

MELODY: I just found my life taked a turn which is rather interesting. And very lucky.

GOSS: There is a definite pull to this place. Many of the guests have been here a dozen times or more.

GOSS: In the evenings, when everyone gathers for dinner, the place can take on the feeling of a house party in the woods. People bring out mandolins and accordions. Melody tries to yodel.

GOSS: In 2007, Loring decided to retire – and in order to afford to retire, he has to sell the ranch. He's looking for a buyer, hopefully one who won't change this land too much. The impending sale has lent a fatal tone to this summer. Many of Loring’s guests, like Sarah Heckscher and Bob Johnson, say it's a loss they'll feel deeply.

SARAH: Tremendous sadness.
BOB: Oh yeah it’s like losing a friend. You get to say it just isn’t fair.

GOSS: But not everyone feels this way. Frank Bonn, the man on the hill, says when he heard that Loring was planning to sell the ranch, he wanted him to.

FRANK: And not because I don’t care about this place – I care so much – but I’ve known him for all these years, and I really would like him to sell and do something else while he has the time.

GOSS: Loring says it’s been a good run – 46 years – and he’s trying to accept that it’s ending. But this hasn’t been the solitary life in the wilderness he had hoped for, and he’s ready to move on. Loring says he still isn’t sure why this place captured him, and the others, for so long.

LORING: I don’t think there was anything particularly special about us, except…there were a lot of people who had opportunities, who had education, who maybe didn’t know where they were headed, and in some ways I never did figure out where I was headed, but they’d come here and discover a side of themselves and a side of nature which became very important to them. I can’t tell you beyond that what it was, but magic is a word that is often associated with this place.

GOSS: On this summer night, the music winds down. The conversation settles. Guests say goodnight, and walk off toward their cabins in the dark.

For Wyoming Public Radio, I’m Addie Goss.

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