Henrietta Hay's Column

There I was -- driving up a dirt road -- in a pickup -- in a pickup with a gun rack in the back window and a rifle in the gun rack! Whoa! Guess I'll have to take my own advice and give up stereotyping people and things since the driver was a very nice man named Charley who manages the X Lazy F ranch on the Black Mesa in the summer.

This extraordinary ride was part of the adoption group weekend at the ranch, which had included a rim ride on horseback for part of the group. Since my days on a horse are long past, I had missed seeing the spectacular scenery the riders were describing. "Henrietta," said Charley the next morning, "how would you like to take the trail ride in a pickup?" Oh yes! My friend Terry and I climbed in, and that's how I found myself bumping along, wondering why anyone would ever want to live anywhere except near the mountains.

Coming onto the rim without warning took my breath away. From there you can see forever, way down onto Curecanti Creek and way up the other side to Soap Mesa and beyond. I had seen it from the bottom, but never before from the top.

After my reaction to the rim Charley said, "Want to see the Billy Knot homestead?" You betcha, and off we went. He explained how to spot a deer in the forest. The trick, I learned, is to look for something in the in the trees that doesn't fit. Trees are vertical. Deer are not. The experienced woodsman can tell the difference between a fallen tree and a deer, but I'm going to have to work on it more. I think one little doe laughed at me.

Several times, we emerged from the quakies onto a sun-drenched meadow of wild flowers and finally in the middle of one of the meadows, there it was -- the sagging remains of an old barn.

The early pay roads from the east all went over Monarch Pass and along the Gunnison River valley. Sometime in the early part of the century somebody had carved out a road up Corral Gulch onto the Black Mesa. And a man named Billy Knot homesteaded a ranch up there.

He built a barn and a cabin, hauling everything he needed up from Sapinero by horse and wagon. We stood in what is left of the big barn and looked up at the sky through the skeletal remains of the roof. We touched the huge pieces of rusty farm machinery still there and thought about Billy Knot. In the winter he used to strap a five-gallon can of cream on his back and snowshoe down to Sapinero. We wondered about Mrs. Billy Knot, who she was, where she came from, how she survived the isolation.

When we returned to the ranch, the envy of everyone there, Charley's wife Jane gave me an X Lazy F sweatshirt to remember the adventure by, and filled me in on the very checkered history of a working cattle ranch.

The house was built in the thirties. All the logs were cut with a double-bladed ax by a man they called The Ax Man. They had some pretty wild parties in that big ranch house, with lots of gambling. According to the abstracts, ownership changed hands fairly often. That may be where the expression, "betting the ranch" came from! What is now a small supplemental kitchen was originally the bath. It had a wall down the middle, and a huge claw-foot tub on each side -- one for the women, one for the men. Who were the women? How did they get there? We do know that Dr. Kingsley, one of the owners, had a black valet who undoubtedly drew his bath water for him.

After an adventurous youth, the X Lazy F Ranch has settled down into a more sedate middle age. One of the many owners willed it to the Presbytery of Western Colorado, and they operate it today as a guest ranch. But the ghosts of the past are still there, along with old maps and pictures and the original furniture.

As I sat to take notes in a chair that was hauled up from Sapinero by Billy Knot, I realized that when I was a kid and fished the Gunnison around Sapinero before they covered it with water, Billy was probably raising cattle a half mile above me. I wish I had met him.