I've just come back to my cabin, depleted by a grueling stint of late-afternoon fly-fishing on the upper pond at Smith Fork Ranch in Colorado, and I've sacked out on the bed for a rest before dinner. My eyes are shut and I'm trying to doze, but I see filament swishing hypnotically back and forth in candy-cane loops across my eyelids. The mesmerizing action of casting and the excitement of catching my first fish ever have enervated me, and the July heat is stifling, so I am content to lie here and imagine telling the tale back home: I caught the big one.
Angling master Jin Choi, my guide, told me to say that--I swear. He measured my brown trout on the bank at seventeen inches before we released the gasping fellow, but when I was reporting the size back at the lodge, he urged me to "go ahead and say eighteen," as if that were what experienced fishers routinely do. I see I have a lot to learn.
By now I know I'm in good hands at this luxury guest ranch on the edge of the Gunnison National Forest in the Rockies, midway between Aspen and Telluride. Jin, an athletic young man who has twelve years of fishing experience, is a patient, intelligent teacher with a sense of humor, a trait that comes in handy with novices like me. He didn't flinch when I disturbed the serene ecosystem by squealing as he took my slimy, wriggling fish from his net and placed it in my hands. Evidently I not only squealed but leaped into the air from the proper crouching position and pirouetted up the bank in fright and revulsion. A couple of serious experts close by joked, "We'll pretend this didn't happen," but I wasn't embarrassed. Who ever said I have to enjoy touching a fish? Jin said we'll work on that tomorrow. I appreciate that the ranch's welcoming, unpretentious atmosphere allows me to bungle along at my own pace.
I give up trying to nap in favor of seeing what's up around the ranch. I walk from my cozy little one-bedroom cabin, called Spruce, along a path bordered by lawns to the main building, the original log hunting lodge. (The property was a guest ranch owned by the Ferriers, a local family, from the late 1930s through the 1970s.) In back of the lodge, facing tall grass, quaking aspens and the West Elk Mountains in the distance, is the Pavilion, a canvas-roofed, open-air deck--the hub of the ranch. Midmorning, guests just finished with a fly-fishing clinic or an early hike or ride stop here to pour themselves a glass of fresh lemonade from the jug and grab a handful of local yellow cherries from the continually replenished bowl on the side table.
This evening there's no sign of other guests yet, but I meet up with the ranch's owners, Linda and Marley Hodgson, Jr. In 2000 they bought the then broken-down 280-acre property nestling in nearly a million acres of uninhabited national forest and mountain wilderness. Linda says she and Marley phoned their son, Marley III, an expert fly fisher, and said, "We found this really interesting piece of the working West, and it's got a river running through it!" The Smith Fork of the Gunnison River, to be precise. The Hodgsons restored the ranch, spiffed it up with high-quality design touches and landscaped the front entrance, leaving the rest of the grounds wild, then opened for business two years ago.
Today, Smith Fork--with its ranch house, which sleeps ten, and four cabins, which accommodate from two to six, for a total of twenty-eight guests--is one of just six Abercrombie & Kent ranch properties in the United States. (When I visited, the fourth cabin was only in the planning stages. The three-bedroom hideaway is now completed and, I'm told, looks as if it had been there eighty years. The Hodgsons used old logs and old-fashioned building methods--though the hot tub on the deck, which overlooks the river, is a giveaway.)
Sitting in Adirondack chairs, we sip Sauvignon Blanc and watch the sun lower over Needle Rock, a 1,074-foot local landmark, casting a pink glow clear over to the east so unbelievably pretty it's like an amateur painting. I learn some lore from the charming couple, who live part of the year in New York, part of it on their sixty-foot Herreshoff schooner, out of Newport, and the rest right here.
"We love this area because it's pure, undiscovered cattle country," says Marley Jr., who founded Ghurka, the leather-goods company, in 1975. "It's never had a railroad boom or mining or skiing, as Aspen has. The closest town, about seven miles away, is Crawford, population 366. This part of the West Elk Wilderness is the least-used wilderness area in the state of Colorado."
