Linda and Kae on the ranch. Note Kae’s missing sweatshirt sleeve!
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Western Thrill-Seekers
By Katie Sauck
Just over three years ago, Kae Luchtel from Milford, Iowa, and Linda Gregor of Fairmont, Minnesota, threw their saddles in the trunk of a red convertible and left for an adventure of a lifetime.
A group of women, who Kae and Linda affectionately refer to as their “cowgirl buddies,” were at a get-together when Kae mentioned she wanted to go on a cattle drive. Linda overheard and immediately said, “You’re kidding!” The year before, she had decided to go on a cattle drive. “I was going to go by myself because none of my other friends would or could,” Linda says, “We knew it was meant to be.”
The women were merely acquaintances when they began searching the Internet to find the perfect location for their big adventure. “We wanted it to be on a real, working cattle ranch,” Kae says. “We came up with the TX Ranch in Lovell, Wyoming. They had a great Web site and they were right in the middle as far as price.”
Two new friends said goodbye to their husbands and hopped in a convertible packed full of Wrangler jeans, saddles and boots to embark on a journey west. “The trip out was a lot of fun,” Kae remembers. “It was a long drive and we talked the entire way.”
Kae and Linda were the first two to arrive at the ranch. “Thank goodness we finally found the place,” Linda says. “It was in the boonies!” The women remember walking out back and finding white, wall tents – some in a heap on the ground from the wind. Kae says, “One of the workers at the ranch said, ‘I’m not quite ready for you guys. Let me get your tent ready to go.’ He walked into the tent and picked up an old spittoon and our 1942 cots, fluffed them up, and said ‘okay girls, you’re good to go.’ We’re like, what’d we get ourselves into?”
When the other paying, western thrill-seekers arrived, the group got acquainted and then was put to work. “During the first two days, we had to go to where the cattle were for the winter. They lined us up according to our riding skills and then assigned us each a horse.
Linda and I
were two of the better riders in the group,” Kae says. “We actually had to drive the cattle from their winter camp into their spring camp so they could start feeding off of grass.”
After driving cattle from Montana to the spring pasture in Wyoming, the women helped round up the cattle for branding. “Kae was wonderful. She would rope, and she’d miss. And she’d rope, and she’d miss. About every fourth time she’d catch a calf,” Linda remembers. “I would walk in with the rancher’s daughter. I would rope it and she’d help me drag the calf out. Or Linda would dolly up and drag it out to be branded,” Kae says.
“It was six days of really hard work,” Kae says. No running water. No flush toilets. No electricity. If they weren’t driving cattle or branding, they were put to work checking fence or were busy splitting wood for the tent stove that kept them warm through the night. “Going into this, we thought it’d be nice to take a horse and do some exploring of the ranch on our own. But we were viewed as ranch hands,” Linda says.
The women got up every morning at 6:00 and went back to their “lovely wall tents” every evening, exhausted. “One night we were so tired – I sat on my cot and said, ‘Kae, there’s cow poop under your cot.’ And she replied, ‘I don’t care.’”
Another time, the women were awakened by the smell of smoke. Kae’s sweatshirt had fallen from the cot onto the tent stove and started on fire. “It was kind of funny: we both thought the tent was burning down,” Kae says. They stamped out the blaze and, because it was her favorite, Kae continued to wear the sweatshirt – minus one sleeve.
That was just the beginning. “A wind storm was coming down from the mountains and was hitting my side of the tent,” Kae remembers, “I’m kind of a scaredy-cat anyway, so I asked Linda if we needed to run for cover and she said, ‘Where in the heck do you think we’re going to go?’” Linda laughs, “I asked her, ‘Do you want to go to the outhouse?’”
While the work was hard and the days were long, Kae and Linda still say their journey west was a good bonding experience. “It was everything they said it would be. We just didn’t realize they really meant it,” Linda says. “It was a recurring theme: We paid HOW MUCH to do this?” The memorable trip forged a lifelong friendship for the women. When asked if they would ever do a cattle drive again, both Kae and Linda say yes – and add they want to try a ranch with hot showers to wash off the dust after a day on the trails.
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