Guests Pay Better Than Cattle for Many Ranchers

Guests Pay Better Than Cattle For Many Ranchers
08/01/1997
Dow Jones Online News
(Copyright (c) 1997, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

Travel:

By Kevin Helliker,

ROUNDUP, Mont. -- After years of making little or no money raising cattle, Don Proue last year started cultivating a new kind of livestock: tourists.

"The home cookin' is second only to the beauty of the ranch," he wrote in a brochure he sent to about 300 travel agents. Few innkeepers are more excited than this cowboy and onetime rodeo star. "I believe guests are going to be a gold mine in the future," Mr. Proue says.

Guest fever is sweeping the West. Never mind that tending cattle isn't always the best training for tending guests. Tales of city slickers dropping $150 a day at Western cattle ranches are prompting cowpoke after cowpoke to turn innkeeper.

The number of ranches accommodating paying guests has doubled in five years in Wyoming and risen 40% in Montana, to more than 100. Meanwhile, the national Dude Ranchers' Association is fielding about 160 inquiries a year from potential new members.

Last year, the University of Wyoming in Laramie launched a class on how to start on-the-ranch recreational businesses; every seat was filled. For three years, the state of Montana has held seminars on how to lure guests to the ranch; 842 ranchers and farmers have attended. "The response has just blown us away," says Dave Sharpe, an agricultural economist with the Montana State University Extension program.

Ranchers aren't lonely for company. Guests just pay a lot better than cows. Declining consumption of beef has depressed its price for years, while population growth has dramatically boosted the value of Western real estate, increasing ranchers' taxes and land costs -- and the temptation to sell out to developers. Since 1990, the number of Montana cattle operations has declined by 800 to 13,200, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

"When you're losing money every year and watching other ranchers move to town to sell insurance, you start thinking about how to survive," says Ellen Hargrave of Marion, Mont.

The guest operation that Mrs. Hargrave, 47, and her 75-year-old husband, Leo, started eight years ago draws about 200 people a year, at a rate of $1,050 a week each. Guests now contribute twice as much revenue as cows. "Without guests, Leo and I would be gone and the ranch would be subdivided," says Mrs. Hargrave. "I tell each and every guest, `Thanks for your check -- I'm going to blow it on this month's diesel bill, or put it toward a new roof on the barn.'"

The experience thrills some guests. Jack K. Rogers has taken his wife and two teenage children to four guest ranches in six years. "It's a chance for us to do something we all love -- ride horses in gorgeous surroundings," says Mr. Rogers, chief financial officer of Canton, Ohio-based Camelot Music.

But success doesn't always come easily. Cultural conflicts can arise between ranchers and city slickers. And the very quality that makes ranches appealing to visit -- remoteness -- can make guests hard to come by. By early June, Mr. Proue's winterlong marketing efforts had yielded one guest.

It doesn't help that capacity is expanding at a time when the enormous boost from "City Slickers" -- the 1991 film about New Yorkers visiting a cattle ranch -- is beginning to diminish. "There's an abundance of supply out there," says William Bryan of Off the Beaten Path, a Bozeman, Mont., organizer of Western adventures.

The variety of guest ranches includes luxurious resorts with tennis courts and cabins whose bathroom is an outhouse. Some specialize in families, others single guests. At the Koger ranch in eastern Kansas, only women are welcome.

Some veteran operators have learned the hard way to screen out guests expecting a rural Ritz. An airline pilot left the Hargrave Cattle & Guest Ranch after finding a fly in his log cabin. A New York model, outraged at having to fetch her own coffee, stomped away from Montana's Lonesome Spur Ranch. "She expected to be waited on hand and foot," says Darlene Schwend, an owner of Lonesome Spur, adding that she spotted this guest as trouble the instant she "arrived in fashion boots and a hot pink derby."

Some new operators fail to understand that guests expect more than a beautiful landscape. "One rancher in eastern Montana put some wealthy tourists from Detroit in an old mobile home with avocado shag carpeting and water that didn't run," says Mr. Sharpe, a creator of that state's seminar on ranch guest businesses. "Within three days, the guests were threatening lawsuits." Henceforth, that rancher stuck to bovine.

For ranchers accustomed to independence and solitude, taking care of guests can be difficult. "`Let me clean your toilet' is an attitude lacking in many ranchers," says Terry Reidy, owner of the Focus cattle and guest ranch in Slater, Colo. But that attitude is necessary, he says, even in the off-season, when summer reservations are taken. "When you've been feeding your cattle in 20-below weather, it's hard to walk in and answer the phone with, `Gosh, it sure is good to hear from you,'" says Mr. Reidy.

Taking guests fishing, hiking, riding and hunting for dinosaur bones sometimes keeps the three Lammers brothers from tending their sheep and cattle at Careless Creek Ranch near Shawmut, Mont. "The trick for us is to serve guests and still get our other work done," says Arville Lammers.

And guests who help herd cattle don't exactly reduce the workload. "With the assistance of guests, our veteran hands can accomplish in eight hours what otherwise would take them two," says Mr. Hargrave. "But helping guests help us is part of our job."

Mr. Proue admits he doesn't have a lot of experience in the hotel business. His guest quarters consist of two bedrooms in his basement, their ground-level windows offering a view one recent day of the family laundry drying on a line. For this and a place at the family dining table, Mr. Proue is seeking $1,000 a week. Guests can ride horses or watch videos of Mr. Proue's children riding rodeo.

Raw need is driving Mr. Proue's diversification. Just last year, bacteria in the surrounding pine needles caused his cows to abort 22 calves. "That tightened things up a bunch," he says.

But guests aren't exactly rushing to the rescue. His massive mailing of brochures to travel agents produced no guests. Nor did an ad in a local travel magazine. Finally, a neighbor aware of Mr. Proue's effort referred a friend from Atlanta, who booked a week in June. Then another neighbor referred a second guest. "It's a start," Mr. Proue says.