About

You've stumbled onto what might charitably be called a grand experiment in suburban delusion. We fled perfectly sensible lawns and automatic sprinklers to wrestle thirty-five acres of Montana rangeland that had been systematically abused for the better part of two centuries.

There's something absurd about city refugees announcing they'll heal land that defeated generations of actual ranchers. Yet here we are in year two of a four-to-six-year rehabilitation scheme, armed with soil tests that read like medical charts for a dying patient and the kind of optimism that would make a traveling salesman blush.

When we arrived in 2024, the place embodied every cautionary tale about buying land sight unseen. Kochia and mustard stood tall as a basketball player where native grass should have been. The soil was compacted hard enough to pave a road. The well was seventy-six years old and gave a slow drip that looked like weak coffee and tasted worse.

The peculiar thing about badly degraded land is that it wants to be saved, like a reformed sinner at a revival. Ours came during the 2025 drought, when a new well struck water deep enough to matter — clean, abundant, and warm enough to hint at something geothermal underneath. After a year of rationing every drop, we suddenly had more water than we knew what to do with. As one of our cattle-ranching neighbors put it: now life can really begin.

The residents have opinions. Huckleberry is a 240-pound English Mastiff with delusions of lapdog grandeur and a slobbering problem that would shame a Saint Bernard. The geese — Gus-Gus and Bon-Bon chief among them — appointed themselves greeters, gossips, and self-important commentators on every human activity. The chickens conduct their mysterious business with the seriousness of bank executives. Add six lambs, a run of pigs turning weeds into worked ground, and a half-dozen steer, and you've got a working operation on land that's still mostly "before."

That's what this is. An honest before — rough, weedy, and clear about the work ahead.