Horse Country

Our guide, 60-year-old horse wrangler Charlie Coldwell, is a third-generation rancher. In 1911, his grandfather settled the Coldwell Ranch just south of here, naming the area Jesmond, after his home in England. The region wasn’t even hooked up to the power grid until the 1990s, and Coldwell remembers kerosene lanterns and ice blocks pulled from the lake in winter for refrigeration during the summer months. Planes, trains, automobiles, tractors and modern irrigation have since changed the cowboy lifestyle. Yet the mail still comes once a week and horses remain a cowboy’s most beloved sidekick — they’re gentle on the grass and don’t scare the cattle.

Our party of five approaches a gravel road that winds past Big Bar Ranch. This route, the Fraser River Trail, was long used by aboriginal people, fur traders and, later, gold miners, who trekked along the Fraser through Lillooet and Pavilion to the gold fields in Barkerville. The Cariboo Waggon Road east of here may be the quickest route north, but this historic river trail passes picturesque old ranches and offers some of the most stunning vistas of the Fraser, where you can still pan for gold flakes.

I hear the clang of the dinner bell as I extract myself from the saddle. Over T-bone steaks, Coldwell explains that his grandfather’s store in Jesmond was the place to grab ice cream and local gossip. “Every spring, there were big branding parties on the mountain. Now we usually do that at the ranch. Before satellite TV, there was always someone playing a guitar or an accordion. And there were a lot of things to do in Clinton, like the May Ball,” he says of the annual Western-themed dance and rodeo, now in its 141st year. “Clinton used to be packed on Friday nights. Now you stop in at the bar and it’s like a morgue — one person sittin’ in the corner.”

Coldwell started “chasing cows” at Big Bar at age 8. “It was the neighbourly thing to do,” he says, blue eyes twinkling. Ranchers typically take second jobs to keep afloat. Coldwell drove a school bus and worked winters as a hunting guide, camping in -30°C weather. He still juggles duties between the Coldwell Ranch and his own pack-trip outfit and started wrangling guests at Big Bar in 2007, when a Danish couple bought the place.

Some ranches cater to well-heeled tourists looking for hotstone massages and gourmet cuisine, but Big Bar’s new owners, Kresten and Else-Marie Vestergaard, are farmers who breed American Paint Horses (a mix of thoroughbred and quarter horse) and host an annual Western horse show in Denmark. They want to preserve the ranch’s laid-back cowboy roots. A hand-hewn log cabin featuring a giant hearth made from Fraser River rocks is currently being restored after decades of patchwork add-ons and bouts of neglect.

Over the years, the place has, at times, laid vacant or served as temporary digs to squatting hippies, bats and the occasional stray cow. Nowadays, with British Columbia’s hot real estate market pushing north, Canadians and foreigners alike are snatching up ranches.

Coldwell and his wife Pat, who co-manages Big Bar, each have two daughters from former marriages. “But you can’t pay the kids enough to keep them home,” he says. “My youngest daughter was a ranch person like me, really liked animals. But now she’s working in a penitentiary in Kamloops, guarding people.”