Hey, Dude
A Passel of Getaways—From Plain to Posh—Where You’ll Get Back in the Saddle Again and Feel at Home on the Range.
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Twin Elm has been honing its cowboy character since it opened as a dude ranch back in 1939. The lawn is adorned with an old buckboard, wagon wheels, and freestanding hammocks. The cabins and rooms are clean and cozy, with knotty-pine paneling, quilts on the beds, and campy Western art on the walls. I especially liked the stables and the corral, which look as if they’d been plucked from a John Ford western. All-you-can-eat meals—fried catfish, pork roast, chicken, brisket, salads, vegetables, homemade desserts—are served in the long stone dining hall. “Everyone who comes here falls in love with our cook, Josie,” says owner Charlsie Browne. While the adults unwind, there are plenty of adventures for the kids: Friday-night rodeos during the summer months, a recreation room with Ping-Pong and pool tables, swimming in the pool, tubing on the Medina, and of course, trail rides.
Twin Elm Guest Ranch, on Texas Highway 470 three miles southwest of Bandera (830-796-3628, 888-567-3049; www.twinelmranch.com). Rates $90 per adult, $60 for children 13 to 17, $50 for children 3 to 12, under 3 free. Includes meals and horseback riding. AE, MC, V.
IT’S SEVEN AND A HALF MILES FROM THE FRONT GATE to the headquarters of the Y.O. Ranch, a drive that took me past herds of white-tailed deer, several spotted axis deer, and a huddle of Longhorn cattle, a sampling of the ranch’s fifty native and exotic species. I had hoped to spot one of the resident zebras or giraffes, but with 40,000 acres to roam, I felt lucky to have stumbled on the animals I did. (I chose to ignore the future fate of some of the creatures as hunters’ targets.) If you’re looking for authentic Wild West accommodations, look no farther: The Y.O.’s five cabins, some more than a century old, are blessedly free of that rough cedar-plywood siding that modern cabin builders seem addicted to. They boast thick walls of split cypress chinked with mortar, stone fireplaces, wood floors, and Dutch doors. (Work should be finished any day now on four new log cabins—actually, old log cabins, two of which once served as Kerr County’s first post office; they were dismantled and moved to the ranch decades ago and are currently being reassembled.) The weekend I visited, the ranch—which can currently sleep at least 35 people comfortably—was booked up with a wedding party, most of whom were cooling off in the handsome swimming pool edged with limestone boulders and surrounded by persimmon trees, oaks, and yuccas as tall as Florida palms. The Y.O. hosts a herd of programs, from camps for kids to trail drives and corporate team-building events. And if you’re looking for a custom adventure, tourism manager Gus Schreiner, a great-grandson of the Y.O.’s original cattle baron, Charles Schreiner, says, “We can organize anything, no matter how crazy . . . within the limits of the law.”
Y.O. Ranch, on Texas Highway 41 West fifteen miles west of Mountain Home (830-640-3222, fax 830-640-3227. Rates $125 per adult, $83 for children 12 and under; includes meals, a one-hour horseback ride, and a ranch tour. The annual three-day roundup in May is $200 a person, plus $150 if the ranch supplies your horse. AE, MC, V, checks. 2005-07-21 Update: The URL for website www.yoranch.com shown in the magazine is no longer active.
Gettin’ Real
STRIP AWAY THE CHUCK WAGON COOKOUTS, the cowboy-in-a-can personas, and all the group hoopla, and you’re left with ranch essentials—land, horses, cattle—and the families who’ve spent generations squeezing a living from them.
The story of the X Bar Ranch, located in the rugged hills north of Sonora, reads like a Michener saga. Three generations of the Meador family still run the cattle and sheep operations on the seven-thousand-acre spread: the grandfather, Ed, who was born on the ranch, educated in journalism at SMU, and once owned the local newspaper; the gregarious father, Lynn, who has worked the ranch on and off his whole life; and his two sons, Chris, who inherited the family love of ranching, and Stan, a world traveler who was drawn back to the X Bar three years ago from his home in Spain, bringing with him the notion of recreational ranching. (Grandfather Ed likes the tourist venture so much now, Stan says, he claims credit for the idea.) Add a twelve-mile trail ride to an oak-lined arroyo, an eye-popping night sky, and if you get lucky, an authentic “sorting” of one of the herds of cattle—complete with little bulls being turned into little steers with a flick of Chris’s knife—and you’ve got one of the most memorable and reality-based ranch vacations around. You swim in a real stock tank. Real cattle bleed real blood. And the horses, especially my new buddy, Pilgrim, have real personalities and leadership disputes, unlike the nearly catatonic trail horses at some dude ranches, which plod behind one another, nose to tail, like a string of furry pearls.
I was stuck staying in one of the ranch’s six former hunting cabins—comfortable but very basic—which flank a communal kitchen and dining room. Luckily, no one else was around to watch me whip up a disgusting mess of black beans and Velveeta I’d bought at the grocery store in Eldorado. (Had I known how well equipped the kitchen was and that I’d have it to myself, I would have chosen my dinner ingredients more carefully.) But even my cooking tasted fine in the cool solitude, by the light of a zillion stars.
The X Bar’s only other guests, a couple from Berlin, were housed in the ranch’s more gentrified Round House. Built in 1967 as a weekend retreat (I love it that a family likes their ranch so much they build their vacation getaway there), the two-story stone house has a wall of windows, a fireplace, a kitchen, and upstairs, two bedrooms that share a bath. It’s perfect for close friends or family members—but they’ll have to get used to the deer that paws on the screen door and begs for food.
When I met Wolfgang Luedecke, he was literally aglow after his second day in sun country, his fair skin scorched to a bright pink. “Now you can say you haf met a German redneck,” he joked. Europeans, particularly Germans, are drawn to the Texas ranching mystique. They marvel at two simple things we take for granted: horses and space. When Wolfgang’s wife, Mary-Anne, told me her horse-crazed countrymen pay $600 a month to stable a pony in Germany, where there’s little open land to ride on, I began to understand how exotic Texas ranches might seem.
The Luedeckes crave authenticity. “We were at another ranch a couple of years ago,” said Mary-Anne, “and a giraffe looked over the wall at me when I was by the pool. It didn’t feel right.” Wolfgang concurs: “We like the X Bar much better. It’s not the fancy resort-type facility like some ranches in Bandera.” He was in hog heaven one morning during the X Bar’s dusty, bloody cattle sorting where bawling calves are separated from their bellowing mothers and gently—well, as gently as possible—clamped into a cattle cradle so they can be vaccinated, de-horned, and . . . other stuff. Mary-Anne and I spent a fair amount of time with our backs to the operation. Wolfgang, however, worked side by side with Lynn and Chris throughout the grim process, turning from pink to green at the sight of his first castration and cringing involuntarily every time the knife flashed, but thrilled to be there.
X Bar Ranch, 5 North Divide, Eldorado (915-853-2688, 888-853-2688, fax 915-853-3131; www.xbarranch.com). Rates $70—$90 per person double occupancy for the Round House, $40—$60 per person double occupancy for the cabins, including continental breakfast. Horse back riding is $20 an hour. AE, D, MC, V, checks.
THE SETTING OF THE LH7 RANCH AND RESORT IS PURE HILL COUNTRY: 1,200 acres of rolling pastures, limestone bluffs, thickets of cedar and live oak (although oak wilt has left its mark), and huge pecan and cypress trees along the Medina River. From the screened porch of my stone cabin, one of ten, I could look across the ranch’s 46-acre lake to distant hills. The classic landscape, however, isn’t the LH7’s most impressive feature. That would be Maudeen Marks, the ranch’s witty, 81-year-old proprietress, who breeds an elite strain of Longhorn cattle that are blood-typed for purity. Miss Marks doesn’t just breed Longhorns; she loves them, particularly an old one-eyed bull named Coronado, who prowled around the cabins waiting to be fed when I visited. “He’s a magnificent, intelligent beast,” she said. “In his day he worked his harem of cows like a man on a quarter horse.” Other members of her herd of two hundred—protective cows and their wide-eyed newborns—gave me the bovine once-over during a scenic two-and-a-half hour (ouch) trail ride led by Belle Meeks, a weathered wranglerette who rolls her own and commands respect despite her diminutive size.
With old Coronado grazing nearby, I didn’t have the heart to cook up the steak I’d brought in the cabin’s cheery little kitchen; so, after a revitalizing dip in the hilltop pool-with-a-view, I hobbled into Bandera for dinner. Steak, of course, but Coronado doesn’t have to know that.
LH7 Ranch and Resort, off FM 3240 three and a half miles northwest of Bandera (830-796-4314, fax 830-796-7156). Cabins $65 double occupancy; $5 for each additional person. No meals (except for large groups), but cabins are equipped with kitchenettes and some grills. Horseback rides, arranged through Belle Meeks (830-796-7292), are $16 for one hour. Checks accepted; no credit cards.
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