Save this story Save Story Save this story It’s dusk in Montana, and I am sitting on a porch, huckleberry lemonade in hand, watching the sun set behind the Big Sky mountains. To my left, a string of horses are grazing peacefully in a meadow; to my right, a coterie of children are throwing footballs and making s’mores on a campfire as the distant twang of bluegrass ripples through the air. It is unquestionably idyllic. I, a born-and-bred Londoner, am momentarily situated within a pastoral fantasy of the American West: the sort of scene that I didn’t believe existed outside of Ralph Lauren billboards. It turns out it does: at Lone Mountain Ranch .
Photo: Heidi A Long / Courtesy of Lone Mountain Ranch Lone Mountain is the first stop on my weeks-long quest to immerse myself in the cowboy lifestyle: a role (or at least an aesthetic ) that has, in recent years, infiltrated seemingly every demographic. As much as there is the libertarian agitprop of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone cinematic universe, there are the coastal cowgirls who populate Ethel Cain and Chappell Roan shows; the enduring Cowboy Carter fandom; the obsession with Bella Hadid’s (ex-)boyfriend. No matter your inclinations, in 2026, the back-to-basics, willfully offline lifestyle of the American cowboy appears to maintain its long-standing allure—and, as fashion takes August off, I’m committed to spending the month figuring out why.
So, I fly from London to Bozeman—to an airport which more closely resembles a giant log cabin than a transport terminal—and find myself swept towards what I have determined is a soft entry into the rough-and-ready lifestyle. Lone Mountain, just over an hour’s drive away, is a dude ranch that comprises a series of beautifully bedecked, individual cabins scattered across its vast property. (While it is not my first time in a cabin on a ranch, it is certainly the first time that it’s incorporated a freestanding bathtub with three types of locally-sourced salts, Frette bathrobes, and a Dyson hairdryer.)
Photo: Heidi A Long / Courtesy of Lone Mountain Ranch The ranch, first established in 1915, was initially conceived as a one-stop-shop for the complete cowboy experience—and, a century on, has only enhanced its original mission, offering everything from trail rides through its astonishingly beautiful 148 acres to a weekly, on-site rodeo; archery lessons in its forests to fly-fishing in its creeks. Turn up ill-equipped, and they have a cozy outpost stocked with essentials from Lucchese boots and Schaefer jackets to Stetson hats to complete your transformation.
Photo: Eric Martin / Courtesy of Lone Mountain Ranch Then, there is the Horn and Cantle restaurant, where we eat bison short rib and elk meatballs the size of baseballs (“cowboy portions”) beneath a mountain lion resting on the rafters. Or, for those seeking something that speaks to the affluent rancher demographic that now populates Big Sky, the on-site, leather-lined members’ club, The Auric Room (where Taylor and Travis are known to hang out), where we are served caviar and fancy Big Macs by the most charming hosts imaginable, alongside people pairing Birkins with their cowboy boots.
Photo: Courtesy of Lone Mountain Ranch But home comforts aside (and there are infinite examples of glorious Western hospitality on offer here: flasks of coffee and cream arrive silently on our porch before we wake up, and chocolate cowboy hats have appeared on our pillows when we return home), perhaps the best bit about Lone Mountain is its proximity to Yellowstone, the national park through which it offers guided tours. We really lucked out when we were assigned Randy: a Montana native and former wildfire fighter who, at the beginning of our day together, beamingly tells us “everybody wants to be a cowboy now… but Yellowstone is the last wild place in America.” As we drive through the park with him, he explains everything from the evolution of its geothermal landscape—Yellowstone contains more than half of the world’s active geysers—to the shifts in its biodiversity since wolves were reintroduced to the ecosystem; the politics around Big Sky’s land ownership since Bill Gates and Oprah moved in, and it became the “Hamptons of Montana” to the lifecycles of the hundreds upon hundreds of bison we see rutting across its plains.
Photo: Ronan Donovan / Courtesy of Lone Mountain Ranch In fact, we are so sold on the glory of nature that when my travel companion and I leave what feels like our three-day honeymoon at Lone Mountain Ranch, we evolve our plans so that we can almost immediately return to the park. We are two city-dwelling fashion editors—not exactly outdoors aficionados—but Randy has fully convinced us that we need to see the other half of Yellowstone (the park is divided into two main loops, and a day is only really enough to visit one). On the recommendation of a friend who spent her childhood summers there, we drive over to Chico Hot Springs—a resort with far fewer frills than Lone Mountain, but which is simply great nonetheless—which comprises a series of rooms, lodges and cabins built around two geothermally-heated pools. Backing onto the bar, and staying open until 11 p.m., the pools remain filled with men wearing their cowboy hats in the pool and reading Bibles on loungers late into the night, who will happily explain the rules of shuffleboard, or their complicated feelings about the division between church and state. We are delighted; we extend our stay.
Despite the fact that, without Randy leading the way, we get a flat tire moments before arriving back in the park, our second trip to Yellowstone is as good as the first (not least because we now come equipped with his understanding of the landscape). Endless hours spent in a remote mechanics shop, and an extensive (albeit picturesque) trip to trade our rental, mean that we arrive at sunset—just in time to see the Grand Prismatic Spring (the largest hot spring in America, and the third largest in the world) transform into what appears to be a celestial body, its vivid rainbow basin just so unspeakably beautiful in the fading evening light that I burst into tears. We stay through the evening, until the park is pitch black and near-empty, to watch Old Faithful—apparently a particularly notable geyser—erupt with clouds of steam and columns of boiling water that we illuminate with torchlight. I’m under a week into my new life, and it appears I am fully invested in the wonder of the West. I hardly even bother blow-drying my hair on the wall-mounted hairdryer when I get back to Chico. (I do miss the Dyson, but I decide I can simply tuck it under my Stetson.)
Photo: Getty Images The following days’ itineraries revolve around, essentially, the most American activities we can conceive of: I download Tinder and match with a cowboy who offers to take us rafting down the Gallatin River, which we enjoy thoroughly; we drive over to Cody, in Wyoming, to stay in the Irma, a hotel founded by Buffalo Bill, and learn to shoot a Civil War-era Gatling gun at the local range. We pick up recommendations for restaurants as we go (Follow Yer Nose BBQ and The Old Saloon in Emigrant are both great shouts; the latter plays a constantly rotating stream of live rodeo and old The Price Is Right episodes), and sit in bars swagged with America 250 flags waiting for locals to illuminate us on local activities. (And they do: one night, we meet the world’s best cattle auctioneer—as awarded in North Dakota last year—and he invites us to an auction where we learn the difference between a steer and a heifer.)
Photo: Getty Images We go to the nightly Cody rodeo, and to the assorted museums (many of which are Buffalo Bill themed, or feature an astonishing amount of artillery). We scour thrift stores and leave the Irma to stay above a barn on a llama farm in the town of Pinedale (town slogan: “we have all the civilization you need”), where we discover that llamas are used to pack the bodies of elk on hunts and I spend immeasurable stretches of time silently watching the animals gallivant towards the endless horizon. We begin to feel immersed in our new lives, where our phone signal is intermittent, but our new hobbies—and friends—are plentiful. When I ask a man in a bar what he makes of the tourists who are starting to infiltrate his world, and why he thinks that might be, he tells me simply that, out here, people just want to have a conversation with you and don’t care what your job is. I realize that nobody has asked me anything about work in weeks, and that my constantly frenetic nervous system has begun to still.
Then we make our way to our final destination: Hyattville (population: 75), then Paintrock Canyon Ranch , to camp for a week on 80,000 acres that promise no phone signal or electricity, but plentiful horseriding. It is only my second time camping—and the first was with Haider Ackermann, in the most luxurious set-up imaginable, so it doesn’t quite feel like it counts—and I am slightly apprehensive about the lack of amenities. But as soon as we see our tents, pitched amidst a meadow and beside a babbling creek, I am sold on my new home. Then, when I unzip to see a wooden dresser and a king-size bed with linen so soft that every single person comments on it at breakfast the following morning, I never want to sleep anywhere else again.
Photo: Julie Pointer Adams / Courtesy of Ranchlands The first evening, we settle into our new surrounds: at dinner around a giant picnic table upon which platters of fire-cooked steak and vegetables appear, we meet the nine fellow guests with whom we’ll be spending the following days, and who range in riding experience from complete novices to one woman who lives across the valley with ten horses. As the sun sets, we collectively descend to the campfire with our blueberry pie and thick cream to begin to discuss our respective lives, and what brought us to remote Wyoming. Without phones, laptops, or televisions to return to, we all stay talking long into the night, like teenagers on a school trip.
Photo: Courtesy of Ranchlands The next morning, we awaken to coffee, fruit, and yogurt served in our communal lounge tent before sitting down for another delicious meal somehow magic-ed from the “kitchen tent” and going to meet our horses at the nearby stables. What unfolds is a series of days that we came to collectively refer to as adult summer camp, where we spend our mornings riding for endless hours in groups of two or three through some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen—across sandstone hills striped in infinite shades of red, only punctuated by silvery-grey sagebrush, or between the dramatic crags of limestone cliffs. I learn to canter within vast expanses of unpopulated, untouched wilderness beneath infinite skies, where the only things that appear on the horizon are occasional clusters of cattle, or packs of horses roaming the terrain.
Photo: Courtesy of Ranchlands When we return to camp in the afternoons, we all gather to learn ranch skills like roping or leatherwork from the wranglers (I make a terrible roper, as well as a terrible leatherwork coaster; others fare better). By the third day, we’ve all formed a sort of utopian collective where, afterwards, we grab armfuls of beers and freshly-brewed iced tea and make our way down to the swimming hole to sunbathe, skim stones, and discuss who’d be best suited to which role if a freak avalanche were to trap us all in camp together forever (we unanimously nominate Sarah, a divorce lawyer from Utah, our president). There are no clocks; no phones. It’s, to put it bluntly, paradise.
Photo: Courtesy of Ranchlands Photo: Courtesy of Ranchlands My companion and I spend our days riding with Grace, the daughter of Duke Phillips III: a third-generation cattle worker who started Ranchlands in the late ’90s with the belief that ranching is “the greatest alternative to large-scale conservation.” At drinks one evening, he joins us—his remarkably good handlebar mustache and low-tipped cowboy hat presenting the perfect picture of a Wyoming rancher—to explain, in few words, that nobody understands the land like those who work in harmony with it. He explains that, at Ranchlands, they breed their cattle in alignment with a program that I become disproportionately fascinated by, which works to evolve cows that are best suited to the natural environment so that they require minimal human intervention to thrive—and they can, in turn, improve the ecosystem through regenerative grazing (my learnings from the cattle auction really begin to pay off here). When he and Grace begin to discuss their apprenticeship program, which recruits young people from both urban and rural environments to consider land as “a multi-dimensional resource” while training them across hospitality, management, marketing and conservation before they join one of their four ranches, I become somewhat convinced that ranching can save the world.
Photo: Julie Pointer Adams / Courtesy of Ranchlands “Everyone in this world is deeply connected to land—whether it’s a ranch, or their garden,” reflects Grace as we sit by the creek one day, eating our (consistently delicious) packed lunches as our horses doze under the trees. “And today, to provide an open space where people can breathe feels more important than ever.” Over the weeks, I’ve quizzed everyone I’ve met about what it is about the American West that has taken such a hold on the world; why the image of a cowboy still appears so remarkably cool; how a nation’s mythology can appeal even while the nation itself appears in abject crisis. Nobody had quite been able to put a finger on it until Grace.
These weeks, these open spaces have given me the opportunity to catch my breath: to lounge on porches and watch the sunset, to silently watch the stars outside my tent, to spend long days phoneless and horseback, to sit in excited darkness waiting for a geyser to erupt. I don’t even have a garden back in London, but I am connected to something here—and she’s spot on: right now, it feels more important than ever.
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Source: Lifestyle
