"a gracious and charmingly rustic ranch that evokes the Old West and a distant, more innocent age"
Delta Sky Magazine
"Knife and Fork"
by David Noland
The trout are laughing at me. Knee-deep in Colorado's burbling Smith Fork River. I've hit the trifecta of angling ignominy: line tangled in a tree, thumb punctured by the hook and zero fish landed after repeated bites.
Never mind. The sun warms me, the sky is a deep blue, and the aspen and oak lie in gold and scarlet swaths across nearby Saddle Mountain. And just steps away, a lunch of buffalo sausage, gazpacho, homemade lemonade and fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies awaits, served on a deck that looks out on the snow-dusted, 11,000-foot peaks of the West Elk Wilderness.
Such is life at Smith Fork Ranch, an intimate, luxurious Colorado retreat for those who appreciate a good wine list as much as a good horse. The ranch dates from the 1890s and began taking in guests as far back as 1939. But it was sold by its founding family in the 1970s, and soon fell into neglect and disrepair.
Enter Marley and Linda Hodgson – founders of Ghurka, the luxury leather-goods company, and refugees from city life in New York. The Hodgsons bought the ranch in 2000 and set to work. "We took every building apart log by log, and reconstructed them with all the amenities," says Marley Hodgson. Employing local artisans, they filled the main ranch-house and the four private cabins with handmade furniture and fixtures, primitive antiques, and Western and Indian art. Instead of settling for the usual guest-ranch grub, the Hodgsons brought in a trained chef who takes full advantage of the abundant organic produce, meat and poultry in the surrounding North Fork Valley.
Later in my visit, forgoing fishing for fall foliage, I take a horseback ride up through the aspen to Sleeping Indian ridge. Coming back, our wrangler, a no-nonsense young cowboy named Andrew, admits, "I'm not a very emotional person, but there were tears in my eyes up there today. It was that beautiful."
September 2004