USFS unsure what to do with ranch land

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

Montana's first dude ranch, the OTO, has been a public property for 14 years, but the Gallatin National Forest is still trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.

For the foreseeable future, the goal is to keep it pretty much the way it is: low key and tucked away, yet available to anybody willing to walk a mile or so through some parched hills, where they'll find the ranch headquarters tucked into a cool and shady glen. It's almost like a ghost town. Or perhaps a ghost resort.

"It's the idea of walking up and stepping on to a site that has no signs, nothing," said Ken Britton, Gardiner District Ranger. "It really piques the imagination."

The OTO Ranch, 10 miles north of Gardiner in the Cedar Creek drainage, became Montana's first dude ranch just before World War I, reaching its heyday in the 1920s and hosting East Coast millionaires and European nobility.

Ranch founder Dick Randall liked to tell customers that a month in the Montana mountains would cure about anything.

If it didn't, "you don't need a doctor, you need an undertaker," Randall is quoted saying in the book "Music, Saddles and Flapjacks," a history of the ranch.

Things started slowing down during the Great Depression years of the 1930s, and the 3,200 acres of scenic meadows, gin-clear creeks and black timber hillsides eventually were turned over to cattle grazing.

The big lodge and about three dozen cabins and outbuildings were steadily crumbling into the ground.

By the 1980s, the property landed in the hands of the Church Universal and Triumphant, at that time the biggest landowner in Park County.

But the church was having problems of its own, including the financing and construction of multi-million dollar bomb shelters in advance of possible apocalypse. It sold the OTO to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for $3.5 million. The foundation then sold the ranch in 1990 to the Forest Service for the same price.

The main objective was preserving the habitat: The ranch straddles a primary elk migration route coming out of Yellowstone National Park, plus it hosts grizzly bears, wolves and a bunch of other creatures.

Since then, the habitat has been left to take care of itself. But there's never been a final decision on how to treat the fine old buildings.

Now the Forest Service is trying to do that.

"It kind of fell off the table," Britton said of the OTO project. "It was time to pick it up."

So the agency has written an environmental assessment, as the law requires, that formalizes its decision not to do much with the buildings, to keep the place "low key" but protected, as Britton explained it.

Restoration projects, mostly with volunteer labor, have shored up foundations and replaced roofs. Some of the cabins are now habitable, Britton said, and future workers can stay in them.

Suggested uses for the facility have included educational institutes and leasing it out to a private contractor, Britton said. But neither option looks likely at this time.

Hank Rate, a community activist and former Forest Service ranger who lives near the ranch, has participated in exercises aimed at figuring out what to do with it.

One of the biggest efforts was a multi-day brainstorming session held in the early 1990s.

"The consensus that came out of it was to do the minimum necessary the keep the buildings from going downhill," Rate said Thursday.

Groups sometimes use the buildings for public or private events, like weddings or annual meetings, but only if they are supervised, controlled and relatively small. Locked gates keep people from driving to the buildings at other times, though you can walk or ride there whenever you want.

Rate said he'd like to see unsupervised private vehicles kept away from the buildings, to reduce threats of vandalism or theft.

A Park County sheriff's deputy lives in the only modern house on the property, a further disincentive to criminals.

So for now, anyway, if the ghost of Dick Randall rides up Cedar Creek, he'll recognize his home.

You can see the environmental assessment on the Web at http://www.fs.fed.us/r1/gallatin, then click on the projects and plans icon.

Send written comments on the proposal to Walt Allen, Forest Archeologist, Gallatin National Forest Plan Amendment, Northern Yellowstone Winter Range Acquisition, Gallatin National Forest Supervisor's Office, P.O. Box 130, Bozeman, MT 59717.

They are due Aug. 1.

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