Today's Reading
PREFACE
This story began on the ruins of an old hot-springs resort in the mountains of Montana.
Or maybe it began forty-nine million years ago, when the earth's crust turned itself inside out, its restless plates shifting and sliding, a volcanic arc spewing lava at the sky. The magma cooled and hardened into a forty-mile chunk of igneous rock. Eons passed. The world was hot, then it was cold. Slow-moving glaciers scooped out cirques and valleys, carving the rock into ridges. Millennia of ice and wind whittled those ridges into thirty-odd jagged peaks. Locals call them the Crazies.
The Crazies towered over wind-raked tundra where the first Americans chipped stones into spear points. They towered over shimmering grasslands where the Crow people hunted bison. Their frozen peaks shone through the summer haze as pioneers trundled along the Bozeman Trail in covered wagons, drawn west by dreams of gold. Now they look down on rangelands dotted with cattle and sheep.
It can seem like a mirage, this island of mountains rising from a sea of rolling hills. Your eye travels from the banks of the Yellowstone River to gray-green and gold-brown foothills as neatly humped as the model scenery on a child's train table, then sharply upward to the Crazies' splintery snow-frosted pinnacles, a chiaroscuro vision in pure white and midnight blue. People from the nearby town of Big Timber sometimes pull over on the frontage road that runs alongside the train tracks to take pictures of the Crazies at sunset or sunrise, or under a full moon. Those posts always get a lot of likes on the Big Timber Buzz, the community Facebook page.
The Crazies stand in magnificent isolation from the landscape they dominate, set apart by topography and by deed. The mountain range is as splendid as any national park, but for the most part it's private property. Crazy Peak, the loftiest of them all, is privately owned. So is Conical Peak, and Granite Peak and Kid Royal. The owners of those mountains are among the richest people in America.
The hot springs were part of a forty-four-thousand-acre mountain ranch owned by Russell Gordy, a Texas oil and gas billionaire. It was late spring in 2017 and I was writing a profile of Mr. Gordy and his $96 million collection of trophy ranches for the Wall Street Journal. Gordy owned so many ranches that he couldn't keep track of them all. There was a big ranch in East Texas, and a bigger one in South Texas. He had an eighty-thousand-acre spread in Wyoming, and a place in Colorado that he never visited—"It's a beautiful ranch, but I already got a bunch of gorgeous places." Later in our conversation, Gordy remembered that he owned a second ranch in Wyoming. He went goose hunting there sometimes.
Gordy's Montana ranch, some fifteen miles west of Big Timber, would be my first stop on a limited tour of his domain. He bought it in 2002 for over $40 million, a state record at the time. It was very windy that day; I had to borrow a hat to keep the hair out of my face. I'd learn that Big Timber is one of windiest places in the country. Wind, like water, flows faster downhill: the steeper the hill, the harder it blows. Big Timber is wedged between some very steep hills. Winds speed up as they're funneled through the Absaroka-Beartooth Range to the south. Chinooks from the west, honed by the sharp-toothed Crazies, double and redouble in force as they pour down the mountains' eastern slopes. It's a phenomenon called mountain gap wind, and Big Timber gets it from both ends. Crosswinds regularly hit gale-force speeds, nudging semitrucks sideways on Interstate 90 before shutting it down altogether. When the town makes the news, it's usually in the form of a high-wind advisory.
Gordy picked me up at my hotel in a muddy Land Rover. Tall, with a neatly trimmed gray beard, he wore shorts, a baseball hat, and a fly-fishing vest. He pointed out the sights as he drove. "You're on the ranch now. That's a buffalo jump rock—the Indians used to herd them off a cliff. That's the Yellowstone River—my boundary line." He turned onto a narrow, unpaved road that wound along a sandstone cliff. Prisoners from the state penitentiary in Deer Lodge had blasted the road in 1913; you could see scoring marks left by the sticks of dynamite they'd used on the cliff walls.
"I always tell folks that I live on Convict Grade Road in the Crazy Mountains," Gordy said with a grin, rocks spraying from the tires as we sped toward his $15 million lodge. A herd of startled pronghorns sprinted past. Gordy loves to hunt—elk, deer, grizzly bears. The antelope didn't get a rise out of him. "I could lean out my window and shoot one," he said. Gordy much preferred to hunt Hungarian partridges on his Montana ranch. The birds were delicious, he told me. "I like 'em fresh."
He pulled over at a creek wreathed in white steam. We got out of the Land Rover, the wind tearing at the pages of my notebook. Cows ranged across the rolling hills, a rumpled carpet shaken out at the mountains' feet under a heavy white sky. All that remained of the Mission-style hotel that once stood at the springs was a crumbling stone wall. A small blue above-ground pool with a ladder, the kind you see in suburban backyards, sat incongruously amid the sagebrush and cow pies.
...
