Traveler's File: Saddle Up!
Just how "away from it all" do you really want to be? Test yourself at Flying A: It's out there. Fifty miles southeast of Jackson, Wyoming, on desolate route 191, the ranch is actually miles father up a deeply rutted pasture road. A new barn pokes up from a high mountain valley, then a cluster of cabins appears around a beautiful pond. Horses graze freely across the way; antelope and elk look up from the hillside beyond.
The sheer country stillness of Flying A may deafen city ears, and the enormity of a whole day with nothing to do but ride and fish as you please may frazzle workaholics. Also, because this is a small ranch - six guest cabins, no more than 12 guests - children under 18 aren't even allowed. But what a romantic hideaway for the rest of us!
This is Flying A's first season: For decades, the Hansen family used it as a private retreat. (On neighboring land, Secretary of State James Baker has just established a retreat of his own.) Over the last several years, Debbie and her fiance', Keith Dagel, have lovingly refurbished the old guest cabins, adding front porches, kitchens and stone fireplaces. Each cabin has at least two rooms, (some have three), with Ralph Lauren linens in the bedrooms and picture window views of the pond and meadow beyond.
Of course, there's no need to use the kitchens: Keith and Debbie serve all meals in the handsome main lodge. Keith, moreover, will gladly smoke up your trout on the front deck barbecue - the trout you caught at dawn in one of the two absurdly overstocked ponds (everyone a winner, as the carnival barkers say).
But the best news is the riding. One of the resident wranglers here, will gladly take guests out on early morning and evening rides, when the abundant wildlife comes down into the high meadows. You don't feel like a dude in a dreary line, and you're not: You're on a fast, happy ride with a new friend, climbing alpine hillsides in national forest land to reach 360-degree views that not too many people, you suddenly realize, may have ever seen.
