On the Road Again, Chapter 4

Former Baltimore Zoo director Brian A. Rutledge leads his two-year-old filly for a training session on the ranch he and his wife Kathleen own in northeastern Colorado.(Photo (c) Bonnie J. Schupp)

Learning about ranch life,

and a threatened bird,

from a friend in Colorado

Former zoo director focuses  on conservation

By mid-afternoon on Saturday, we have crossed the border on I-80 through southeastern Wyoming and headed south on Interstate 25 into Colorado for a visit with an old friend, again a result of Facebook.

The friend is Brian A. Rutledge, who for most of the 1980s into the early 1990s was director of the Baltimore Zoo. I grew up about two miles from Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park, home to the second-oldest public zoo in the nation, and occasionally rode my bike there. Admission during my childhood was free, and countless families have snapshots of their kids sitting on its iron lion statues or feeding bunnies in the cages that dominated the exhibits back in the 1950s. 

As a reporter for The Sun, I staked out an informal beat, usually on my own time, covering the zoo, including the stewardship of director Steve Graham, who made headlines and unpopularity by suggesting the euthanization of unneeded Kodiak bear cubs and feeding them to the big cats.

But Graham's more-lasting accomplishing was to hire Brian, who soon became his successor and embarked on a mission of modernizing the zoo. He sped up the development of naturalistic animal environments to replace the old steel-bar cages, and opened a spacious elephant area and a  children’s zoo section focusing on Maryland habitat and species – both still among the most popular exhibits.

In Baltimore, he also made news as the victim of a rare crime – horse theft. His pastime was a sport known as cattle cutting, in which horse and rider maneuver to direct the actions of a cow in an arena. And someone stole a horse from his city-owned home on the edge of Druid Hill Park. He and police tracked down and recovered the horse, and Brian moved his family and animals to the rural community of Woodbine miles from the city.

Some months ago, I noticed his posting of a comment on a Facebook post that included a wonder about whether I was still around. My response was to send a friend request, and our friendship was reborn online. After leaving Baltimore, Brian’s gigs included running the Stoneham and Franklin Park zoos in Boston for a few years, then heading west with his wife Kathleen,  to Colorado. (They'd met at a horse show.)

They live on a 160-acre horse ranch in the high desert, low mountain landscape of Livermore – close enough to our westward route for a weekend visit.

He has a dozen horses here, and four dogs, and raises cattle. It’s a very western way of life, near the end of a drive along a sparsely populated 12-mile stretch of dirt and washboard-rutted road.

He also found a job more in keeping with his life’s passion – conservation. He’s a vice president of the Audubon Society, in charge of sagebrush programs in 13 states, including 11 of them focused on the sage grouse (aka, prairie chicken).

Instead of dealing with boards of directors and bureaucracy to run zoos, he’s working with state and federal officials to preserve sagebrush environments critical to survival of a bird species that once numbered around 20 million, and now estimated at  less than 500,000.

So we received a lesson on the sage grouse, and its critical – but to many, unappreciated – role in a fragile ecosystem. An Audubon magazine cover posted on a stairway wall focuses on the issue, headlined “How the Sage Grouse Can Save the West.” And it is the subject of a TED talk he presented a few years ago in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Historically, the sage grouse fed native tribes in harsh times and settlers migrating westward in the 19^th century. It’s deemed a stupid bird, one that a 9-year-old could walk up to and whack with stick to help feed the family. But in breeding season, it nests in sagebrush, concealed by its coloration from predators. In the western states’ food chain, its existence supports the wildlife that tourists travel to see.

 Brian’s task has been making allies in the states, including their governors, to protect millions of acres of sagebrush lands – much but not all owned by the federal government at a time when the current administration in Washington is shrinking national parks or allowing the plunder of public lands for oil and gas drilling and other commercial uses.

Kathleen, a stunning brunette who does not appear close to her age of 60, works days a week, handling the recordkeeping chores for a financial adviser in Fort Collins – but with Brian shares the many chores of ranch life tending the animals. And she has a fantastic collection of Western-style boots.

Beyond talking about environmental and conservation issues, and a little of our agreed-on politics, we enjoyed their company Saturday evening and Sunday. Bonnie photographed them working their horses, and teaching a two-year-old filly the directions and moves necessary for cattle cutting. Brian even managed for only the second time to get her saddled and briefly mount up in the ranch training ring.

We treated for dinner Sunday in an old cafe back down the 12 miles of dirt and rutted roads.

Bonnie and I, sandwiched at dinner by Kathleen and Brian Rutledge.

Brian drove us all in his Toyota 4-Runner, which handled the bumps a lot better than our Camry. It has about 100,000 miles on its odometer -- and he has another one with 300,000 miles, along with the inevitable pickup truck and the trailer needed for hauling horses and livestock. (Soon after we left Monday morning, they headed off on a three-hour drive to Wyoming to sell a horse and pick up eight heifers.)

Brian’s got a tidy gray beard, and a sparse head thatch covered by a stylish cowboy hat. In the saddle, he could pass for a western movie star. He’s pushing through his late 60s, but you’d hardly know it. He’s home on the range, and living his dreams. 

Next chapter: Rodeo photographers’ round-up

On the Road Again... Part 11

Slow-going along the road through Yellowstone. (Photos by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Making hay in Montana,

shooting bison in Wyoming

We find the spirit of Sacajawea in a Native American cemetery and have some fun in an old prison gas chamber...

I know, that sounds very odd.

HERE AND THERE, Out West – We’d been to Montana, Wyoming and Colorado before, but some places you just need to revisit. There’s always something new to discover, and it didn’t take long after crossing the border from oil-drilling country in North Dakota.

For one thing, Montana looks different just about immediately. Rolling hills of grazing land on ranches too large to imagine, and only an occasional giant grasshopper head bobbing up and down to pump black gold from somewhere in the earth. Big oil seems not so big a deal, yet, in eastern Montana.

Hobo art inside caboose.

Our first stop is Culbertson, along U.S. Highway 2, home to a surprisingly large history museum and its oddest oddity – a railroad caboose formerly occupied by an anonymous hobo who thoroughly decorated its inside wall space with his take on the Bible’s Revelation to St. John. With magic markers. Visions of the Apocalypse. Yet another piece of oddball Americana that would be right at home at Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum.

 The Culbertson Museum also features, in room-by-room displays, depictions of ordinary life over the decades – a schoolroom, a doctor’s office, the barber and beauty shop, an early homesteader’s house. Each is populated by mannequin figures, and crammed with antique bits of the past, down to the little bottles of early remedies. There’s clothing, pots and pans, ink-well desks. And outside there are old tractors and other machinery, even an old fire engine.  It was way too much to take in during our short, but rewarding, visit. (Admission there is free, but donations are appreciated.)

Winner of the 2014 Hay Day competition.

Hay there!

Our big destination was the town of Hobson, where the Sunday after Labor Day is celebrated as “Hay Day.” It was that rare opportunity when we could get to a place where something exciting is happening, not a place where that something happened last week or will happen next month. It was a “now” and a not-to-be-missed event linked to the harvest of a major local crop – hay.

I have to admit that hay makes me sneeze. But in Hobson, it made us both laugh. Bonnie, the fearless navigator and Web surfer found it online, and it sounded so zany that we drove more than 300 miles across some lonely, narrow (and high-speed) back roads to get there.

Along a 22-mile stretch of two-lane blacktop between Hobson, Utica and Windham, folks of all ages create hay sculptures that must be up by 8 a.m. that Sunday – and they’re supposed to survive for a week of viewing pleasure. The speed limit is usually 65, but on Hay Day the reality was 15 MPH as folks drove what is called the Hay Bale Trail to take in dozens of whimsical works of hay art.

They had names, of course:  Pork ‘Hay’ Pig, Scoob-Hay-Doo, Win-hay the Pooh, Pork-Hay-Pine, Croc hay dile, Rudolph the Red-Nosed ReinBale, Godz-hay-la, The Very Hungry Cathaypillar, Boob-hay trap, She thinks my tractor’s sex-hay (a hay bale tractor with a couple of cute gals waving from it to passers-by).

Movies, music and current events were represented: The Lhaygo Movie, Straw Wars, Because I’m Happhay, the Ice-Hay Bucket Challenge all had their Hay Day in the sub. One clever participant put out a simple bale of hay, and a sign with its title: “We are not CreHayTive.

Fanc Hay Pants, John Hay on the Spot, Needle in a haystack. Back in Hobson’s tiny business district, there was a Hay Zoo that includes El-Hay-Plants Blowing Bub-Bales.

And it was Sunday, so we cannot leave out the Meth-hay-dist woman.

Want to get yourself into the picture? There was a frame set up in front of hay bales for taking... wait for it... a self-hay.

After about two hours of laughter and photo-taking, we were back in town – dropping off our ballots in voting for the top three entries (and, in the ballot envelope, a cash donation to support the annual event). Bonnie and I agreed on the best – and we learned from an online report later in the week that it won top honors: Haypunzel, Let your hayr down. Straw Wars and Win-Hay the Pooh finished second and third, respectively and hilariously.

Back to the mountains

With five travel days left before our scheduled arrival in Aspen, Colorado, it was time to head southward – but not necessarily in a straight line. We left Montana through the entrance to Yellowstone National Park, where road construction inside the gates resulted in a delay of more than half an hour. And we avoided a route to Old Faithful that was closed for road repairs. Instead, we followed U.S. 89 through the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (where we had rented a cabin last time through), past the bubbling and smelly mud pits, around Yellowstone Lake, and south through an edge of the Grand Teton range.

Part of Yellowstone canyon

What’s left to say about great spectacle? We found elk and bison roaming the parks, and Bonnie got a classic photo of a bison leading a line of traffic down the road.

Lucky find

We followed the AAA map’s dotted path onto U.S. 287, heading southeasterly, and crossed the Wind River Indian Reservation – lucking into one of the most interesting places of the entire trip in Fort Washakie, spotting the only sign pointing to it down a narrow reservation roadway. Not even a mention of the distance, and down that road not even another sign showing where to turn. Some local folks driving out of their neighborhood pointed out the left turn to get there.

Sacajawea statue.

It was the gravesite of Sacajawea. Or maybe the purported gravesite of Sacajawea. There seems no certainty in the historical record about when she died or how, but on the highest ground of a Native American cemetery at Washakie stands an eloquent statue depicting the woman who, as a teenager, served as a guide to the Lewis and Clark expedition exploring and mapping western reaches of the continent.

The statue had been adorned with flowers and rings, and a variety of objects and coins left as offerings at its feet.

The Sacajawea Cemetery below the statue was fascinating, with each grave mound heavily decorated by friends and family of the deceased – creating a colorful patchwork of flowers, beer cans, jewelry, clothing, toys and the like. Even boots, and tennis shoes.

It was these artifacts decorating the graves that gave us a real sense of the humans buried there—unlike the uniform, traditional flowers and headstones adorning graves in other cemeteries.

It was, in a word, haunting.

Entrance to the cemetery.

A patchwork quilt of grave decorations.

... and throw the key away!

Continuing down the road, we chose a route toward Colorado based, in part, on the likelihood of a comfortable motel for our third night since the crossing into Montana. We ended up in Rawlins, where Bonnie had found yet another distraction: The Wyoming Frontier Prison, where you can get an hour-long tour of the way it used to be for folks who should have behaved better.

It starts with a scale-model demonstration of the Julien gallows – named for the inventor of this Rube Goldbergian contraption that was triggered by water draining from a bucket, so no executioner was needed to pull a handle. The last sounds the condemned would hear was about a minute of trickling water, then the trapdoor would be sprung.

The prison had a very good baseball team early in the century, playing on a field behind its high concrete walls. Visiting teams from the region would come in through a double locked gate behind home plate. But, alas, the success was not lasting – after the prison team went undefeated, its star catcher (convicted killer Joseph Seng) was gone -- hung from the gallows in 1912.

Trying a cell on for size...

We saw a series of cellblocks, and how their style and mechanics changed over the decades. None was very nice. But there was art – murals in the mess hall painted by a one-armed, two-time inmate with a record of theft and forgery.

Hanging was replaced by a gas chamber in the 1930s, and since we were joined only by one other couple on the 10:30 a.m. tour, there was time for me to try out its metal seat. It was not very comfortable.

When I posted the picture on Facebook, some of my friends suggested I belonged there. One was offended, pointing out that our people had been gassed by the Nazis. But lighten up, folks – this gas chamber was used individually only five times, lastly in 1965. The state’s statutory method now is lethal injection, and there’s apparently been only one in Wyoming since the gas chamber was retired.

Don't drop the acid!

The gas chamber is just a bizarre relic of its era, just like this prison – operated by a local foundation with grant funding, gifts, tour fees ($8 for adults, $7 for seniors), and sales in its gift/book shop. Almost bought a reproduction prisoner outfit. Halloween, you know – or maybe some fun stock photo poses.

_{Up next: Colorado, a wedding, and the turn toward home}