Picture this: City Slickers meets Downton Abbey. Throw in a little a River Runs Through It, and that's the vibe Juanita Vero '91 says her guests feel when they visit her family's E Bar L Ranch, situated on 8,000 acres on the Blackfoot River, an hour east of Missoula, Montana. It's a location that's famed for its beauty, and it's land that Vero is actively engaged in protecting for the future.

Vero grew up on the ranch, which was founded by her great-grandfather, O.W. Potter. Potter was an engineer and a surveyor who'd been brought up in Chicago, where his family was in the steel business. After graduating from M.I.T., he "wanted to figure out where he wanted to be." So, like so many young men at the turn of the last century, he headed West," Vero says.

"I was very lucky to be born into this, therefore I feel a great responsibility to foster, steward, and share all that we have here."

Potter explored Montana as an engineer on the Northern Pacific Railroad before falling in love with the land along the Blackfoot River (the "river" of the famed book and movie A River Runs Through It).

Potter began buying land in 1906 and, after marrying Gertrude Landsburg (who married O.W. on a bet), decided to make the land a ranch and their permanent home. "It was a business marriage," Vero says of her great-grandparents. "She could be a difficult person."

When World War I broke out, the ranch lost all its farmhands, who joined up to fight the Kaiser. After the war ended, Potter's old college buddies from M.I.T. would visit, seeking an experience that would help ease their transition home. Tired of feeding and housing guests with no compensation, Gertrude and O.W. decided to open the ranch to paying customers in the mid-1920s. These guests were usually New Englanders fascinated by the Wild West, which was becoming more accessible thanks to the construction of the railroads. The ranch's first name—El Dor El—was derived from Vero's great-grandfather's three sisters, Eleanor, Dorothy, and Elizabeth, who helped fund the land purchases. The name was later changed to E Bar L.

Being kind to the land has always been a priority at E Bar L, Vero says. "For many years the logging that happened on the ranch was for building structures and getting firewood. We didn't get electricity here until the late 1950s, and didn't stop using ice from our ice pond and ice house until the mid-1960s.

"In the 1970s there was a pine beetle infestation, and my grandfather (O.W. 'Bill' Potter, Jr.) had to figure out a way to save his timber. That forced him into forestry, and he began working closely with the University of Montana Forestry School's Lubrecht Experimental Forest, which is just down the road from us," Vero says.

"My grandfather was known for retrofitting his farm equipment for logging purposes, and for creating uneven aged stands of timber with the dead, dying, deformed, diseased trees removed so it looked as if a natural fire had gone through," Vero says. "Our guests ride through this landscape, so he was also very particular about 'clean' logging operations. He was much lighter on the land than traditional logging operations because most of the logging activity happened in the fall and winter, when the ground was frozen. Our guest season is from May until October, so there wasn't time to log during those months."

"My grandfather also had family members working for him—you don't have to pay family members to do this more tedious, time-consuming form of logging the way you would proper employees," Vero adds. "He was fortunate that he had the guest ranch business to supplement the logging, so he wasn't dependent on logging income and could make choices that made better conservation and long term economic sense, but that maybe weren't immediately economical."

The Lay of the Land

Scenery abounds at the E Bar L Ranch. Stunning mountains, gorgeous sunsets, and winding trails greet guests.

"We're in western Montana, which looks like a profile of a face. The eye is the Blackfoot watershed, and that's where we are," she says. "It's ponderosa pines, mountains, prairies—just a fantastic landscape. It's great riding terrain."

Riding through the sagebrush and the ponderosa pines, the mountains and the prairie, hearing nothing but the creak of the saddle and the cries of birds, is heaven for Vero.

The only livestock that the ranch supports are the horses that guests spend their days riding through the gorgeous countryside—the ranch has 97 horses. The family continued to operate the guest ranch through World War II, and by the late 1960s, Juanita's mother Mary, O.W. Jr.'s daughter, had fallen in love with Louis Vero, one of the ranch hands, a Filipino wrangler from California hired as summer help.

"That caused all sorts of drama," Vero says, "but they stuck it out for five years—them against the world"—before marrying. The scandal lingered, as interracial marriages were still uncommon at that time. But along came Juanita and her brother, and now she runs the business with other members of her extended ranch family welcoming visitors for weeks or months each season.

Growing up in the remote area as she did was wonderful, Vero says, but because the ranch is so far from other communities, she "didn't get the social references" her peers learned from watching television and movies, she says. She graduated from Taft in 1991 and after graduating from Lewis and Clark College returned to the ranch.

"Taft should be, and no doubt is, very proud of Juanita. My family has been visiting the E Bar L Ranch for 23 consecutive years, so we have known 'Juan' for quite a while. While I have no doubt she would be successful in any setting, she is a child of the wilds of Montana. She is an amazing rider, a poised businesswoman, a passionate environmentalist, and, most important if one is fortunate enough to ride the mountains with her for three to four hours, a marvelous storyteller." —Bill McClure

A minimum stay at the E Bar L Ranch is a week, and they accept about 40 guests at a time. Guests stay in rustic log cabins and take meals together in the large lodge with a huge stone fireplace.

"We're open from the beginning of June to the end of September," Vero says. "For a guest, it's get up, eat breakfast at 7, be at the corral by 8, go out riding until noon, come back, and eat lunch. Then there's skeet shooting or rifle shooting or float down the river in an inner tube for a couple of hours, followed by cocktails and dinner. After that there's a ranch-wide softball game, and then we sit around the campfire. It's like summer camp for the entire family."

Apart from a Facebook page for the ranch, there's very little in the way of advertising. Vero gets her business through word of mouth and from repeat clients, many of whom have come since they were children.

The challenges facing a family-owned and operated business that's been passed through several generations can be tricky to navigate, Vero says. Her mother and father recently retired from the business, and a trust was set up to ensure that her grandfather's wishes for the ranch would be honored. The ranch brings in young college students each summer to help with the day-to-day operations.

"It's long days," she says. "It's fun, but you're on all the time."

Riding through the sagebrush and the ponderosa pines, the mountains and the prairie, hearing nothing but the creak of the saddle and the cries of birds, is heaven for Vero.

A Commitment to Conservation

"I care so much about Montana and the part of Montana where I live, it makes me really happy, but you have to share that," she says. "When you have something fantastic that gives you joy, if you can't share it with other people, it doesn't work. I love being able to share this space. Generations of guests have been coming here—people who knew my mom before she met my dad. To have clients like that, I don't consider them clients, they're family."

"The ranch experience, that's such an honor to be able to provide," Vero says. "It's just something that's very organic, a culture and a structure to the place that's hard to describe."

Caring for that land and the river that runs through it is part of the reason Vero joined the Big Blackfoot Chapter of Trout Unlimited in 1998, soon after she returned to the ranch after college. "I don't fish, don't know a tippet from my elbow, but the ranch is on the hallowed Blackfoot River," Vero says. "Clean, cold, connected, complex water is important to us regardless, and BBCTU has helped us improve our irrigation practices, conserve water, and improve trout habitat. Why should we care about fish? They are indicator species of our watershed's health. Also, people come to Montana to fish."

In 1975, the earthen Mike Horse tailings dam failed, and 100,000 tons of toxic sludge went into the Blackfoot River. By the 1980s the fishery was suffering due to years of ranching, mining, and logging along the tributaries. An open-pit cyanide heap leach gold mine was also being considered for the headwaters on the Blackfoot near Lincoln, Montana. Landowners became anxious, decided to get serious about organizing, and formed a Trout Unlimited chapter to address concerns about the proposed mine.

"A baseline study needed to be done to inventory the river but no state funding was available," Vero says. "One of E Bar L Ranch's longtime guests, an avid fly fisherman from Chicago, asked how much was needed and wrote a check to get the study done. That mine and another proposed in the mid-1990s did not get built. The Blackfoot's fishery has been restored, and the Big Blackfoot Chapter of Trout Unlimited is one of the most active restoration chapters in the country."

But the environmental challenges didn't end there, Vero says. In 2005 an "egregious" subdivision for 119 lots on 200 acres next door to the ranch was proposed. "How could something like this happen in 'our' utopian Blackfoot Valley?" Vero says. "I educated myself on land use planning, my county's process, and better understanding local and state government. This led to me being on the board of Montana Conservation Voters, which has broadened my perspective to include statewide issues. In 2006, I was appointed to the county's Open Lands Committee."

Vero says that 2005 was also the year when any tract of land with a road, or potential for a road plus views of snow-capped mountains and within two hours of an airport, was at risk of being subdivided and developed. For over 60 years the E Bar L Ranch had leased 4,000 adjacent acres from Plum Creek Timber (and other timber companies before them), which was interested in selling its timberlands for development.

"Our ranch guests helped raise $2.5 million for a conservation easement to be put on those adjacent 4,000 acres that we had always leased," says Vero. "We already had a conservation easement on the ranch land (about 4,000 acres), so that no matter what happened, our land and the land we lease cannot be subdivided or developed. It was probably the most important endeavor I've ever been part of."

With the help of the Blackfoot Challenge—a landowner-based group that coordinates management of the watershed—and The Nature Conservancy, 88,000 acres in the Blackfoot Watershed were protected from development by being sold to conservation buyers.

"I sometimes have fantasies of going to law school—not to be an attorney, but to learn how to better think about these issues: conservation, growth, community development, while maintaining the state of mind that is Montana," Vero says.

"One can simply read or hear the word Montana, and it conjures up images and emotions that I feel invested in delivering: clean air, clean water, wild places, access, community, solitude, freedom—perhaps an overused word nowadays—and opportunity.

"I was very lucky to be born into this, therefore I feel a great responsibility to foster, steward, and share all that we have here."