Elk Creek Ranch Summer Camp
Elk Creek Ranch offers teenagers a unique summer camp experience combining a traditional ranch setting with a variety of wilderness activities in Wyoming's Northern Absaroka mountains.
Horseback Riding
The central activity at Elk Creek Ranch summer camp is western horseback riding. Each teenager is given his or her own horse and riding gear for the entire summer camp experience. The climax comes at the end of each session with a four-day pack-trip that embodies the essence of western horsemanship.
Backpacking
Backpacking at Elk Creek Ranch is an extensive and challenging adventure into one of the few remaining wilderness areas in the continental United States: the Absaroka and Beartooth Mountain Ranges in northwestern Wyoming and southwestern Montana.
Work Crew
We have always believed that a ranch experience without some ranch work is as unrewarding as it is artificial. The work itself ranges from the normal chores of a ranch operation to ambitious building projects and horse training.
Elk Creek Ranch is a summer of enjoyment, with groups sharing the camaraderie of youth and the recreational opportunities of the West. It is a summer of challenge, confronting each individual with rugged wilderness surroundings and a rustic life style. It is also a summer of involvement, with each teenager participating in a small camp community.
Elk Creek offers a taste of the Old West through training and riding horses as well as working on ranch chores and projects. Our Ranchers also receive an introduction to the New West, backpacking and packtripping through the high country and wilderness of Shoshone National Forest.
The Elk Creek Ranch experience has been for almost sixty years and remains today many-faceted, appealing to a variety of interests and abilities. Our purpose is to provide a challenging summer for each teen. The challenge is partly physical in that we are very active and mobile. It is partly mental in that the individual encounters a totally different mode of life. The challenge is also environmental in that the ranch is located in one of the few truly wild areas left in the continental United States. In meeting this blend of challenges, each individual gains a widened awareness of himself or herself and a greater appreciation of our western wilderness heritage.
We hope you will join us for a truly unique summer.
We hope you enjoy seeing the Elk Creek Ranch experience as told through their own storytelling.
Although Elk Creek Ranch helped me gain admission into Cornell University and the Wharton Business School, I hold more value and gratitude for the ranch's influence on my character.
First, I'm not kidding about Cornell and Wharton. My essays and interviews focused on my ranching history. Perhaps cohabitation with grizzly bears while backpacking for a month in the mountains of Wyoming distinguished me from the other applicants. Maybe pictures of the two-story log cabin we constructed from nearby pine trees illustrated perseverance. Or perhaps my inconsistently successful attempts to introduce a rambunctious colt to a saddle (sometimes with me in it) made them smile.
But these are not the influences of Elk Creek on my character that I cherish most. Instead, I look to the camaraderie of a crew that developed another motivation to work hard: one based on shared pride of toiling and trying and pushing together to achieve something tangible, enduring and worthwhile. Building a fence, irrigating a field, loading horses for a pack trip, we did all of these side by side, because there is no other way.
Summers at Elk Creek brought a supervised but unstructured environment in which to develop and maintain friendships with both boys and girls. It is where I learned how to show respect for other people, animals, and the environment because of their inherent worth, as opposed to blind adherence to parental edicts.
Finally, even on the first day of my first summer, Sunlight Basin resonated with me. I now call Wyoming my home, and return to the ranch for a few days every summer to reinvigorate my connection to my friends and idols, the almost impenetrable mountains and seemingly undiscovered creeks, elk and bear, surprise thunder storms and surreal sunsets, a Western heritage that is already part of legends, and is now a part of me.