Twenty-five years ago, as a big-city university graduate student, I visited a cattle auction in Calhan, Colorado. At no point during my one-day visit was I tempted to make a bid

Bob West

Boulder architect Bob West  did make a bid. With cowriter Janet Fogg, he narrates his own growth journey as a developing cowboy in Twenty Miles of Fence, a collection of learnings and entertaining yarns that help city mice imagine how being a country mouse could be.

Cowriter Janet Fogg

Though West drew some satisfaction from minding horses back in Boulder, he tired of the city’s precious vibe and the usual workaday irritants, and decided that his passion and curiosity about ranch life was strong enough to stake a claim on. So he and his wife bought the 3,200-acre Devil’s Washtub Ranch in Wyoming, and set about learning the ways of the cowboy on the weekends.

Along the way, West absorbed tips of the trade from local mentors and ranch hands, and hosted visits from “the boys from Boulder,” white-collar work buddies who performed rough-and-tumble tasks in exchange for a weekend of wide-open escapism, and a few beers and steaks.

West gives us an entertaining tour of life and challenges at Devil’s Washtub Ranch. How to brand cows, and help mamas birth them. How to manage ranching economics (spoiler: here it’s a losing game), navigate an auction and use body language to bring around petulant beasts.

His anecdotes resonate most when they illuminate small-scale learnings about situations rarely imagined by those who are positioned to publish a book. West tells us about the need to dislodge enormous tumbleweeds stuck in a barbed wire fence, so that snowdrifts don’t collect upon them and damage the fence. He shows us baling twine has its function, but when improperly extricated from the hay, it can slice up a cow’s innards “like a wire cutting cheese.”

We are often reminded that West doesn’t have to be doing all this. We hear about his rise in the architecture profession, and snippets of family history that negated concerns about the profitability of his ranch work. We meet West’s ranch comrades and family members, but they mostly populate the narrative as static conduits for his own insights, even when they provoke major and unexpected transitions later in the book.

Making a working ranch work is not for dilettantes—especially on a property encompassing nearly five square miles, where hundreds of tons of livestock need to be kept alive. Twenty Miles of Fence reminds us that romance with Rocky Mountain ranch life remains to be found, even to those not bred to it, if you come with the right cocktail of resources, gumption and sweat.