My Friends and I Paid Good Money to Get Kicked by Calves, and I'd Do It Again Tomorrow. The Double Rafter Cattle Drive That Broke Me and Rebuilt Me Over Four Days In Wyoming.

There is a version of the American West that lives in our heads. 

We've seen it in movies, heard it in certain songs, felt it in that specific melancholy that hits when we're watching a sunset from a parking lot. 

It's the version where men are measured by what they can endure- where the land doesn't care about your feelings, where the work is real and the silence is earned and the animals are partners, and not props.

Most of us will never live in that version.

But for four days last August, I got to visit it.

The Double Rafter cattle drive sits about as far from my actual life as anything I've ever done. I'm a half-assed DJ masquerading as a half-assed writer from Worcester, Massachusetts who lives in a highrise building in downtown Chicago, and whose most physically demanding regular activity is carrying cases of beer up two flights of stairs. 

I know things about music, and sports and bars, and the specific texture of modern life that doesn't require you to be particularly tough. 

I'm not too insecure enough to admit I own several skincare products. 

I have extremely strong opinions about olive oils. 

I once spent twenty minutes in a heated debate about pasta shapes.

None of that prepared me for Wyoming.

But none of it was supposed to. 

So you're probably wondering, how did seven guys end up on a cattle drive in the middle of nowhere Wyoming together? 

Midlife crises? 

No, but fair guess. 

The way most people end up doing something like this is that one person in a friend group gets an idea, pitches it with too much enthusiasm, and everyone agrees before they fully understand what they've signed up for.

That's pretty much what happened.

What I can tell you is that the seven of us were a perfect cross-section of what happens to a friend group in your thirties and forties. 

My buddy Kevin moved to Kansas City, has a kid now, and we see him maybe once a year if we get lucky. 

My friend Tony is out in the Chicago suburbs buried under four children- a man whose confidence consistently outpaces his preparation, which made him perfectly suited for this trip and honestly for life in general. 

My friend Chris works for a news station in Boston, has five kids of his own, and operates at a pace that makes the rest of us look like we're standing still. 

My best friend Vincent was in, like me, no questions asked. 

And Patrick and Jake rounded out the crew, neither of whom had ever once been on a horse in their lives before.

(I'll come back to that.)

The ranch hands took one look at us and started calling us the Magnificent 7 right off the bat. They meant it as a joke. But we chose to take it as a compliment, wear it as a badge of honor, and move on.

My whole point is we don't get to see each other enough. None of us do. 

Life does that thing where it spreads us apart so gradually we don't even notice until we're sitting at someone's kitchen table during the holidays and we realize we've been talking for three hours and we haven't actually talked like this in two years. 

The trip was the excuse, the ranch was the destination, and what happened in between was the thing none of us fully saw coming.

Or maybe some of us did.

We flew into Billings, Montana the day before the drive began and drove to Sheridan, Wyoming in the early morning.

The first thing we noticed about Sheridan was that downtown looked like something a set designer built for a Taylor Sheridan show and then forgot to take down. Except nobody built it, it was just there. 

The buildings looked the way buildings look when they've been standing long enough that nobody questions them anymore. Old storefronts, wide streets, the specific energy of a Western town that hasn't been renovated into something else yet.

We found the Silver Dollar Diner and walked in and I'm telling you, if you took every cowboy diner you've ever imagined and distilled them into one actual place, this is what you'd get. 

Place was straight out of Yellowstone. 

The food was incredible- it was the kind of food that doesn't need to explain itself. 

We sat down, ordered, ate, and we left understanding something about this part of the country that we hadn't understood before.

Then we hit the Mint Bar.

The Mint Bar is one of the top five bars I've been to anywhere in the world. This is not a take I'm open to debating, it's not a take I even understand how someone would debate. 

Write it down, put it on the list, and don't question it and if you ever have the reason to visit Sheridan, plan on spending as much time as you possibly can at this bar. It is the that special.

And here's where it got funny.

The place was packed with locals- as in real Wyoming people who live there and drink there and have been going there for years. 

We walked in and stuck out like seven sore thumbs from the Midwest who had clearly just gotten off a plane. 

One of the guys at the bar came up and introduced himself. 

My friend Tony, who is from Buffalo, was wearing a Bills shirt, and in Wyoming, because of the Josh Allen connection, there's a massive Bills fanbase. So the guy clocks Tony's shirt immediately then asks him if he's local or just visiting.

Tony said he's from Buffalo.

The guy asked what brought us out to Wyoming.

Tony told him we're heading to Double Rafter for a cattle drive.

The guy's face changed completely.

"Oh my god. Are you guys part of that Barstool group?"

Because this guy had read my blog (posted above) a week earlier, I'd written a piece about the trip and said I needed all the advice I could get. This guy, in the Mint Bar, in Sheridan, Wyoming, at 11 o'clock at night, had read it. Tony pointed me out, the guy asked for a picture, said he was a huge Barstool fan, started telling everybody in the bar, couldn't believe we were there. It was pretty cool and a good omen.

(Sidebar- I need to know what his algorithm looks like that Barstool blogs are coming through.)

But showed the reach and that people are reading. 

And it set the tone for what ended up being the most memorable week of my life, because we hadn't even gotten to the ranch yet and Wyoming was already proving it was going to be different in the best ways possible.

The next morning we drove out to Double Rafter. And once we arrived, that was it. 

We were there and there was no leaving. 

No running out to grab something you forgot to pack. No quick trips into town.

Also- no cell service.

No electricity.

Nothing. Nada. Niente.

It is important to understand what that actually means in practice- because I think most people read "off the grid" and picture something cute. 

Like a cabin with bad Wi-Fi or something. 

This wasn't close to that. 

This was genuinely, completely, absolutely disconnected from everything. 

We couldn't check our phones because our phones were bricks. 

We couldn't scroll or text or look anything up or distract ourselves with anything digital because none of it existed out there. 

The only light after dark was the fire. And the only entertainment was the people around us.

We weren't going to bars at night. We were drinking what we brought and what the Kerns family supplied. That was the deal. 

For four days we existed in a place where the 21st century had not arrived and was not expected. 

We ate when the food was ready, slept when the work was done, and we woke up when the ranch woke up.

I won't lie, the first few hours of that felt disorienting. 

Our hands kept going to our pockets. 

We kept catching ourselves reaching for something that wasn't there. 

It was like a phantom limb for the chronically online.

But by the end of day one, something started to shift in us all. 

And by day two, we didn't want it back. It was fucking awesome.

We realized how much noise we'd been carrying around in our heads and how quiet our brains got when we took away the machine that feeds it garbage 18 hours a day.

The drive began before it officially begins. 

Follow me here.

On the first day, before a single cow moved an inch, we had "horse school". 

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Horse school is run by a man named Taylor.

Let me tell you about Taylor.

Taylor is not mean. (Even though he sometimes tries to be)

He's not harsh. 

He doesn't bark at you or make you feel stupid. (Even though he tried with me, way too many times)

But he operates with a level of directness and economy that makes us stop whatever we're doing and pay full attention. 

He commands every field he walks into- not through volume but through weight. 

He has the kind of authority that comes from actually knowing things and not needing to perform knowing them. If that makes sense. 

What separates Taylor as a teacher from anyone I've ever had in any context is that he explains the WHY.

He wouldn't say for example just- hold the reins this way.

Instead, he's says here's why we hold them this way, here's what happens to the horse when we don't, here's what that means when we're on a 60-degree slope with a 900-pound animal underneath us and a bad decision has about a half-second window before it becomes a medically interesting situation.

My friends and I discussed later that night how effective the crash course was because when we understood the reason behind a rule, the rule sticks. We didn't forget it because it wasn't arbitrary anymore. 

Out on a real cattle drive, forgetting things isn't an inconvenience. It's a liability to you, your horses, and everyone riding with us.

Taylor knows this all too well, and so he teaches accordingly.

It was seriously pretty crazy in retrospect… I mean we had people in our group that had never been on a horse before. And after a pretty brief crash course, were not only expected to saddle up and tacking up their own horse, but were then up on it and riding some pretty rough terrain a couple hours later. It was like throwing a baby into the pool and having them figure out how to swim.

But they clearly knew what they were doing because it worked better than any training-wheel type instruction would have. And they paired us with horses based on our registration questionnaires- height, weight, experience. 

Then they watched us ride and adjusted as needed.

I got paired with a horse named Cracker Jack. This is important information for later.

The feeling we left that first session with was a precise mix of excitement and low-grade terror that was, honestly, intoxicating. 

We felt alive in a way that most of modern life doesn't provide for anymore. The kind of alive that requires something from us.

I need to stop here and do real justice to something I completely underestimated going in.

I'd always respected horses the way we respect something large and powerful that could squash us like an ant without meaning to. Polite, distant respect. The kind we give to something that operates on a different scale- like elephants. 

That's not the same feeling that I left with.

What I left with was closer to reverence for these incredible animals.

These horses, the ones the Kerns family has assembled and rescued and rehabbed and turned into working partners over the years, are among the most remarkable creatures I have ever been around. And the thing that got me wasn't the size or the strength, or even the sure-footedness on terrain that makes no physical sense for an animal of that mass. 

It was their intelligence. Theri emotional intelligence, specifically.

Horses mirror us.

It's crazy. 

I'm not trying to be poetic. 

It's a real, observable, repeatable phenomenon that every single person in our group experienced and commented on independently. 

If we're tense, our horses get tense. 

When we're calm, our horses settle. 

We're confident, our horses move with confidence. 

We second-guess ourselves mid-motion and our horses feel it before our brains have even finished the thought.

The second our boots hit the stirrups, they knew who they were dealing with. It's wild. 

Fun Fact- Horses have the second-best memory of any animal on earth behind elephants. And I believe it. These animals knew the ranch the way we know our own houses in the dark. They knew the trails, terrain, cattle, dogs (more on them later),  the routines. They have a sixth sense about location that functions like an internal compass. In the middle of nowhere, under conditions where most humans would be completely turned around, they know exactly where home is.

The Kerns family rescues horses and buys them cheap, animals that have been given up on or written off. Then they put the work in and rebuild them into partners. Most are quarter horses: compact, smart, quick, and capable of accessing a gear you didn't know existed when things get serious. Some are larger crosses from Amish breeders with bigger hooves and broader builds and zero hesitation about mixing it up with cattle.

On Day 3 they switched me from Cracker Jack to a roan named Laredo.

Laredo had opinions in the morning. 

Strong ones. 

We were in active negotiation about our working relationship for a while, and I was not clearly winning that negotiation.

Then something shifted after lunch. Whatever Laredo was testing for in the morning, I must have passed. Because in the afternoon he turned into Superman. Smooth, intuitive, fearless, completely locked in. The kind of ride where you stop thinking about riding and you just move together.

(That's my confidence telling me that I won him over through my riding ability and not the 2 peanut butter granola bars I fed him on the down low.)

By the end of the week I didn't want to give him back.

Back to the dogs now. 

Because I need to talk about the dogs.

I've seen well-trained dogs before. 

Police friends' police dogs. 

Military working dogs. 

Dogs that can do obstacle courses and demonstrate a level of discipline that would embarrass most people I know. I thought I understood what a working dog was.

I had no f'n clue.

These ranch dogs are maybe twenty pounds soaking wet. Kelpie and kelsey mixes, lean and low and built for endurance. They spend their days managing cattle that outweigh them by a factor of thirty or forty to one.

And they have zero fear.

Dana's son told us early in the week- "one good ranch dog is worth ten cowboys."

We nodded the polite kind of nod you give when someone says something that sounds like it belongs on a barn wall. 

Sure, man. Ranch dog. Ten cowboys. Very rustic.

By the end of the week nobody was nodding politely, because we were doing the math out loud.

These dogs didn't respond to herd chaos, they anticipated it. 

They could read a break forming before it happened. They would cut off escape routes before the cattle had committed to them. They applied pressure at precise angles, in precise amounts, snapping animals back into line with the calm authority of someone who has been running this operation their entire life and is quietly disappointed in everyone else's performance.

There were whistles and commands, yes, but mostly these dogs just knew the assignment.

Outnumbered, outsized, and outmatched on paper, but running the whole operation in practice. 

Watching them work rewired something in our brains about what intelligence and instinct looked like, and what the difference is between knowing the job and understanding the mission. 

These dogs understood the mission. Most people never get there. These twenty-pound animals lived it every single day.

To the point they would pass out from the hardest days work you've ever seen every night around the campfire- sometimes before enjoying their well earned supper. 

Now let me get to the family. 

What nobody tells you about Double Rafter, and what no amount of reading about it actually prepares you for is the family.

The Kerns family doesn't perform ranching for our benefit. 

They don't put on a curated version of ranch life that's been cleaned up and made palatable for people who drive cars with heated seats. 

They just live. 

And they let us live alongside them for a week.

Dana Kerns sleeps outside every night. 

If it rains he pulls a tarp over himself and keeps sleeping. 

He has done this for more years than I could confirm. 

Sit with that detail for a second. 

Not a tenr and not a hammock. 

Outside- tarp if necessary. Every night.

I am one one-thousandth of the man Dana Kerns is. 

I did not need this trip to confirm that. The trip confirmed it anyway, with interest.

His sons run the ranch alongside him. There is Trent who is the middle son. Taylor, the youngest, who runs horse school and is the reason the Magnificent 7 survived the week with most of our dignity intact, and Brendan, the oldest, who before coming back to the ranch had been the chief legal officer at a hospital. Yes, Chief legal officer at a hospital and in his spare time, ranching cattle. The West contains multitudes and the Kerns family specifically contains about twice as many multitudes as you'd expect.

One of them is raising three kids on the open range. 

Three little kids- one of them is three years old and rides a horse with more confidence and composure than anyone in our group showed on day one. His name is Jack and he is three years old. 

Jack is better than you. Jack was better than everybody. Jack was the absolute man and I saw him ride a grown horse all by himself easier than most kids his age can tie their shoe. 

Dana's wife Alice is the sweetest kindest woman you'll ever meet, and she heads up all of the cooking out of here. 

And when I tell you the meals were outstanding, I mean that with zero exaggeration. 

How she was working her magic out of a tiny little tent with no electricity, and just a small gas burner, is beyond me. But everybody was raving about the food all week.

Both of the daughters-in-law work the ranch. 

And then there is the niece.

She couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen. And I'm telling you, without hyperbole and with full awareness of how this sounds, she was the best rider I saw all week. Better than guests who had been riding for years. And better than adults with real experience. She moved through terrain that had grown men renegotiating our relationship with fear, and she did it with an ease so complete it didn't even register to her as anything worth noting.

Zero hesitation or fear. Pure competence.

And one of the craziest parts of it all is that none of this is remarkable to them. They're not showing off, and they don't Instagram it. They don't need anyone to see it. They wake up, they do the work, they go to sleep. They wake up again. The work is still there.

The essence of this family is that they are always there for each other. And always present. 

When you watch them operate for four days, what you notice isn't just competence- it's the way they move as a unit without having to say anything. 

Nobody waits to be asked. 

Nobody checks to see if someone else is handling it. They all just handle it, together, because that's what their life has always required of them.

One afternoon I was riding alongside Taylor and he told me about a wreck he'd had on the trail. The horse spooked, things went sideways fast. He got thrown and crushed. Broke multiple ribs. Said the pain was indescribable. Hospital couldn't do much beyond telling him to rest.

So I asked the obvious question- How long were you laid up?

He looked at me the way you look at someone who has said something that doesn't connect to any version of reality you inhabit.

"What do you mean?"

I said, how long before you could get back to work?

He laughed.

"Brother, I had to be there the next day."

He rode on broken ribs for weeks while they healed. Because "the cattle don't take weekends. The horses don't know what a sick day is. The ranch doesn't pause for your recovery timeline."

So neither do they.

I've thought about that exchange more times than I can count since I got home. It's not bravado or some macho toughness being performed for visitors. It's just the reality of a life built on responsibility. Their animals depend on them. Their land depends on them. And their family depends on them. Pain is a variable in the equation but it doesn't change the equation.

That's a different relationship with obligation than most of us have ever been asked to have. 

And being around people who live that way, even for just a few days, rearranges something in you. At least it did for me. 

I started thinking differently about the things we've complained about. The things I've called hard. Shit Ive used as excuses. 

Just another part of the experience that you can't quantify or put a price tag on. 

Speaking of that, something I didn't fully understand until I was standing out there in it, and something I think every person who books this trip should know before they arrive- The Double Rafter Ranch was homesteaded in 1887. The Kerns family came from Missouri in a covered wagon and settled at the base of the Bighorn Mountains near Sheridan. The barn they built the following year is still standing. And it is still functional. We rode past it and it didn't register at first because it looked like it belonged there, and then it registered- that barn might be older than the state of Wyoming. (It was)

They are seventh generation ranchers. 

Not third or fourth. Seventh. 

There are kids on that ranch who represent the continuation of a family story that started before Wyoming was a state, and before the Bighorn Mountains were designated as National Forest land, band efore any of the infrastructure of modern America existed in that part of the world.

And they have sadly, almost lost it- twice.

The hard times came in the 1970s and early 1980s when interest rates under Carter hit 18 percent. Dana says it with the specific bitterness of a man who watched those numbers do real damage to real people. 18% on ranch debt, when you're running cattle and your margins are already razor thin and the bank is charging you 18 percent, the math stops working fast. 

So, in a story right out of Yellowstone, the Kerns family, like hundreds of family ranching operations across the West, had to start selling off land. 

Land that had been in the family since 1887. 

The same land that their great-great-grandparents had claimed and built and bled for.

They sold off large segments. They watched the footprint of what their family had built shrink. And when that still wasn't enough, Dana and his brothers sat down and decided they had two options- to diversify or get out of the cattle business entirely.

Thankfully, they chose to diversify.

In 1990, Double Rafter Cattle Drives were born. 

They started inviting paying guests to join them on the drive, trailing the herd the same way they had for over a hundred years. 

Same camps, routes, and work. Just with some bewildered visitors from the Midwest tagging along and paying for the privilege of being humbled.

And believe it or not, Dana says it saved the ranch.

But the threat didn't go away, it just changed shape.

Because of what's happening to family ranching in this country right now, and it should make us furious. Taylor explained multiple times throughout the week to me, and I hope my memory does this justice (forgive me if any of this is incorrect). 

In 1977, the four largest meatpacking companies controlled about 25 percent of the market. Today they control over 80 percent. Four companies, eighty percent. 

The rancher raises the animal, feeds it, cares for it, and puts everything into it, and then has to sell it at whatever price the Big Four decide to offer, because there is no other option. No leverage and no alternatives. You take what they give you or you don't sell.

Since 1980, 40 percent of family ranches in this country have gone out of business.

Bonkers.

The Double Rafter is still here because Dana Kerns and his family refused to let it die. And because they got creative. 

Because they opened their land and their lives to strangers and figured out how to turn the authenticity of what they do into something people would travel across the country to experience. and because Taylor and Trent and their wives came back to the ranch after pursuing other paths and put their shoulders into keeping it alive for the next generation.

That 1888 barn is still standing because this family would not let it fall.

I think about that every time someone talks about where their food comes from, or complains about grocery prices, or doesn't think twice about buying whatever the store brand beef is without wondering who raised it and what it cost them to get it there.

The Kerns family is the answer to that question. 

And they need people to know they exist.

Now for the ranch itself. 

Let me describe what we were actually doing out there, because I don't think the words "cattle drive" fully land for people who haven't done it.

Every day we covered miles, and I mean miles, of terrain that had no interest in accommodating us. 

I'm talking ninety-degree slopes. Loose shale. Narrow passes with drops on one side and vertical rock on the other. Ravines so deep and wild they looked like they belonged in a different century. Creeks and streams that our horses simply decided we were crossing whether we'd mentally prepared for that or not.

And cattle, who are large and stubborn and occasionally furious about being relocated, scattered across all of it.

There was a day- the best day, that still sits behind my eyes when I close them, when we dropped into a ravine that looked like a prop from Jurassic Park. 

I mean that literally. 

Steep slopes falling away on both sides of a creek running through the bottom, cattle and calves scattered on both rises, the kind of green that made us feel like we'd wandered into something that predates human language. It was crazy. 

We pushed cattle down into the creek and through it, gathering animals from both sides simultaneously, and were met partway through by other groups pushing their own herds. The whole thing converged, four or five separate efforts becoming one moving mass of cattle and horses and dogs and shouting and dust.

It was ELECTRIC.

After we got that herd through, we decided to go back down into the ravine to help push the last herd up. And I know how stupid that sounds, because we had the option to be done, but we chose to go back in. 

But that's what this place does to you. By day three or four we stopped thinking about being comfortable and we started thinking about the work. We wanted to be part of it and we wanted to finish it.

It was also the day a bull decided he wasn't participating in whatever we had planned. Just stood there on the main road like a bruick wall with a personal agenda. Then the herd broke off into the woods and chaos ensued. Nobody with a functioning brain argues with a bull. So we worked around the bull, accepted that he had made a decision, and adapted accordingly.

The horses handled all of it. 

I'm talking every grade, obstacle, every sudden direction change. 

On what appear to be, comically, toothpick legs, carrying 700 to 900 pounds of rider and saddle up inclines that would put most humans on their knees. 

They somehow never step wrong. 

They breathe hard on the uphills at elevation and stop sometimes to catch their breath, and even that, even the fact that they manage their own exertion and know their own limits, seems almost impossibly thoughtful for an animal.

We stopped thinking about steering them somewhere around Day 3. We started trusting them. 

There's a significant difference between those two things and it took me until Wednesday to fully feel it.

This place is not City Slickers. I need to be direct about that.

Double Rafter is not a dude ranch. 

(Sidebar- if you are looking for a Dude Ranch experience, this is not for you. You will be waking up with the sun every morning, and on horseback for 7-12 hours a day. You are working. Back breaking work. When you get back to camp and finish dinner, you can barely keep you eyes open. What you see and experience is too incredible for words, yes, but this is not a relaxing vacation by any means.)

Nobody hands you a curated Western experience and takes it back at the end of the day. The Kerns family puts you to work because there is work to be done, and if we're there, we're part of the operation.

Case in point- the bull.

On Day 3, one of the younger bulls, about 600 pounds and full of piss and vinegar, needed an injection. The ranch hands needed help pinning it. So they looked at our group and asked who wanted to volunteer.

I want to be honest about what my first instinct was- which was to suddenly need to be somewhere else.

Tony's instinct was different.

Tony walked over without breaking stride. Dana's son swung a lasso, caught the bull's feet, and pulled it to the ground. Tony and a couple of others piled on top and pinned it. Another son sprinted in, gave the shot, and everyone ran for their lives. 

Not trotted. RAN. Before 600 pounds of confused and angry young bull got back to its feet. I was equal parts terrified and equally blown away.

I don't know exactly how far Tony ran before he stopped. But I know he was grinning when he turned around. 

And then came "vaccination day."

Officially the last afternoon of the trip, and completely optional. But unanimously chosen. The Kerns family asked if we wanted to go back to camp after lunch or help them vaccinate and inoculate their entire herd.

I am proud to say that every single one of the Magnificent 7 chose the herd.

We split into small groups and spread out across the ranch- starting at the edges and working inward, pushing every loose head of cattle toward a central meeting point. From there we separated the mothers from the calves into a holding pen. Then we took five calves at a time into a smaller pen, and from there two or three at a time into a chute.

There's where it got physical.

The calves weighed around 300 pounds and were not interested in the chute. They kicked, and jumped, and spun. Their hooves are hard and sharp in a way we didn't fully understand until one landed on your foot. Getting them into position required three people in the pen steering them to one side and two people in the chute running what I can only describe as offensive line drills, full body, shoulder down, pushing these animals forward while they pushed back, until they were positioned to be harnessed and vaccinated.

Shot up the nose- that's how it's administered. We pinned a 300-pound calf, harnessed it, and shot the vaccine up its nose while it tried to disassemble us from the shins down. Hundreds of times.

It took four to five hours- all hands on deck. All seven of us, the whole time.

The ranch said it would have gone into the night without us.

Nobody said much on the ride back to camp after that. 

There's a specific kind of accomplishment that doesn't require words. The kind that lives in our bodies, arms, and in the dust still on our faces and the knowledge that the work got done and we were part of it. 

Not like tourists who helped out. 

But like people who showed up, took it seriously, and got their money's worth. 

The Kerns' knew it and we knew it. And it felt like we actually might have earned a little bit of their respect. 

And that was enough.

Now for Patrick and Jake. 

I told you we'd come back to them.

Patrick and Jake arrived in Wyoming as two guys in our crew who, to put it gently, weren't at the peak of their friendship. They'd drifted a bit. No drama or fallout, just the natural way people sometimes end up on different sides of the room over time.

And neither of them had ever been on a horse. Not once.

They showed up, got their assignments, put their boots in the stirrups, and rode out without a visible moment of hesitation.

By the end of the week they were the two best riders in the group. 

Not the best among first-timers. The best, period. 

The ranch hands were commenting on it unprompted. 

People who have spent their lives on horseback and watched hundreds of guests come through, stopping to note how naturally those two moved, how fast they developed feel and communication with their horses.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, between the ravines and the cattle and the campfire and the general daily experience of being pushed to your limit alongside people you give a damn about, Patrick and Jake became close. The drift reversed and the gap closed.

I don't know exactly when it happened. I don't think they do either. 

That's kind of how it works when something real happens. We don't narrate it in the moment. We just find ourselves standing next to someone thinking, "yeah, this person is in my corner."

Being on the ranch does that. 

I don't know if it's the shared hardship or the removal from everything that usually distracts us from each other, or just the specific chemistry of being genuinely scared and legitimately challenged alongside people you love. 

But it works. Every time.

Getting a genuine week of quality time with these six guys, not a dinner where half of us are checking phones, or a bar where it's too loud to hear each other, or a holiday where everyone is distracted and stretched thin, was quietly the most valuable thing about the entire trip. 

And the fact that there were no phones to check, no notifications pulling anyone's attention, no half-conversations interrupted by a buzz in someone's pocket, meant we were actually there with each other in a way that almost never happens anymore.

As one of the other guests on the trip put it around the campfire one night, "the cattle were the vehicle, the friendship was the destination."

Speaking of the campfire…

Every night, no matter how wrecked we were, or how many new locations on our bodies had developed bruises or blisters, we found ourselves drifting toward the fire.

It was magnetic, and everyone felt it.

When we have no electricity, screens, or options, the fire becomes the center of the world. And honestly, it should be. The work would finally stop and someone would pour a whiskey and someone else would throw another log on and within a few minutes the whole group was there, boots off, and the day, the chaos and near-misses and victories and moments we were certain we were about to die in a scenic and inconvenient way, would start getting retold.

And the retelling is where the day became the story. 

The thing that actually happened to us that afternoon became the thing we'll tell for the rest of our lives, and we can feel it happening in real time. That's what a campfire does- it turns experience into folklore.

And Dana's sons would get going.

These men are storytellers in the oldest sense of the word. 

Not polished or rehearsed. Just men with a hundred stories from a life lived at full volume, and the specific gift of making us feel like we're hearing each one for the first time even though they've clearly told them a thousand times before. The same story they told the group before us, and the group before them, delivered with identical vigor and enthusiasm because the story isn't a performance for them. 

It's a memory they genuinely love reliving. 

We'd be leaning forward without realizing we'd moved. Laughing before the punchline arrived, or jaws open at a turn we didn't see coming.

Then came the nightly awards.

The awards were less a ceremony and more a nightly public accounting of the day's finest exercises in poor judgment, handed out by a group with absolutely no mercy. 

Tony and I were the reliable nominees. 

The moisturizer situation- and yes I brought moisturizer on a cattle drive, and yes I used it, and no I won't apologize for my skincare routine, but yes I deserved every moment of what followed. Also the bandaids. The incident involving the trees and the designated side of the trees for men versus the side that is not, which I got wrong due to a hearing situation I will not elaborate on further except to say it did not help my reputation with the group.

This kept coming up. 

Every night- different variation, same punchline- "Dante doesn't know where he is, geographically or socially."

None of it was mean-spirited. 

But all of it was merciless. 

There is a specific kind of being roasted that feels like belonging, and that's exactly what this was.

(Sidebar- The moisturizer in question was a very normal and perfectly acceptable hand cream that any reasonable adult male would use after multiple days of manual labor. It's called Working Hands for crying out loud and was recommended on several message boards. I will die on this hill. I will be buried on it. With moisturized hands.)

The Double Rafter runs small groups, under thirty people total, which means we actually got to know everyone there. Some groups were there for corporate team building, which makes complete sense when you consider there is no team building exercise on earth that creates actual trust faster than shared physical hardship and nightly ritual humiliation.

And then there were the two women from England, living in Canada, working as movie producers, who were an absolute trip. 

They had stories that made our stories feel tame. And mouths like truck drivers. They thought we were hilarious. We thought they were hilarious. They got drunk with us at the fire and told unhinged stories about their industry and their lives and we sat there like it was the best show we'd seen in years.

That's what happens when you get thirty people who have all spent the day genuinely challenged and genuinely humbled and put them in front of a fire with whiskey. The walls people normally maintain just don't really come up. There's nothing to perform. 

lar

Everyone already knows exactly how good we were and exactly how lost we were that day. So we might as well just be people.

By the end of the week, strangers from all over the country and all over the world had become real friends. Every single one of us.

(Sidebar- I have to mention Gorsha.

Gorsha is one of the ranch hands. 

Gorsha is also a classically trained violinist. 

He also runs what he calls an immersion camp, which is its own whole thing that I don't have the space to get into here but trust me when I tell you it's exactly as fascinating as it sounds coming from a classically trained violinist who also herds cattle for a living. He's one of the most talented and incredible people I've ever met.

I've written it ten times already, and I will again- "The West contains multitudes", and that trip did not stop surprising us._

At the final ceremony, held at Bear Lodge, which is technically in town even though "in town" here still means the middle of Wyoming, getting a real shower for the first time in four days was one of the most legitimately life-changing experiences of the entire trip. 

I slept in a tipi for four nights- yes, a freaking tipi. 

And the grime that came off of us after days of riding through wilderness and sleeping on the ground was alarming. It should not be possible to be that dirty. 

The water was black. I just stood there and watched it and tried to calculate the last time I had been that genuinely filthy, and I couldn't come up with a single candidate.

I had a conversation there with Dana's daughter-in-law Cathryn, who has been working to bring Double Rafter into the modern era. Social media, an online presence, and getting the story out to people who don't know it yet. She told me that one of her consistent challenges is convincing Dana to raise his prices.

The demand is there, the experience is singular, but the prices are too low and she knows it.

Dana's problem is that his brain cannot compute why people pay to come work.

It genuinely does not register as a coherent transaction to him. 

We stayed on his land, rode his horses, ate his food, and fine. That's fair exchange. But we also pushed cattle and pinned bulls and spent four hours getting kicked by calves and slept in a tipi and woke up unable to identify which specific part of us hurt most. And for that, we paid him money.

His brain breaks at that part.

And I don't have a cleaner summary of the distance between how Dana Kerns sees the world and how the rest of us see it. 

He can't understand why this is valuable to us because he's never lived the life that makes it valuable. 

A life where real physical challenge is scarce, where community is thin, and where a week of genuine purpose feels like something we have to travel to Wyoming to find.

He already has all of it and he's always had it since 1887. So it's almost like he can't see it from inside it.

That's the most quietly poetic thing I encountered on the entire trip- and I encountered a lot.

Speaking of poetry.

Taylor's kids come to find him at the end of every night.

We'd spent all day watching this man be unmovable. 

Calm under circumstances that warrant alarm. Authoritative without needing volume. The kind of steady that real competence produces in a person, not performed, not maintained, just present.

And then his kids come running.

Full sprint, from a distance, with their arms out. 

They get air before they even reach him, launching themselves at him with the complete and absolute trust of children who know without question that they will be caught.

And he catches them with the biggest smile you've ever seen on his face, every time.

I don't know exactly why that image has stayed with me as clearly as anything else from the week. 

Maybe because it was the smallest thing, and after four days of big- terrain, animals, sky, and stories, something small hit differently. 

Maybe because it was a reminder that the man who spent the day teaching us not to die on horseback is also just a dad who his kids missed all day.

Or maybe it was just the most purely good thing I saw all week. And the most purely good thing tends to stay with us.

I'm still not sure. 

As for what else I took home with me…

I'm not gonna lie, my taint was destroyed. De-stroyed.

Let the record reflect this. 

Whatever the opposite of fine is, that was the situation. Pounded thinner than the best veal scallopini you've ever had in your life. I was walking like I'd been in a low-speed car accident with a folding chair.

I had welts on the inside of both legs. 

I was sore in muscular locations I did not previously know I possessed. Muscles that apparently exist only to inform you of their existence through pain after you've done something they didn't consent to.

And I was different. That's the honest answer. 

Not dramatically, or in any way I could fully articulate standing at baggage claim in Chicago. 

But differently oriented. Like something had been recalibrated.

My sense of what constitutes actual difficulty had shifted. Big time. 

My sense of what a real community looks like. 

My sense of what it means to build a life on purpose instead of by accumulation and default.

And here's the thing I keep coming back to- every single person on that ranch- every guest, ranch hand, member of the Kerns family, is carrying something. We don't know what, and we don't always see it. The guy next to us at the campfire might be in the best year of his life or the worst. The woman who came from England might be running from something or running toward something. Taylor rode with broken ribs for weeks and never once mentioned it to anyone who wasn't there.

Everybody's got something. 

And everybody's climbing something. 

And we don't have to know what it is to treat people like they matter, because they do. 

All of us. 

That's what the ranch teaches us without trying. At least that's what it taught me.

Not through a speech or a lesson, but through the simple act of putting a bunch of strangers on horses and saying, okay. 

Now work together. Now depend on each other. Now be decent. 

The rest takes care of itself.

Dana Kerns can't figure out why "people pay to come work."

And I can't figure out how to put a price on what I brought home.

For that I cannot say thank you to the Kerns family enough. 

The Double Rafter cattle drive is the real thing in a world full of simulations of real things. 

It's hard and beautiful and humbling and occasionally fuckin terrifying and it will make you genuinely question whether you've ever actually tried at anything in your life.  I have been lucky to take several "guys trips" to some pretty awesome places in my life. This blew them all out of the water. If you're looking for a reason to get together with the guys for a true bonding experience, to create memories you will cherish the rest of your life, do it. If you're looking for a real honest challenge, that will test your mental and phsyical toughness, this is it. Or if you're just looking to getting out in nature, and experiencing and seeing, in my opinion, what is the most beautiful part of our stunning country, this is that too.

And its not only limited to guys either. There were older women, younger women, and older guys in our group as well. Everybody enjoyed the hell out of it and said they'd happily pay to come back and do it again.

It will also make you laugh until your already-destroyed core gives out, forge friendships in the specific furnace that shared hardship creates, and leave you with the memory of a week that felt more well lived-in than most years.

Go.

Don't read more reviews. 

Don't ask more questions. 

Don't put it on a list you'll look at again in two years.

Find your people. Book it. And show up. 

The ranch takes care of the rest.

And if anyone asks about the moisturizer- I stand by it, I'd do it again, and I have zero regrets. (Again, it's called "Working Hands")

Double Rafter Cattle Drive. Sheridan, Wyoming. Look it up. Book it. Tell them the guy with the moisturizer sent you. 

p.s. - Alice Kerns, mam, if you're reading this- the cookbook! You know what I'm talking about. Please make it happen. The people need it.

p.p.s. - This took me eight months to write because I felt an insane amount of pressure to share the Kerns family story with the care and honor it deserves. I have attempted to write this no less than twenty times. I have scrapped all of them because I couldn't do it justice. I apologize for the delay and I hope this lives up at least somewhat to the experience they provide and the life they've built since 1887.

p.p.s.- I mentioned it in the blog, but I spent as much time as I could on slow rides picking Taylor's brain and learning his story whenever he was with my group. One of the big takeaway for me was the beef industry and what a disaster it has become. The smoke and mirrors, deceptive marketing, market manipulation, etc. As if the ranching wasn't difficult enough, the giant corporations running everything make it downright next to impossible to make a living doing it. Because they are determined to persevere, the family began selling their own beef- direct to consumer. 

This is real deal, Grass Fed, and GRASS FINISHED, beef, raised on their own ranch, processed down the road in their town, and shipped direct to you. We got to try the beef jerky through out the week and it was absolute fire. Our group went in on a half a cow and they make it incredible easy to divide up between however many friends you have. Or you can order small batches. I can't recommend trying them out enough. ORDER HERE

p.p.p.s. - I'm not going to spoil any surprises for anybody. But let me just leave you with this- there will be A LOT of talk about "the white saddle bags". You do not want to win the white saddle bags. I'll leave it at that. 

p.p.p.p.s. - Cathryn, I am so sorry this took me so long. But let's talk about the "Brokeback Barstool" idea we discussed about making happen. I have the perfect group of misfits to bring to you.