Bull Run Guest Ranch is unique in that it blends ATV and off-road motorcycle tours, rental and riding with horseback rides and guided hunting and outfitting packages. It also offers advanced rider training for the military, the U.S. government and area businesses, in addition to hosting riding schools.
The Tripps initially branched out as a way to keep the family ranch going. They talked about raising beef cattle, but that idea was rejected.
"Joe and I decided to do a guest ranch," Leslie Tripp said. "Joe renovated the cabins and we hired an outfitter. The outfitter didn't work out, so we started buying horses to do it on our own.
The pair felt out the industry over the next few years, building a list of good clients in the process. They also discovered that working with horses was not necessarily Joe's strong suit.
As Leslie tells it, she knew horses and her husband had some issues on a ride up to Bull Run in their first year.
"They were riding through some tall sweet clover, and some birds flew out in front of Joe and his horse. She [the horse] goes sideways six feet, he falls off and the horse raced around him as he lay on the ground ... probably laughing at him! That was pretty much the demise of his horse affection."
Joe is an avid motorcycle rider, however, who began at the age of six on a Briggs & Stratton minibike and did some racing in high school and college. Coincidentally, the ranch had long been a favorite riding spot with locals, who called it "The Rockpile." He decided to return to his old sport as an alternative to working with horses. He began to market the ranch as an ATV- and motorcycle-riding destination, and success came almost too quickly. Greg White came out to do a piece about riding the ranch for Speedvision in 1999. In that segment on "Bike Week," Dave Despain referred to the ranch as a "Disneyland for dirt bikes," and the viewer response was immediate.
"When the show aired," Tripp said, "I was sitting in front of the television in the living room with the phone and a notepad in my lap, thinking I'd get a few calls, but my voice mailbox filled up in about a minute. We received more than 1000 responses within a few days ... it was overwhelming."
The ranch wasn't quite ready to handle that kind of volume back then, but the calls and letters the show generated gave the Tripps faith that sufficient interest existed to make the business successful. They went to work adding accommodations and machinery. Today, the ranch can handle large groups, with five cabins, a bunkhouse, plenty of outdoor gear and space, Kawasaki ATVs and bikes, a staff of tour guides, a professional cook and, of course, a large network of well-developed trails.
On our first afternoon in Montana, we had a chance to sample those trails after sitting down to lunch with the ranch hands. Eisenzimer and Tripp took us out for an afternoon ride on the trails above the ranch. The ranch itself sits on a broad rolling meadow, with craggy peaks a few miles away. We took the ranch's Kawasaki Prairie 360 ATVs to a mix of cow trails-turned ATV trails and old two-track that wound into the foothills.
As we climbed higher into the 8000-foot range, the grassy expanses were broken with rocky outcroppings, and the tree cover became heavier. Among pines and a smattering of aspens, we found custom-cut trails winding deep into the ranch's primitive backcountry.
Tripp cut these paths with a Sweco bulldozer, a narrow, agile and powerful machine purpose-built for constructing ATV trails. These steep and rugged trails snake their way through the mountains, demanding your attention.