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During a Bluedot Living Travel retreat to B Bar Ranch in Montana, we watched wolves at play, dined on ranch-to-table food, and learned about environmental efforts from remarkable people leading the charge.
Where do you begin a story like this? With the teenage wolves in Yellowstone playing in a distant meadow, loose-limbed and joyful like oversized puppies discovering the world? Or with the osprey who circled our group on our walk as if investigating us, then banked away into a vivid blue sky filled with giant white clouds?
Or with the ranch itself and the way it settled us almost immediately, its design calibrated to make you feel held rather than housed? Or with Maryanne Mott, the woman who had the vision to create B Bar Ranch, and her grandson Jackson Stewart, who has taken the reins with the same sense of purpose and care?
In the end, I decided it doesn’t matter where I start. Every thread leads back to the same place: a conviction that when human beings are given the chance to step into nature, something can shift.
B Bar Ranch, where 16 of us stayed this past June, sits 9 miles off the highway, deep in Montana’s Tom Miner Basin, bordered by large working ranches along the Gallatin National Forest and the northern boundary of Yellowstone National Park. Situated at the crossroads of land once shared by the Crow, the Blackfeet, the Shoshone, and the Bannock, the basin was a common hunting ground where the abundance of elk, deer, and bison made the land generous enough for many peoples. This was the first story Jackson shared with us when we arrived, with the aim of inspiring ideas of peace and cooperation.
The 9,000-acre B Bar Ranch is part of a unique and fragile ecosystem and a place of exceptional natural beauty framed by two 10,000-foot snow-capped peaks, a sweep of pastures and grasslands, green trees of every hue, with creeks threading through it all. The land is alive with elk, moose, and grizzly and black bears. Bighorn sheep and cattle roam together, supervised by ranch cowboys.
The cozy A-frame cabins and cottages for guests sit among the trees. The lodge is the warm social center with ranch-to-table meals in the dining room, after-dinner conversation by the living room fire, guest-provided guitar music, and mornings that begin with the kind of bird sounds and fresh air at sunrise most of us have forgotten.
All of this is the vision of one woman, Maryanne Mott. She and her late husband, Herman Warsh, bought the ranch in 1978, flying over it in a Cessna on a February day and knowing, almost at once, that this was the place. “My goal was to really share the experience that I was learning and experiencing myself,” Maryanne said. “Seeing the landscape and all the life that’s in it was very special, and I love sharing that.” (Meet Maryanne in this short video.)
Over the decades that followed, she shaped B Bar into something rare: a ranch committed to ecologically responsible practices, humane treatment of livestock and wildlife, and the protection of natural resources. Today, B Bar hosts group retreats and runs one of the largest certified organic beef operations in Montana.
Maryann’s grandson Jackson leads the ranch’s marketing and outreach. He is not a cowboy by training, nor a cattle rancher, but he understands the complex challenges of ranching and has embraced the ranch’s mission. A former software salesman, he drafted a job proposal for his grandmother because he wanted to stop selling things he didn’t care about. He cares deeply about the ranch (and about his grandmother, too).
Jackson explained to me that B Bar protects its cattle from predators — wolves, grizzlies, mountain lions — not by eliminating the predators but by using range riders and cattle dogs, who keep the animals moving across the land in a way that mimics the natural rhythms of wild grazing. The land itself is certified organic, which means living up to the USDA’s exacting standards in ways that reach into every corner of the operation. The beef is not merely grass-fed but grass-finished, a meaningful distinction as even organic beef can be fattened at the last minute with corn. Every animal is free from antibiotics and hormones from birth to the end.
“Even the fence posts must be chemical free,” Jackson said. “Once. the county was spraying weeds with chemicals along the roadside, and we had to cordon off that whole area to maintain our organic certification.”
What the Wolves Taught Us
Our group had planned several activities before we came to the ranch, like horseback riding, hikes, and a river excursion. In truth, we may have planned more than we needed to. The ranch itself was so quietly nourishing that simply being there, watching the light change on the mountains or sitting by the pond at dusk, felt like enough. But one side trip stood apart from everything else and was our initial purpose for coming.
One morning before dawn, we drove in a van to the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone with Doug Smith, the legendary wildlife biologist who, in 1995, helped lead the release of the first wolves back into the park after a 70-year absence. The night before, Doug told us over dinner that as a young boy, when he first learned about the cruelty that had been visited upon wolves — the poisoning, the trapping, the systematic extermination of an entire species — he was so distressed that he vowed to do what he could to protect them.
Doug’s childhood conviction became his life’s work. He spent 28 years in Yellowstone studying the packs, gave more than 2,000 talks on wolves, appeared on 60 Minutes and in National Geographic documentaries, and is considered one of the most consequential wildlife biologists to ever work in the park.
Doug knew exactly where to go that morning. He and our guide Quinn, from the Wolf Tracker company that provided the van, drove through the valley looking for wolves with the quiet confidence of people who have read this landscape ten thousand times. When we reached the viewing position, they set up high-powered spotting scopes with practiced ease, and then — there they were. Three teenage wolves, tumbling and leaping on one another in the open meadow.
For an hour, nobody spoke much. We were mesmerized, taking turns at the scopes, excited, exchanging glances that needed no words. There is something that happens when you witness wild animals at play in their own world, entirely indifferent to yours. The weight of everything — the cruelty, the extinctions, the climate reports, the long lists of what is being lost — lifts for a moment, and what remains is pure, uncomplicated joy.
“This is amazing,” Doug said. “Usually, you see them for just a few minutes and they run off.” Because they were lost in play, we could watch until it was time for us to move on.
That day there were other lucky sightings, including golden eagles and bald eagles. Throughout the day, people who recognized Doug pulled off the road, his fame as natural and unassuming as the landscape itself, his look distinctive of a younger Sam Elliott with a mustache that says “cowboy.”
As of January 2026, Yellowstone has around 84 gray wolves in eight packs. What followed their return is one of the most closely studied ecological stories of our time.
Scientists call it a “trophic cascade,” a phenomenon in which changes at the top of the food chain ripple through the rest of the ecosystem. After decades without wolf predation, elk were free to graze heavily on willow, aspen, and other trees, suppressing the growth of young plants. When wolves returned, the elks’ behavior changed: They spent less time in areas where they were vulnerable to their predators. Woody vegetation began to recover in some areas where elk had foraged the most, especially near streams and valley bottoms.
And then the rivers changed. As elk browsing declined, aspen, willow, and cottonwood forests recovered along riverbanks. The return of forests created habitat for songbirds, insects, and small mammals.
Perhaps most remarkably, the beavers came back. When wolves were reintroduced in 1995, beavers were rare in northern Yellowstone. Today, the park has seen an increase in beaver colonies because the willows they depend on have finally been allowed to grow.
As Doug Smith described it, the wolves triggered an avalanche of change, like kicking a pebble down a mountain slope where conditions were just right.
Evenings at the Ranch
Evenings at B Bar had a lovely rhythm all their own. Dinners prepared by chef George Peirce were genuinely delicious — ranch-to-table in the truest sense, unhurried and abundant, the kind of meals that make you linger. His fresh sourdough bread could have been a meal unto itself (and in my case, almost was).
Two evenings brought particularly special guests to the dinner table. One night we were joined by some young Montana students, one of whom has been a plaintiff in the landmark Held v. Montana case — the extraordinary lawsuit in which a group of young plaintiffs took the state of Montana to court for failing to uphold its own constitutional guarantee of a clean and healthy environment. They won, and the Montana Supreme Court affirmed the ruling in 2024.
Listening to Eva Lighthiser, now in college, talk about why they sued their own state government, about what it feels like to believe so fiercely in something that you take it to court, was inspiring. The other girls, still in high school, were smart and unassuming and serious all at once and, like us, in awe of Eva.
Another evening, we welcomed Jeff Reed, a scientist doing work so singular it stops you mid-sentence when he describes it. Jeff has dedicated himself to recording the conversations of animals, and he means that literally.
Working in and around Yellowstone, he has been capturing and studying the vocalizations of wolves, building an archive of their vocalizations and using AI to look for patterns that may help researchers understand how wolves communicate, identify individuals, and interpret different types of calls. The Yellowstone Wolf Project has recorded more than 2,000 howling events. After listening to Jeff, with the mountains going dark outside the windows, seeing the wolves the next morning felt even more extraordinary. (Hear the howls Jeff recorded in his TEDTalk.)
Each evening, whether we had a guest or not, we sat in a circle sharing impressions of the day — the wolves, the light on the mountains, the smell of the fresh air — and then, as they tend to do at night, the conversations moved deeper. Stories from our lives began to surface.
There is something about a place this elemental, this far from the noise of ordinary life, that loosens something in people. Defenses drop. Laughter comes more easily. And by the end of the week, a group of people who began as relative strangers had forged the kind of friendships from shared experience that have every reason to last.
