Have you ever packed your lunch for a hike based on its weight rather than its deliciousness? There’s no need to scrimp on gourmet fixings when you have a llama to carry your picnic basket for you. A llama hike and picnic is just one experience Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming offers its guests. Plus, there’s a herd of darling goats. You can book a pasture goat walk where you’ll stroll through a pasture while Alpine, Nubian, and Nigerian Dwarf goats cavort around you.
Where is this magical land of goats and llamas? Brush Creek Ranch is located at the North Platte River Valley of south-central Wyoming, between the Sierra Madre mountain range and Medicine Bow National Forest. The ranch owns 30,000 private acres, including lakes, creeks, rivers, and a 600-acre ski mountain. The nearest town is Saratoga, population 1,727.
Guests can hike with llamas in the Snowy Mountain Range, Sierra Madres, Medicine Bow National Forest, and the ranch’s private Green Mountain. In addition to hiking, the llamas can accompany you fly fishing, where they’ll hold all your gear.
Or your family can enroll in Llamas 101, where you learn to groom the llamas, feed them, play with the babies (called crias), and, of course, have the most darling family photo shoot ever.
You can learn more about the goats through the “wake up with the goats” experience. Guests will accompany a dairy farmer through the milking process. You might even get to bottle-feed a baby goat. Or get bendy with your new friends in a goat yoga class.
Guests with culinary aspirations can be cheese-making apprentices for a day at the ranch’s Medicine Bow Creamery, Wyoming’s leading maker of goat dairy products. Cheese-making apprentices will learn to make feta, from pasteurization to forming the curd. Instruction in making ricotta, burrata, and mozzarella is also available. Or join a caramel-making class using goat milk that’s been honey-aged in Brush Creek Distillery bourbon barrels. You can bring as much fresh-made caramel home with you as you like, so bring a big suitcase.
Ready to plan your trip to the ranch? Visitors can fly into the Saratoga Jet Center by private plane or take a commercial flight to Laramie or Denver.
