Mary Strand

A life of peace and solitude

Mary Strand has run a successful ranch for three decades

Mary Strand gives a tour of her barn where she keeps horse and cattle in Evansville Wednesday October 16.

CAYLA NIMMO, STAR-TRIBUNE

CAMILLE ERICKSON

307-266-0592, camille.erickson@trib.com

When the Cole Creek Fire consumed the parched grasslands of Natrona County in 2015, Mary Strand did not evacuate her property.

“We would have lost everything if we didn’t fight it,” said the longtime Evansville ranch owner.

When the fire began to encroach on her property, Strand jumped in her pickup to drive up the road. She had to save her cattle. The further she drove, the closer the fire lapped the edges of her truck. The smoke thickened.

“You couldn’t see anything,” she said.

As she neared the pasture, she remembers noticing a deputy sheriff and a firefighter blocking her way.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she recalled the sheriff telling her.

“I don’t want to be here,” she blurted out with indignation. “Get out of my way, I’m going down that hill try to find my cattle!”

“You can’t go down there,” he replied.

“Well, I’m going down there, so get out of my way.”

The sheriff eventually acquiesced, demanding she at least put on the truck’s emergency lights.

As she descended the hill toward the gate of the pasture, all she could see was “a solid ball of flames.”

Unable to locate her animals, she turned around and returned to the top of the hill, measuring her loss. That’s when she noticed movement on the crest of a nearby canyon. Her cattle, all 40 of them, were lined up single-file, marching to safer land.

“They were fine,” she said. “I don’t know where they went, or how they came to be there. The fire burnt that whole pasture and jumped the river. It was unbelievable.”

Though her cattle saved themselves, about 90 percent of her land ended up destroyed by the devastating fire, she said. It took months to recover her property — an “astronomical” task she accomplished largely on her own.

“I worked harder that next year than I ever had in my entire life,” Strand said.

She went on, “I hate to ask anyone for anything. I am very, very independent. I am pretty much a loner, and it’s by choice.”

Today, a blanket of golden grass once again cloaks her property, topped with a prodigious, clear sky. She continues to care for cattle and horses every day.

CAYLA NIMMO PHOTOS, STAR-TRIBUNE A small group of cattle lay in a pen as clouds roll over the lands of Mary Strand’s ranch in rural Evansville. RIGHT: Mary Strand poses for a portrait at her home in rural Evansville. Strand wakes at 5 a.m. on summer days and closer to 6 a.m. in colder months to care for her ranch.

A stained glass tile with Mary Strand’s brand hangs in a window of her home in rural Evansville. Stand has worked on a ranch most of her life and her sister made her the decorative tile of her brand as a gift.

· · ·

With short, white-tipped hair cut neatly to frame her sun-kissed skin, Strand described how she circuitously wound up back where her life began.

Born in 1944, Strand was raised on a ranch in Natrona County. Every waking moment she tried to spend outdoors.

“I absolutely love outside labor,” she explained. “I did everything and anything outside. I absolutely hated anything in the house.”

She described herself as a tomboy.

“I was raised as my dad’s boy,” she said. “The biggest factor in my life was my dad. I have a great deal of respect for country people. And the majority of them are very giving, helpful people.”

Despite her love for Wyoming’s sprawling land and open air, Strand would face formidable hurdles before finding her way back. She married one year into college and moved to Denver, where her husband at the time worked in the oil industry.

“It was a miserable existence,” she recalled with tears collecting in her eyes. “My marriage wasn’t the happiest in the world, and I had two daughters so I was pretty much stuck to it.”

But in 1978, she had enough. Her former husband pulled a pistol on her. She packed up her bags, gathered her 13- and 14-year-old daughters and moved back to Wyoming. Having worked in the airline industry in Colorado, she landed a job with the same company. But when the company folded, she became a part-time travel agent, a job she despised. Strand simply longed to go outside and be on her own. She acquired over 100 empty acres of her parent’s ranch land and started an over threedecades-long business from scratch that continues to this day. She never looked back. “It’s just nice to have this peace and solitude,” she said with a glowing smile. “And animals are your best friends.”

Industrious and proud, Strand has raised, trained, boarded and hauled horses, picking up myriad awards along the way.

“I worked in a man’s world an awful lot of my life,” she said. “There’s very few women on ranches that you find do what I do. The majority of them, they work with their husbands but don’t do the physical labor. But, like I said, I like it.”

She rises at 5 a.m. in the summer, and closer to 6 a.m. when the days become shorter.

“I wake up and look out at what God really created and I thank him for it,” she said. “That’s my church out there on that hill. I don’t need to go to a manmade building.”

As the sun rises, Strand places a bale of hay on the bed of her pickup and drives out to feed her animals. The property is thoroughly cleaned twice a day. The 75-year-old spry rancher maintains scrupulously tidy barns, too.

“I got a lot on my plate,” she admitted. But she doesn’t complain.

“(I’ve done) everything related to the horse business and it was kind to me.”