Valley Garden Ranch

A historic ranch in montana’s madison river valley reels in an active family captivated by the slower pace, spacious skies, and silvery trout.

- Deborah Donohue

The romance and thrill of fly-fishing for rainbow trout and other aquatic beauties in Montana’s cold, crystalline waters was the perfect lure to entice a high powered metropolitan couple to ditch their city suits and don their Carhartts. The couple and their brood found their Nirvana near Ennis, Montana at Valley Garden Ranch, an eight-thousand-acre sprawl of pristine Montana real estate located on a bench beneath a bluff, above the spectacular Madison River Valley. The valley was once the hunting grounds of the Flathead, Bannack and Shoshone tribes, and was visited by Lewis and Clark in 1805. The area is also steeped in the colorful history of the truly wild west that surrounded the gold rush of 1848. The stagecoach stop at the headquarters of the Garden Valley Ranch was on the route to Virginia City, a hotspot for bushwhackers, miners, vigilantes and other ne’er-dowell, including suspected outlaw “Club Foot George,” and Henry Plummer. Plummer was a sheriff who allegedly went crooked, robbing miners and burying his treasures in the area of Bannack, Montana. Both were unceremoniously hanged under suspicious conditions. The lingering intrigue and the legacy of gold swirling through the streams still lingers today.The better part of that romance with the Old West was the motivation for building a family compound where multiple generations could take in the sweeping vistas encountered by those early settlers and adventurers, and where life could unfold amidst the ever changing natural beauty.