SuzAnne Miller is the owner of Dunrovin Ranch. A fourth-generation Montanan, SuzAnne grew up roaming the mountains and fishing the streams of western Montana. Her love of nature, animals, science, and education prompted her to create the world’s first cyber ranch where live web cameras bring Dunrovin’s wildlife and ranch life to internet users across the globe. Visit SuzAnne live at www.DaysAtDunrovin.com!

My love affair with Miss Dixie, my Chevy Silverado 2500HD Duramax diesel pickup with an Allison towing transmission, took me completely by surprise.

I am not a motor head. For most of my life, I really didn’t care much about vehicles. It mattered not to me how they run; I could have cared less about what’s under their hoods. Television ads for pickups have always struck me as an excess of testosterone-driven banality. I shudder at the off-road scenes of pickups tearing up the environment – wheels turning, mud flying, birds scattering, as some young buck extols the myth of the freedom and power that is his, as he careens his pickup truck across the western landscape, singing a cowboy song.

However, anyone who is serious about horseback riding in Montana’s backcountry soon learns that it is inextricably interwoven with driving a truck and pulling a lot of weight – a lot of emotionally important, living weight. Towing a trailer is a reality.

Lacking both the interest and the skills acquired from afternoons spent with a bunch of guys in garages tuning up engines and jacking up frames for dragging on Main Street, most horsewomen are reluctant to learn the basics. We don’t care if it’s fancy, we don’t need roll bars and fog lights, and our identity has nothing to do with the horsepower at our command. We want a SAFE, DEPENDABLE, DRIVABLE machine.

The problem with a laissez-faire attitude towards truck ownership is that it can get you into trouble – serious, life threatening trouble. Pulling the wrong load with the wrong vehicle can take you right into the great beyond.

Heavy loads simply up the driving ante. High speeds, steep terrain, narrow, washed out or soft shouldered mountain roads, Montana’s famous gumbo mud, and winter’s snow and ice can spell disaster. My adventurous spirit and my often misplaced know-it-all attitude has given me more than my share of hair raising moments while learning the ins and outs of towing a trailer with horses.

Mud as slippery as snot and up to my axles on a long road into the Beartooth Mountains – check. Trying to back a fully loaded 4-horse trailer down a mountain logging road only to have the trailer pull my truck off the road – check. Jackknifing the trailer on a hidden patch of spring ice – check. Running out of gas along the Rocky Mountain Front and facing the irony of pulling over in front of a derrick pumping oil out of the ground – check. Flying down Pipestone Pass at too high a speed and holding on for dear life as the weight behind me pushed my truck beyond the breaking capacity – check. (Note: those runaway lanes on Montana’s mountain passes aren’t there for picnicking)!

I have learned a few lessons – the hard way. Now I can back a six-horse trailer down a mountain road with greater ease than I can parallel park my car in downtown Missoula. All of this has made me a much more cautious and skilled driver, and it has turned me into a very discriminating truck consumer.

Miss Dixie did not just fall into my life. She was sought and carefully evaluated before I brought her home to meet the family. My initial reluctance with vehicles practically turned into an obsession for researching the desired attributes when I went to purchase a brand spanking new truck. Towing capacity, power, fuel capacity, turning radius, length of wheelbase, and transmission gear ratios became key elements in my search for the right vehicle.

Then, there she was – on the lot of Karl Tyler Chevrolet. A sleek, black beauty with all the power to take me up any mountain road, with a “smart” towing transmission to bring me down those mountain roads just as safely. A short wheelbase for tight turnarounds, yet roomy enough for five passengers—with comfortable seats and a great radio to boot. Yes, I admit it. I am in love with my truck. We are inseparable. You can call us the Montana Dixie Chicks!

Now I am just waiting for those TV ads to feature a frumpy old horsewomen like me ready to take on the world with the likes of Miss Dixie! Or perhaps I will settle for a great country western song about an old Montana cowgirl and her beloved truck – I think I’ll call up Shane Clouse and ask him to get right on that.

Jenna Caplette migrated from California to Montana in the early 1970s, first living on the Crow Indian reservation. A Healing Arts Practitioner, she owns Bozeman BodyTalk & Integrative Healthcare. She says, " Health is resiliency, a zest for the journey. It’s about coming awake to the joy of being alive. As a practitioner, its a privilege to facilitate that healing process, to help weave new patterns of health & well-being.

As spring arrives, the earth warms, and our Montana outdoors fills with luxurious sensory details of color, sound, texture and smell. Be sure to make time to notice, to immerse yourself in that luxury. It’s actually important for your physical, your emotional and mental health.

Each of us begins our experience of life through our senses: the feel and smell of mother, the taste of food, or the sounds of family and home. It is through our senses that we begin to identify the boundaries of our physical selves. Our sensory and emotional experiences become windows to how we view the world, how we experience what is happening around us.

Imagine that as babies we're clear as a light bulb, glowing from inside, bright and inquisitive, abundantly curious. Then our experiences begin to cover and dim that bulb. Sounds we don't like, perhaps repeated experiences of someone yelling at us and the feel of that anger, can limit how and what we hear. We attach beliefs to various senses – yelling is bad and scary and we don't want to be yelled at. If our response is to withdraw, then over time that response becomes automatic and unconsidered when someone yells at us. We narrow and limit our capacity to hear, to interpret and experience sound.

Our sensory and emotional experiences as children become the basis for our personal beliefs. Our brains interpret and filter all the information that arrives through our senses, making decisions on how to categorize and file that information. Our belief systems become part of the organization of that filing system, become another set of filters. Our experience becomes distorted.

Sure other things influence that process, things like genetic inheritance, family and cultural attitudes and beliefs – our brains give us extraordinary capacity to complicate everything. They also give us an extraordinary capacity to heal, to restore much of our access to our senses, to remember how to glow. Effective healing modalities – I work as a BodyTalk practitioner – can help you identify filters and facilitate a clearing process. That clearing can improve your health.

Season changes can act as an invitation to come back to your senses, to dial in your awareness of your environment.

Why does it matter? It feels great to come awake to the world, especially in the spring, when everything is greening up, coming alive. And, compromised as they may be, your senses offer you a doorway back to yourself, right now. Today. When you put your attention on sensory input, say the sound of robins in your backyard, you slow the business of your mind as it filters data and gives you input about everything. You know the chatter. It can be incessant and exhausting.

Focus on sound, on color and light, on the feel of the greening grass under your bare feet. Don't try to focus on all your senses at once. Choose one and truly focus on what input is available to it in the moment. For however long you can maintain your focus, your thoughts will take a back seat and your body will relax. Come back to your senses as often as you can each day, and at night if mental chatter keeps you awake.

Immerse yourself in the gifts of the season. In any moment when you can be fully present to your senses, your inner light will glow.

This was my last pie stop and I am so thankful I heard about it. The weather was cool and rainy as I drove up to the Lazy B, perfect for a piece of pie and a hot cup of coffee. After I was seated I listened to the casual banter among the locals. I was by myself and wished that I knew someone at the café. After I selected a piece of sour cream raisin pie, a cowboy at the next table started to tell a story. He said his wife had brought home an entire sour cream raisin pie from the Lazy B. He didn’t think he liked that kind of pie but he tried a small piece and said, damn, that was so good it was addicting. After consuming my piece of sour cream raisin at the Lazy B I tend to agree with the cowboy. Other pies that I’d like to try there include black forest chokecherry and strawberry rhubarb. They also have homemade soups and serve local meats and Montana 7 grain oatmeal. And, by time I left the Lazy B, I felt like one of the locals!

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