For the last year or so Cathi and I have been quietly focused on acquiring a larger and improved property  at which to live and conduct our workshops.

Misty, Duchess, Kate and Ann on pasture

Since May 1, 2010, a ranch near Eureka, Montana has been the new home of Cathi Greatorex and Doc Hammill, and the home of their Montana Workhorse Workshops. 

Doc and students in a recent Montana Workhorse Workshop

    Some of the features that have excited  us most about this new location are:  700 acres of Montana mountain ranchland made up of hay meadows, agricultural land, and forests-with trails for driving horses throughout; timbered and open pastures for our horses, a huge barn, a longer growing season and longer workshop season, a six-acre commercial organic farm-10 Lakes Organic Farm-in operation on site, easy year-round access, and a nearby Amish community. 

Several 2010 students in one of the outdoor classrooms!

The ranch sits near the base of the Whitefish Mountain Range-with peaks of 7200′ elevation-just west of Glacier National Park. Therriault Creek Ranch is surrounded by national forest lands, has abundant wildlife, a trout stream, and magnificent views.  Doc and Cathi know they are blessed to be stewards of such an amazing place and are anxious to share it with family, friends, and Workhorse Workshop students.

We are very excited to have found and leased an amazing ranch that exceeds anything we imagined.

Tom at the US Forest Service winter range near Perma, MT

Tom Triplet, my step father, was inducted into the Montana Draft Teamster Hall of Fame at the 13th annual Big Sky Draft Horse Expo in Deer Lodge, Montana.

Tom comes from a family of horsemen, dating back to the days when Tripletts were friends and neighbors of George Washington, and his ancestors took Washington’s guests fox hunting and did the future president’s carpentry work.

His parents moved from Missouri to Oklahoma in horse drawn wagons before his birth, then back to Missouri and later on to Montana. Four years before Tom was born they moved in wagons from Plentywood Montana to the Flathead Valley, west of the Continental Divide.

For Tom, horsepower was the only source of transportation and power into his early adult years. He logged with horses, worked mules in the forest service grading landing strips, skidding poles, putting up hay and more.

Through his years of draft horse and mule work, he developed the depth and breadth of expertise and experience that can only come from daily hands on work- privately and professionally. His knowledge of the horse was clearly stated when one of his nominators into the Hall of Fame explained, “as a horseman, Tom Triplett may not be able to walk on water, so to speak, but he could sure enough get a horse or a mule to do it.”

Triplett’s depth of knowledge, experience and patience, his commitment to safety and the comfort and the well being of the animals, and his obsession with figuring how to get everything “jeeest right”- which all combined, puts him in a class of his own among horsemen.

If you’d like to discuss and share ideas with other students, you can subscribe to the Yahoo discussion list, which is moderated by Jane Fallander.  Click here to find us.

You will need to ask to join and be “approved.”  We do that only to keep the spammers away. Just tell us you’re a student of Doc’s or interested in his ideas and you’re in.