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| The Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary, which takes care of several blind horses as well as a variety of other animals, is moving from the Ovando Valley to New Hampshire in part to cut costs. Photo by KURT WILSON/Missoulian |
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In the end the winters were too cold, the distances too great, the costs too high.
The Rolling Dog Ranch animal sanctuary is pulling up stakes in the Ovando Valley after 10 years and heading to New Hampshire.
Alayne Marker and Steve Smith, who started the unique sanctuary on Kleinschmidt Flat for blind, deaf and maimed animals in 2000, announced the move April 4 on their website, www.rollingdogranch.org.
They said the animals will be transported starting May 24 to a 120-acre ranch on the outskirts of Lancaster, in northern New Hampshire. The Ovando ranch will be appraised and placed on the market.
Smith was en route Friday back to Montana from the sprawling 1800s farmhouse that the couple recently purchased. Marker couldn’t be reached at the Ovando ranch. The couple requested online that they not be showered with phone calls and e-mails, inviting comments on their blog instead.
By Thursday, nearly 100 had been posted from across the U.S. and Canada. Most wished Marker, Smith and their award-winning enterprise well. Heather Montana of Helena did, too, but in obvious anguish.
“My heart is breaking. I’m sobbing,” she wrote. “Part of my love of being in Montana has been knowing you made this State a better place. You and Alayne are simply the best. Montana is losing the best. The people and volunteers are losing the best. It is crushing.”
Marker and Smith were among 10 recipients of the 2009 Humane Award presented by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Rolling Dog has been bestowed a steady stream of awards and tributes in state and national publications. It was recently featured in a segment of Jack Hanna’s “Into the Wild” TV program.
Last Christmas, the ranch received the $20,000 first prize in an online National Shelter Challenge. The deadline is Sunday for a first-round prize of $3,000 in the 2010 contest.
“You may want to pour yourself a second cup of coffee – or a second glass of wine, depending on what time of day you’re reading this – because this will be a long post,” Smith blogged when he broke the news.
Rising gas prices and the hour-plus drives to the closest cities of Missoula and Helena are among the reasons Smith listed for the move. In Lancaster, they’ll be three miles from city center and minutes from their veterinary clinic.
There’ll also be a much larger pool of potential employees, volunteers and, ultimately, successors.
“It was always a major problem for us to hire employees here, because most people did not want to move to such a remote area,” Smith said. “And of the few who were willing to move out here, most quickly tired of living so far out.”
The 3,600-square-foot farmhouse in New Hampshire, which was remodeled in the 1980s, will accommodate not only their living quarters and offices but all the dogs as well. On the Ovando ranch, many of their dogs and cats lived in separate buildings because the house was only 1,400 square feet.
Rolling Dog bought the ranch – including a pond, spring, a three-story barn and a five-bay equipment shed – for $663,000.
“The real estate prices for the kind of property we were looking for were by far the most reasonable in New Hampshire and Vermont,” Smith said on the blog. “Here in Montana, a place like this would have run into the millions of dollars.”
The fact that New Hampshire has no sales tax will save the sanctuary a lot of money compared with other ranches they looked at in the Pacific Northwest, Virginia and elsewhere. There is also no personal income tax in New Hampshire.
Once settled in the East, the sanctuary can reduce expenses with its own woodlot for heating and the ability to put up its own hay, since ample rainfall eliminates the need for irrigation.
“Out here in the West,” Smith wrote, “you need both sufficient water rights and irrigation equipment to have enough water to produce a hay crop, and we have neither.”
Smith and Marker began reflecting about the future last year upon their 10th anniversary in Ovando, where they moved to start the ranch, leaving behind corporate jobs in Seattle. They’re in their early 50s, and they asked themselves where they wanted to be when they reached their 60s and 70s.
“We plan to be running this wonderful sanctuary for a long time to come, but is this the right place to do it when we’re that age?” Smith wrote.
“I think the day Alayne and I finally decided to get serious about moving, back in December, it was 22 below zero here and 24 above back there (in New Hampshire). We had just finished scooping poop that morning, our hands were frozen, and we thought, we’ve had enough of this kind of cold!
“As much as we’ve loved living out here, we realize that dealing with the sub-zero temperatures every winter will not be something we want to do in our 60s and 70s.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at
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