Western Pleasure Guest Ranch traces its roots to February 1940, when Riley and Gladys Wood arrived at their newly purchased Gold Creek property in three feet of snow, with four children and $150 left to their name after the down payment. Eighty-five years and five generations later, their descendants — Roley and Janice Schoonover, alongside Janice’s parents Jim and Virginia Wood — still work the same 1,100-acre property sixteen miles northeast of Sandpoint, now welcoming guests to a ranch that has quietly become one of the Pacific Northwest’s most decorated dude ranch destinations.
Set beneath the Selkirk and Cabinet Mountains, with views stretching to Lake Pend Oreille, Western Pleasure blends genuine working-ranch history with a level of comfort that has earned it “Favorite Dude Ranch Hosts” award five years running. Roughly seventy ranch-bred Quarter Horses and draft crosses carry guests of every ability, from complete first-timers to competitive ropers, across land the family has called home since well before most American guest ranches existed.
The Experience
You wake to the scent of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls drifting from the timber-frame lodge, your horse already saddled and waiting for the day’s trail duty. Riding here covers genuinely varied terrain across the ranch’s private acreage and the million-plus acres of adjoining national forest, with routes ranging from gentle valley rides to the five-hour Grouse Creek Falls excursion, picnic and swim included.
Signature moments punctuate your week: a two-hour dinner ride ending in a ridge-top Dutch-oven feast, cattle sorting competitions in the covered arena, and, if you’ve timed it right, a photography experience pairing golden-hour rides with professional instruction. If you’ve brought children aged six to twelve, the “Lil’ Buckaroos” programme has them learning genuine grooming and saddling skills alongside arena games.
Your evenings might bring cowboy poetry, a line-dancing lesson, or simply a soak in the hot tub beneath skies dark enough to make Idaho’s stretch of the Milky Way genuinely jaw-dropping. And when warm cookies appear, as if by magic, most afternoons, you’ll find yourself drawn into a spirited round of horseshoes or cornhole before dinner — exactly the kind of unplanned moment that a hundred years of the same family’s hospitality tends to produce.
About Western Pleasure Guest Ranch
Western Pleasure’s history runs deeper than the Wood family alone. In 1918, Isaac Bonnie first arrived in Sandpoint by train from Colorado, returning the following spring with his family to homestead what’s still known today as Bonnie Hole. In 1940, Riley Wood arrived separately, chasing his own dream of a mountain cattle ranch; his son Jim later married Isaac Bonnie’s granddaughter Virginia in 1948, uniting the two families’ land and legacy into what became the Wood V-X Cattle Ranch. Jim and Virginia’s youngest daughter, Janice, and her husband Roley began transitioning the working cattle ranch into a guest operation in 1991, a full century after Isaac Bonnie first stepped off the train.
That century-long continuity is visible everywhere on the property — old railroad grades from the area’s early logging days now serve as riding trails, and apple trees planted from loggers’ discarded cores still bear fruit each autumn. The ranch operates with genuine sustainability at its core: rotational grazing, sixty percent locally sourced produce, and a main lodge heated with renewable wood pellets, alongside a horse programme that includes twenty-four-hour turnout and bi-weekly chiropractic care for its herd.
What distinguishes Western Pleasure within the wider American guest ranch landscape is this rare, unbroken seven-generation thread — two families united by marriage, a hundred years of continuous stewardship of the same North Idaho land, and a level of authentic, lived-in history that no newer operation could ever fully replicate.
Our Stewardship
Western Pleasure operates rotational grazing across its property, sources roughly sixty percent of its produce locally, and heats its main lodge with renewable wood pellets. The ranch’s horses also receive twenty-four-hour turnout and regular chiropractic care.
