Standing on a snow-covered Sierra Madre ridgeline in the Los Padres National Forest, I was looking through my binoculars down on the distant town of New Cuyama. I was rationing the last of my peppered strips of buffalo jerky, dried mangoes, and the bottom half of 16 ounces of lukewarm water. I was still about 15 long miles from the northern fringe of Santa Barbara County. It was going to be a slow trudge down the heavily rutted Rocky Ridge Trail of Lion Canyon and eventually that high-desert outpost.
I told myself after three days backpacking from Santa Barbara to New Cuyama, I would treat myself to a room at the Cuyama Buckhorn, a motel, saloon, and restaurant, a sort of oasis hugging Highway 166. When I arrived that early January afternoon, caked in backcountry dust, I was disappointed to find the Buckhorn was closed and had been for some time.
However, I soon learned that was all about to change. I ran into the new owner of the Cuyama Buckhorn, Johnny Thomsen, an enthusiastic, young entrepreneur who gave me a newly remodeled room despite the ongoing construction among the breathtaking badlands and thorny tumbleweeds clinging to rusted barbwire.