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RIDGWAY, Colorado — Namgyal Sherpa speaks yak.
So when a calf disappeared into the tall grass recently, he roamed among the herd making low, rumbling grunts.
There was a rustle and a flash of black. A youngster sprang from the grass, running toward its mother, draped in what looked like a roomy shag carpet. She nudged the anxious calf to her side and they trotted briskly away.
“Cows moo, yaks grunt,” she explained. “Their Latin name is Bos grunniens — grunting ox.”
1. A shrine in the entryway of Ruth Higdon’s home in Ridgway. 2. Higdon keeps an eye on the herd at Smiling Buddha Yaks in western Colorado’s San Juan Mountains.
Higdon has been chasing yaks for years. She’s worked with them, lived with them and, for the last decade, has been raising them on her ranch, Smiling Buddha Yaks.
It’s the grunting culmination of a love affair that began when Higdon, a retired cancer surgeon, encountered a line of yaks in Nepal not far from Mt. Everest.
“They were the most majestic animals I’d ever seen,” she said. “They had these big bells around their necks and were dressed up in a way that made them look very regal and a bit ferocious.”
The affair continued years later as she ran yak expeditions in Alaska, gleaned wisdom from weather-beaten yak herders in Tibet and studied the finer points of yak husbandry at India’s National Research Center on Yak — home of Norgyal, the first test tube yak baby.
Now she breeds her own yaks on 120 acres of pasture, foothills and mesa tops high in bucolic Ridgway, about 290 miles west of Denver. She owns the ranch and Namgyal manages it.
It’s a little sliver of Nepal in the San Juan Mountains. Jagged gray mountains frame the sky. Prayer flags snap in the wind. A gong and hammer function as a doorbell. Yak skulls, tails and hair hang in a barn overseen by a furtive gray cat.
And then there are the Sherpas — Namgyal and his wife, Pasang, a former Buddhist nun, who hail from the Khumbu region of Nepal and live on the property with Higdon. Sherpas are an ethnic group who live primarily in eastern Nepal and nearly all share the last name “Sherpa.” Many go by just their first name.
After his parents died in 1981, Namgyal, 56, and his two sisters were taken in by Higdon’s then-partner, a physician who ran a clinic in Nepal. The three siblings eventually settled in America. Namgyal worked in Alaska, New York City and finally Colorado, the place most resembling Nepal and the epicenter of yak ranching in the United States.