Cory Lawrence is the president and CEO of Off the Beaten Path. In early 2017, writer Sabine Bergmann spoke with him about Wyoming trivia, adventuring at twelve years old, and his lifelong search for connection.

Sabine Bergmann: Let’s start at the beginning, which for you would be in Johnson County, Wyoming. It’s more than 4,000 square miles, and in the 1990 census had only 6,000 residents. What was it like growing up there?

Cory Lawrence: Johnson County is a place that’s steeped in a lot of history. The old Bozeman Trail, an offshoot spur of the Oregon Trail, passed through Johnson County so the area played a significant role in the settlement of the West history. There were homesteaders, English land barons, cowpunchers, Basque sheepherders, and native peoples, principally the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, and Shoshoni in the region.

I’ve always felt very, very fortunate to be connected to Johnson County history through my family. I’m fifth generation in Johnson County and I consider myself a resident emeritus, happy to be in the Northern Rockies and just one state away from the epicenter of “home”. On one side of my family, my mother’s side, I’ve got a cattle ranching history and a recently passed grandfather that was a classic American Cowboy. On my father’s side of the family, I have a wonderful cadre of early Wyoming settlers, from dirt farmers to cattle ranchers and most prominently, to a happy, prideful clan of Basque sheepherders. My great-grandfather, Gaston Irigaray, herded 20,000 sheep from Reno, Nevada all the way to Wyoming as a part of a crew of young and aspirational Basque men trying to make their mark in America. Hard work and an abiding belief that good effort results in a good life contributed to one of my most favored bits of Wyoming trivia: that there are more sheep in Johnson County than people in the entire state of Wyoming!

SB: Wow! I love that!

CL: There are! When you come from a small state — Wyoming is the least-populated state in the union — you have a different experience. You know everyone. My wife, who I’ve been married to for 23 years, is a hometown girl. You know, when you’re twelve years old, you just know when you’ve met “the one.”

SB: You two met when you were twelve?

CL: We started hanging out when we were quite young. She wasn’t originally from Buffalo and in fact, I like to joke that she was the only girl I knew with certainty I wasn’t related to! She’s just wonderful. Naturally, she’s one of the biggest reasons why Wyoming remains so important to me, even today.

SB: Tell me about what you did when you were young. Where did you go adventuring?

CL: I grew up in a very Wyoming way. With access to ranching families, I was driving at a young age – first, steering a truck during feeding on Grandpa’s lap then, taking the wheel myself when I was 10 or 11 years old, managing the old flatbed as it ambled along in 4-low. There was an independence I quickly gained on the ranch – learning how to work and learning how things worked. This was a grand adventure that started very early in my life.

I was also treated to a fantastic dose of cultural heritage as there was a Basque cultural organization that formed in town. I was even a participant in the Basque dancing troupe from the area. We would travel around the state of Wyoming and dance at various events. We would also have local festivals centered around religious celebrations. Those memories are so vivid for me today, with all of the encounters with the elder Basque people, all speaking that unique language and capturing the moment to celebrate their cultural heritage and the good friendships they had with their neighbors.

The result of all of this is I get puffy-chested and swell up with pride about Wyoming and my upbringing. You may have noticed! And that pride naturally spills over to the Northern Rockies and my current home, Montana.

SB: What was your backyard like?

CL: Buffalo sits right on the eastern slope of the Bighorn Mountain Range: a classic, quiet mountain range that not many people know about. Those peaks are absolutely spectacular. Cloud Peak over the top of the Bighorns is over 13,000 feet in elevation. My grandfather’s ranch abutted the national forest, opening up his beautiful section of property to a few hundred thousand acres of pristine forestlands.

The small town, beauty of the area, and proximity to such abundance created my perspective of the world. From my little slice of things, everything was accessible and very little was off limits. I was free to explore and from a young age could get out on my own or with friends to wild places in just minutes. It is amazing: twenty-five minutes of effort, and you’re pretty much on your own in the middle of seemingly nowhere. You could be in these places that were just so spectacularly beautiful in just minutes. I frequented that mountain place above the ranch on many occasions.

SB: What’s the best way to get there?

CL: You definitely go in a ranch truck — a high-profile, old, beat-up Ford, typically, that’s got a few bales of hay in the back for weight. You tool up the road – all of them gravel, of course, and more primitive as you progress to the mountain place. So you’re bouncing along, getting out of the truck, opening and closing gates. Ultimately, you arrive at your destination – a little cabin tucked up against the timberline. Used predominantly for hunting or to camp when cattle are moved from lower to higher ground in the summer and back in the fall, the cabin is sparse on amenities but rich in character – much like the whole ranch experience, now that I think about it!

Above the cabin you’ve got a beautiful little saddle that is draped by a wide park that you can hike through. The saddle is fantastic in the fall, with elk migrating through and bedding down on many days. Looming above the saddle are amazing cliffs that can be accessed from the backside and provide a most spectacular view over Buffalo and Powder River Country to the east. Beyond the saddle, you would migrate down the backside of the mountain on a very primitive jeep trail my grandfather blazed many years ago. The trail ultimately meanders into the Shell Creek drainage, where the canyon narrows into a dramatic sliver, complete with a little creek, beautiful foliage, and a few denning spots for bear or mountain lion. The Bighorns are so wild, and I love that. Not because I am a particularly wild guy myself but I love that there are places that have been only softly touched by man, providing a natural experience that includes just you and that place. This is one of those places.

SB: What a great place to be a kid!

CL: It is a great place. You learn so much living in an area like that or particularly, growing up on or having access to a ranch. You know, when something breaks down and you’re fifteen miles out of town, you have to make do. Although I didn’t live on the ranch full-time, I learned so much about self-sufficiency and gears and saddles and horses and so many other things. Growing up anywhere else would have delivered far less of these things – and I would be a much different person as a result.

It was a part of who we were to be exploring, to be out and about, to be curious. When I think about what drives me today at Off the Beaten Path — to me, the priority is not simply travel. It’s not just stamping out that two weeks of vacation each year: It’s thinking about how a person can leave their work-a-day life, step off of that rail, and really connect with a whole different landscape or culture or way of life. Something that is so vastly different from what they experience every day naturally inspires a burst of learning and marvel and meaning that can’t help but change your life. And that is the essential value of travel.

And the catalyst to achieving that value is connection. Connection can come from the landscape – from nature or critters or climate. Many times, though, connection comes from encounters with local people; people who love to share their passion for their home place. All connections are powerful but connections with people who live and love and depend on the landscape are consistently the most powerful connections for travelers. Curious, different characters inspire so many unexpected experiences, especially while traveling, when you are open to experiencing something new or have more time to take it all in.

SB: These encounters push your typical boundaries?

CL: Yes! A great example for me, personally, was ending up in the Bay Area after my Wyoming upbringing and attending college in the Midwest. The Bay Area was not initially a comfortable zone for me given my rural perspective: It was urban, filled with people, and had its own (different) set of rules. But, it was also colorful and diverse and cutting edge.

SB: It’s very different from Wyoming, isn’t it?

CL: Significantly – to say the least! I’ll never forget my first “camping” experience in California: It was early September, 1993. My wife and I decided to enjoy a Labor Day weekend of camping in Northern California and using our shared perspective from Wyoming, thought we would really get a jump on things and depart at about 5 a.m. on Saturday morning. Anyone who knows about camping in California is likely already laughing! Suffice to say, we returned to our little apartment in San Francisco at 11 p.m., discouraged and road weary from burning nearly 700 miles through the whole of Northern California looking for a camping spot. We couldn’t believe it! This was nothing like Wyoming. We even spent some time questioning where we had chosen to live.

SB: Oh no! See, just yesterday, I made camping reservations for May for Yosemite. And this is early January.

CL: That’s the key, right! I’m conditioned now, but at the time, it was a point of extreme frustration to even consider using the words “reservation” and “campsite” in the same sentence. I felt like, “Where do I live? What have I done?”

But, in time, you start to learn a few tricks and you get connected with local people who can give you the lay of the land. Then all of a sudden you discover beautiful places like the Lost Coast or Palisades Lake up around Donner Pass. It’s all about adapting, right? You can have these amazing natural experiences in Northern California, but you have to go about it entirely different from your approach in Buffalo, Wyoming.

SB: Yes, and that wisdom, it all comes from building those one-on-one connections.

Unquestionably. In fact, that is how I got involved with Off the Beaten Path. After departing Northern California, my wife and I returned to the Northern Rockies. Upon my return, I got involved on a project that really resonated with me: It was a real estate fund that bought ranch properties, enhanced them for their recreational values, and sold them to conservation-minded buyers who would keep them whole.

I was the finance guy on the project and among the other partners was Bill Bryan, the founder of Off the Beaten Path along with his wife, Pam. After our project, Bill asked if I would help him and Pam develop a new, strategic plan for Off the Beaten Path. And when it was all said and done, Bill came to me and said, “We love the plan – why don’t you implement it?”

That’s how it came to be. Just like everything else in a Wyoming kid’s life: just dumb luck.

SB: Well, it’s more than that. Off the Beaten Path is a good match for you, isn’t it?

CL: Indeed, it is.

In the first week after joining the company, I was handed a Journey Guidebook — one of the beautiful guidebooks Off the Beaten Path custom-publishes for its clients. I asked, “What is this?” and was told what it was and that we produced one of these for every client engagement – custom-tailored specifically for the trip we developed for our clients. As I sat there, thumbing through the book — it even happens to me now — the hairs on the back of my neck started standing up. In that moment, I realized how different Off the Beaten Path was from other travel companies; how much it cares about peoples’ travel experiences.

That was really when it all came together. I realized that Off the Beaten Path has all of this very deeply localized, very bespoke information that it gathers from people out in the field – real people, with real passion for their homeplace and a penchant for sharing what they love most with curious travelers.

SB: And now you’re working with people who have that same pride and connection to the places they’re from that you have as a fifth-generation Wyoming boy?

That’s exactly right. That’s what this business does: It lingers in the local joints – the nooks and crannies where the authentic heart of each landscape dwells – and it proves itself trustworthy through its respect and curiosity to then connect to what is truest and best about a place. Then, we share that with our clientele.

The work that we’re doing is important. It is so important to a person’s life to get out and really connect with the world. I can’t even tell you how grateful I am for that. When I read that guidebook, everything came together.

SB: And the rest is history?

CL: Sure. History that is written each day.