A string of old friends on horseback were riding through a narrow draw in the rugged country near Hyattville when the horses stopped.
Jim Clutts was at the back of the line, taking in the Wyoming scenery on a July day, when the horses ahead shifted enough for him to see the ground.
Lying there was a man he'd known for half a century.
“He was motionless, absolutely motionless,” Clutts told Cowboy State Daily.
Clutts asked the rider ahead of him what the hell was going on.
His friend had come off his horse.
Ordinarily, Clutts said, he's the kind of person who would jump straight into the middle of an emergency. This time, he stayed put.
“I knew John was there,” he said. “I knew Duke was there, and therefore, I knew everything was going to be OK.”
John Williams is a physician, a retired Navy medical officer and combat veteran who formerly commanded a Marine Corps medical battalion.
The men hadn't been thrown together by chance for a trail ride. Their friendship goes back more than half a century to their school days at St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas.
“The thing to do in a situation like that, when you got fellows like John and Duke up there, is just stay the hell out of the way,” Clutts said.
‘Man Down’
Williams knew firsthand how unpredictable emergency response can be in remote country. In addition to his medical and military career, he said he had spent about 10 years as a reserve sheriff’s deputy in El Paso County, Colorado, responding to emergencies where help wasn’t always close at hand.
Williams was riding into the Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site when he heard somebody behind him yell two words.
“Man down!”
Williams turned around and found his friend on the ground and in distress after the fall, Cody Regional Health later wrote about the incident.
Temperatures had climbed above 100 degrees and help was miles away.
The group moved the injured rider out of the sun and into the shade while Williams began treating him.
From farther back, Clutts couldn't see everything happening around his friend. He estimates the man was unconscious for eight to 10 minutes.
Eventually, he heard something — moaning.
It wasn't a pleasant sound, but "the good news is, ‘You're still alive,'" Clutts recalls thinking at the time.
For Clutts, who spent roughly 40 years as a trial lawyer and accustomed to stepping into problems rather than watching them from afar, standing back wasn't easy.
“You don’t like to see your pals hurt,” Clutts said. “Pretty simple.”
That Fast?
The group's outfitter used a Garmin inReach to send an emergency message, Cody Regional Health said.
Then the machinery of rural emergency medicine began moving toward them.
Clutts headed back toward others at the ranch, intending to make certain someone had called for help.
“About five minutes after that, I heard a helicopter,” Clutts said. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘That fast? Seriously? Wow!'”
Cody Regional Health EMS responded, along with Big Horn County Search and Rescue, the Big Horn County Sheriff's Office, the Hyattville Fire Department and First Flight of Wyoming, the health system reported.
For First Flight, an injured horseback rider in remote country is an example of why the program exists.
The hospital-owned flight service launched in 2023 to serve a region where a conventional ground ambulance can be hours away and rugged terrain can prevent one from reaching a patient at all.
Heather Stamey, senior director of emergency and critical care at St. Vincent Healthcare and a First Flight board member, described the distinctly Wyoming emergencies its crews prepare for:
“We’ve had bear maulings, we’ve had motorcyclists crash into moose, people fall off horses, get run over by bulls,” she said when the program launched. “Having access to life-saving care is critical.”
Williams came away impressed.
“It’s not like being in a big city,” he told Cody Regional Health after the rescue. “In rural areas, it’s so important to have people like your team out there saving lives.”
His Hand Moved
Clutts watched emergency personnel arrive around the same time as the aircraft.
He said an ambulance started up the draw before there were concerns about whether it could get back out or turn around. A smaller six-wheeled vehicle went farther into the canyon instead.
Cody Regional Health described its crews as arriving equipped to provide advanced care in the field, with the multiple responding agencies working together to get the injured man safely out of the backcountry.
Roughly half an hour later, by Clutts' recollection, rescuers began coming back out.
His friend was secured to a backboard.
Then he saw a hand move. Again, he thought his friend was going to be OK.
“These guys, from their equipment to their appearance to their ability to communicate, were just fabulous,” Clutts said. “Absolutely fabulous.”
Williams was equally impressed.
“I’d like to be a big cheerleader for them because people need to realize that person may be sitting next to you in church, or at the county fair showing a sheep — and that may be the person who saves your life,” Williams said.
Old Friends
Also with the group that day was Duke Phillips III, who has spent most of his life around cattle, horses and remote country.
The third-generation cattleman grew up on a ranch in northern Mexico hours from the nearest town and went on to build Ranchlands, the Western ranch management and conservation operation behind Paintrock Canyon Ranch.
About two years earlier, Clutts and Phillips had begun talking about getting some of the old group together. Clutts eventually invited about 15 men.
Ten came to Wyoming.
They slept in canvas tents beside Paintrock Creek, ate around communal tables and rode through a landscape of red sandstone, cottonwoods, creek bottoms and canyon walls.
Paintrock Canyon Ranch encompasses nearly 80,000 acres at the western base of the Bighorn Mountains, with terrain ranging from creekside meadows to carved sandstone cliffs and high-country ridgelines.
Hyattville itself sits where Paintrock and Medicine Lodge creeks meet, far from Wyoming's tourist thoroughfares.
When Cowboy State Daily visited the community in 2024, longtime Wyoming resident Tim Kurtz offered perhaps the simplest explanation of its isolation.
“People that end up here, unless they're lost, they came here on purpose,” Kurtz said. “This was their destination.”
The friends had very much come on purpose. They'd come to have some fun, explore, and laugh about old times.
There was even a rattlesnake encounter along the way — unrelated to the accident, Clutts stressed.
‘Doing Just Fine’
Clutts had cowboyed years earlier on a ranch near Laredo, Texas. Phillips had spent a lifetime on horseback.
Even Clutts got a reminder during the trip that horses occasionally have plans of their own. At one point, his mount plunged face-first into tall rushes.
“I’m sitting there thinking, should I bail out or hang on?” Clutts recalled.
He chose to hang on.
One of them had the bad luck to come off a horse hard enough to need medical attention, but he was lucky to have a doctor and a lifelong cattleman with him.
How's he doing today?
“The fellow who hit the deck is doing just fine,” Clutts said. “Had to sleep sitting up for about six weeks, but all good now.”
Neither the fall, the backboard nor the helicopter was enough to sour the old friends on Wyoming, because they intend to do it again next year.
Contact Kolby Fedore at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
