The cowboy on stage at the Flying W Ranch speaks and sings in a baritone that sounds as deep and as dark as a water well. His higher-voiced tenor singing partners sound as smooth as a tranquil lake. Blended with stringed instruments and drums, the Flying W Wranglers flood the full spectrum of the human hearing for the ranch’s hoopin’ and hollerin’ guests, who sit nearly eye level with the band.

Though faces have come and gone in the Wranglers’ lineup, the group has been performing together for 70 years, making them the second-longest running Western singing group in American history. And while they have played everywhere from the Grand Ole Opry to Carnegie Hall, no venue is more special to these cowboy singers than their home base at the Flying W Ranch in northwest Colorado Springs.


The Flying W Wranglers delight the audience from their home stage at the Flying W Ranch in Colorado Springs.
These five cowboys are just one part of the ranch's longstanding display of tradition and hospitality.
Flying W founder Russ Wolfe lives on in spirit through the ranch, which has been entertaining guests
and providing a delicious cowboy meal since the doors opened in 1953.

From May through October, the Wranglers form the musical backdrop for the “Chuckwagon” dinners at the Flying W Ranch’s towering stone-and-timber lodge. The Wranglers’ authentic cowboy songs and the dinners are a beloved Colorado Springs tradition that began in 1953 and has continued to the present day. It is a tradition so strong that not even one of the worst natural disasters in Colorado history could break it.

The five Flying W Wranglers wear cowboy hats, vests, denim jeans and scarves to match their cowboy lyrics. The evening will be a journey through Western standards that feeds the audience’s nostalgia for the Old West and their love for Colorado.

On a floor-to-ceiling screen behind the band, it’s a night of horses – flesh and iron. As the Wranglers sing “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” galloping horses flash on the screen. Next is “Orange Blossom Special,” set to video of steam locomotives, smoke bellowing across western landscapes. As the song’s tempo mimics a train gaining speed, the Wranglers’ fiddler follows suit, each round of the song going faster – the pace so fast that his bow becomes a blur. The audience cheers him on.

The baritone gets the audience laughing and applauding with a familiar cowboy tune, Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” when suddenly he makes it a funny CliffsNotes version: “Down in the west Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love, I got shot and I died,” he sings. “The beginning, the middle and the end in one sentence.”

On another night, after a heartfelt musical tribute to Colorado, one of the Wranglers nonsensically breaks out in Italian opera, singing “O Sole Mio.” That gets a laugh, too. But the baritone is the enforcer – he cuts it short in comedic exasperation. He responds likewise when another Wrangler tries to sidetrack the Western music by playing the rock tune “Back in Black” by AC/DC on his electric guitar.

 

Introducing the Wranglers to the audience and cheering them when they leave the stage is a spry woman dressed head to toe as an authentic cowgirl: Western hat, pearl-snap denim shirt, big belt buckle. It’s not a stage outfit – it’s her lifestyle.

Leigh Ann Wolfe is the Flying W Ranch’s owner and emcee. As one of three daughters of Flying W founder Russ Wolfe, this is something Leigh Ann was born to do. A microphone in her hand, facing a darkened hall, she’s smiling a smile bigger than her belt buckle. She’s happy to welcome hundreds of hungry visitors, just as her father had done.

When her father’s version of Flying W opened in 1953, it stood alone, far back into the woods at the western end of a cow pasture two miles north of Garden of the Gods. Old-timers remember as children tossing cow patties like Frisbees in the Wolfes’ vast, empty barbed-wired enclosed meadow.

The Flying W served its meals in a low-ceiling dining hall of reclaimed lumber that had been surrounded by trees – a “funky old barn,” some locals called it, that nonetheless held special memories of what Colorado Springs once was: a much less sprawling, less urban town.

Russ had moved from Kansas to Colorado to help his father-in-law with his ranch. Russ was skilled at it – cattle and horses.

Russ started hosting guests for a chuckwagon meal twice a week. Demand for Flying W meals and Flying W Wrangler entertainment grew so rapidly that within a decade, Russ was hosting dinner shows every day of the week. So visible was he that Russ became the face of Colorado Springs tourism, helped attract the U.S. Air Force Academy to Colorado Springs and founded the Western Chuckwagon Association. Russ took time for everyone – guests by the busload, Flying W staff, Wranglers, his daughters.

“He was a giver to humanity,” Leigh Ann said. “And he was my best friend.”

Leigh Ann wants everyone to know just how much her dad gave, because he would not have done so himself. She provides a visitor with a list of his accomplishments. At the top: Russ Wolfe’s service in World War II as first lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, aboard a wood-hulled mine sweeping vessel, the USS YMS-298. After the Japanese had surrendered, and after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, YMS-298 approached Hiroshima Bay and a much larger, metal clad Japanese warship. The ship lowered its Japanese flag in response, as a sign of its surrender. Leigh Ann and her sister Terry love that story – the big ship bowing to the tiny ship.

Russ didn’t talk about all the times he helped people, like the time he helped a Flying W Wrangler who faced a family crisis.

Vern Thomson had not worked long at the Flying W when his wife, Kathy, needed surgery he could not afford. Russ paid the bill, and never spoke of it again. Thomson worked every night from 1977 to 2003, from Memorial Day to the first of October. “I didn’t see a summer sunset for 30 years,” Thomson said. It was all he could do to honor Russ Wolf’s generosity.

Russ didn’t seek recognition in return. He didn’t want handouts, either – not from the government, and not from anyone else. He didn’t need accolades, or ego strokes. He simply worked hard at making people happy. When the gut punches that life can deliver struck him – his wife Marian’s death after 54 years of marriage, and the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire that burned nearly everything he had built – Russ carried on, just as he had done on the range, and in the Navy.


The packed dining hall has come a long way from its origin days in 1953.
The original venue stood solitary in a pasture, with a low-clearance hall
of borrowed lumber. After it was destroyed in the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire,
the Wolfe family reopened with the new, modern dining hall in 2020.

A 2,600-degree fire moving straight downhill at 65 miles per hour got the Wolfe family thinking fast and hard about who and what needed saving.

The day Leigh Ann will never forget was a Tuesday, June 26, 2012, when the temperature in Colorado Springs rose to 101 degrees, after four straight days of red flag warnings and mandatory evacuations. Strong winds pushed fires over the crest of the Front Range and down into Colorado Springs at approximately 4 p.m.

Early on, Colorado Springs Police thought the fire, which they saw jumping from treetop to treetop toward hillside neighborhoods, might overwhelm the whole city, too – perhaps becoming as big as the San Francisco Fire of 1906 or the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Even so, police allowed Leigh Ann and her sister Terry to stay at the ranch until the last minute. Terry and Leigh Ann removed gift store inventory but also prized family antiques, such as Western paintings and American Indian artifacts, as the fire crested the ridge above them. Then they saw the flames racing toward them. They were the last two people to leave; firefighters had already retreated in hopes of saving nearby houses.

“You didn’t have time to be afraid,” Terry said.

Within hours, the fire destroyed everything that Russ had built, as well as 346 homes downslope.


Wild West days are never far away at the Flying W Ranch, thanks in part to a band of crooning cowboys
dressed to the nines in denim.

After the fire, the staff cut down trees and trimmed back burned vegetation to remove what Leigh Ann called an “eyesore” for the Colorado Springs community. Without paying customers for their dinner show, cash flow became a trickle. To fund the rebuild, Leigh Ann sold a business and launched another – a forestry management business that provided fire mitigation services on federal lands.

Finally, in 2018, the Wolfe family was ready to sign a letter of intent to build the new dining hall. Leigh Ann desperately wanted her dad to walk with her through the construction process, but at his age – he was 93 – there were good days and bad days. Russ died March 29, 2019, before he could see the new dining hall built.

Leigh Ann and Terry believed their dad would love the new hall, especially the leather saddles straddling the rafters. They used fire-damaged lumber from one of their reclamation projects to build 41-foot-long dining tables.

Only now, years later, can Leigh Ann begin to see the fire’s silver linings.

“There’s two good things that come out of this fire,” Leigh Ann said. “One is that the old dining hall is gone, because it was antiquated. And two, our ranch is like the Garden of the Gods now, because you can see the rocks.”

Terry is still amazed, years later, that a wooden tepee where her mother stored a thousand cookbooks survived the fire.



The new dining hall opened in 2020, and with a program familiar to long timers and refreshing to newcomers.

Early in the program, the guests will hear the most important announcement of the night: how not to burn their hands on the tin plate carrying their hot cowboy dinner. They pick up the plate from a stack outside, hand the plate to servers at each station, who quickly serve their part of the meal dish, and who will add a little more if you ask. It all moves at a fast pace, and you soon learn why you’re happy for it. The plate is getting hotter at each stop.

Everything is hot: first, a choice of smoked beef brisket or spicy chicken, then sausage and finally trail beans. The cold applesauce arrives just in time to cool one edge of the plate that guests can hold before their next test of endurance.

At the end of the line, Flying W’s “boot sock” coffee is served hot, without lint or foul odor, in a tin cup whose handle is almost but not quite too hot to touch. This gets guests moving quickly to their seats for relief.

The ranch is well practiced in moving people through the food line. At full capacity, it serves 850 people in half an hour before the show.

At Leigh Ann’s request, the baritone Wrangler sings a nightly tribute to Russ, and a remembrance of what Flying W had once been. This is the land he fell in love with, the land he wouldn’t leave for a return to Kansas. It’s land that his daughters won’t leave either. They’re staking their stand. Flying W is here to stay.