Ranching Tradition Fiber

A conversation with Kami Noyes of Ranching Tradition Fiber in Whitehall, Montana, brings to mind those determined pioneer women who made a life for themselves in the rugged American West. Though clearly thriving in the twenty-first century, Kami is a self-made woman—a sheep and cattle rancher by birth, deeply committed to caring for the land; a self-taught organizer of a successful and growing Copper K Fiber Festival; a fiber artist who taught herself to spin, dye, knit, and crochet; and a fiber entrepreneur who sells a variety of her hand-dyed yarn and fiber online and in local stores.

Fifth-generation rancher Kami Noyes raises Targhee Rambouillet sheep in southwest Montana. Photo by Kami Noyes

Kami Noyes is the fifth generation of her family to work their ranchland near the Tobacco Root Mountains in southwest Montana, where she lives in what was originally her grandparents’ home. The family has always raised cattle, and Kami continues this tradition with her husband and son, with an established herd of Black Angus and Herefords. While her great-great-grandfather was one of the first to bring sheep to Montana from California, sheep on the family ranch have come and gone over the generations. But Kami has had a special fondness for sheep since she was a kid. Gradually, beginning about twenty years ago, she brought them back to the ranch when she started taking in bottle lambs from local farmers. She’s grown that to a herd of about 150 ewes today. Initially, she raised only white Targhee Rambouillet, but three to four years ago, she and her son “stumbled on” some colored Rambouillet, which she praises for being hardy range sheep and good for both meat and wool. They added some to their existing herd, and now they constitute about ten percent of her total; the rest are Targhee or Targhee Rambouillet. In the first few years of raising sheep, she learned a lot about wool and what kind of wool she wanted to produce from her sheep: fine wool with a long staple.

Some of Kami’s happy herd grazing on the family ranch at the edge of the Tobacco Root Mountains. Photo by Sara Gilman

Doing Fiber

“I didn’t do fiber before I had sheep,” Kami admits, even though she grew up in a house of crafters where her mom encouraged creativity. Kami fondly remembers having “free rein” in the craft store when she was a kid. As her sheep herd grew, Kami started to sell only raw wool. Then her mother and husband bought her a spinning wheel, and Kami taught herself how to spin.

Spinning is one of Kami’s favorite aspects of her fiber work, and she emphasizes the stress relief it provides. She especially likes to spin yarns using a combination of textures as well as colors. It’s just within the last several years that she taught herself to knit. Her other fiber joy is “standing over a dye pot, playing with color.” She grows bored dyeing the same colors consistently and loves to experiment, creating unique colorways.

After she learned to spin and dye, most of her yarn “sat in a basket,” she remembers, before she finally decided she could sell it, which she started to do about 15 years ago. Kami now sells both millspun and handspun yarn—in either natural colors or hand-dyed herself. Kami has about 60–70% of her wool processed and keeps the rest for raw fleece.

Fiber Arts Heritage

Kami describes her Tobacco Root Valley yarn line as a “true Montana yarn,” made with her homegrown Targhee Rambouillet wool and milled at the Montana Wool Barn in nearby Cardwell. She hand-dyes it (see photo above), drawing color inspiration from the natural beauty of Montana. Knitwear designer Joanna Johnson describes the semi-worsted-spun Tobacco Root Valley yarn as combining the qualities of handspun and commercially spun yarn: “It has the consistency of a commercial yarn, with a reliable gauge and yardage for project planning purposes. But it has that very lightweight and lofty air to it that some of my handspun yarns have, making for an open and springy fabric once the knitting is finished and blocked.”

Fiber Alliances

Kami enjoys collaborating with knitwear designers to highlight her yarns. She worked with Stix Yarn, a yarn retail shop in Bozeman, Montana, who designed the Copper Leaf Sweater using Tobacco Root Valley yarn. More recently, Kami collaborated with author and knitwear designer Joanna Johnson of Slate Falls Press to create the Roots in the Valley kit. Johnson created a pattern booklet, writing a brief history of the family ranch, and her college-aged son drew companion illustrations using Kami’s photos as reference. Using Tobacco Root Valley yarn, Johnson designed a rustic shawl pattern.

Range Camp Wool, pure Targhee fibershed yarn. Photo by Kayla Mehlhoff

In her Range Camp Wool line, Kami developed a fibershed-style project, with every aspect of the yarn, from growing the fleece to spinning, dyeing, and selling it, taking place within her geographic area. Range Camp wool includes some of own her wool and wool she buys from other local ranches before sending the lot to Mountain Meadow Wool in Buffalo, Wyoming, to be processed. This fibershed-style wool is available in combed top for handspinning, fingering-weight, and DK-weight yarn. Much of it is available in natural colors, but she dyes some of the yarn—in limited-edition colorways, because she doesn’t want to be held to specific colorways for each batch.

Mountain Meadow Wool also processes Ranching Traditions’s third yarn and fiber line, the Smith River natural colored Targhee (which is available as a knitting yarn or combed top). With the rich color of milk chocolate, the natural shades of the Targhee wool look good enough to eat.

Wool pellets made from waste wool and usable as fertilizer and pest repellent. Photo by Kami Noyes

Sustainability

In August of 2023, Ranching Tradition Fiber began processing wool pellets, part of the family’s commitment to sustainability and operating a no-waste business. Wool pellets transform waste wool—belly wool, wool heavy with organic matter, wool with a short staple, or wool that’s too coarse—by compressing it into a pellet. Kami says there is little market for waste wool, so she researched options for creating some kind of value for this waste product. She discovered wool pellets, which can be used as a natural fertilizer, help conserve water, and act as a natural pest control. One customer purchased wool pellets to experiment with insulating her beehive over the winter. This new product is just another example of Kami’s work to preserve her family’s ranching tradition, carrying it into the future.

---

Karen Elting Brock is a contributor for Farm & Fiber Knits, Spin Off, and PieceWork.