Horseback Riding in Colorado - The New Dude

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Multisport Dude Ranching
The New Dude
At Colorado's Sundance Trail Guest Ranch, the horse might take a backseat to rafting, fishing, or hiking.

By Tim Brookes


	Cowboy Dustin (Tony Demin)

"Horses are afraid of two things," Dan Morin explained, taking off his Stetson and settling himself near the huge granite fireplace in the parlor of his Sundance Trail Guest Ranch. "Everything that moves and everything that doesn’t."

Dan was giving two dozen of us dudes the introductory talk for our week at the ranch, and it wasn’t going well. The thing to remember about horses, he said, is that they are at the bottom of the food chain. Everything eats them, given a chance: bobcats, wolves, lynxes, mountain lions. “Think of a horse as a very large rabbit,” he suggested, one that will select from three unpleasant responses at the first hint of danger: buck, bolt, or bite. The art of riding, therefore, seemed to consist mostly of avoiding stuff your horse might be afraid of. Yeah, yeah, I thought. But what if you’re afraid of the horse?

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Given that fear, it may sound odd that I brought my wife, Barbara, and seven-year-old daughter, Maddy, out from Vermont last August to spend a week at a dude ranch in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, 37 miles northwest of Fort Collins. But the fact is that I didn’t have to spend the entire week surrounded by stampeding cattle, being yelled at by leathery wranglers, or constantly in the saddle. Sundance is a sort of multisport adventure center offering a hyperactive menu on top of riding: hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking, fishing, whitewater rafting, four-wheeling, archery, riflery—the full western octathlon.

Besides, my wife loves riding, and she hoped Maddy would like it, too. I wanted to explore the Colorado Rockies, and I didn’t want to go on foot because, to misquote Gertrude Stein, there’s too much there, there. So we’d do it the old-fashioned way: on horseback. And that’s how—even though tall hats look silly on me and, having grown up in England, I’d already eaten enough beans for a lifetime—I started thinking about ranches.

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