Dude ranching started to catch on in the 1850s, when western farmers, always on the lookout for a second income, started hosting aristocratic adventurers from Britain, Ireland, and Russia in search of good hunting. One party in 1871, guided by Buffalo Bill Cody, shot more than 600 bison and 200 elk, and traveled the Colorado Territory with French chefs and 25 wagons, including three that served as mobile icehouses.
My favorite dude was my countrywoman Isabella Bird, who visited Colorado in 1873. She survived rattlesnakes, locusts, and ghastly frontier food (she described one entrée as "black with living, drowned, and half-drowned flies"). Bird rounded up cattle and climbed Longs Peak—which at 14,255 feet was a considerable achievement, even if her detractors say that she was hauled up the difficult parts in a basket.
Today’s dude ranching is, frankly, less arduous. The Sundance Trail lodge is a large A-frame log cabin, perhaps built by someone familiar with Architectural Digest, flanked by two smaller cabins, housing a total of 24 guests.
"If your butt's sore," Dustin was saying in his droll cowboy way, "your stirrups are too long. If your knees are sore, your stirrups are too short. If both of 'em are sore, your stirrups are about right."
Built in 1968, the lodge has a large dining room as well as a parlor, two guest suites, and quarters for the owners, Dan and his wife, Ellen. We stayed out back in a kind of woodsy duplex among the trees that comprised a one-bedroom and a two-bedroom suite. Our quarters were small yet comfortable, with a shower but, thank God, no TV or telephone. Sundance is neither Old West nor New Age, more like an amiable, unpretentious family home, with big picture windows and pine furniture, that happens to have a lot of land and a lot of horses.
SUNDANCE TRAIL GUEST RANCH
Sundance Trail Guest Ranch (800-357-4930, www.sundancetrail.com) charges $1,470 per week per adult and $995
per child age five to 15; children under five stay free. All meals and activities are included.
And I mean a lot of land. The ranch is on 140 acres, surrounded by 660,000 acres of Roosevelt National Forest between the Mummy and Rawah ranges of the Rockies, a remarkable setting: yellow-gray granite hills like stacks of pancakes; forests of ponderosa pine, aspen, and Norway spruce; a floor of sand, pine needles, carpet juniper, and fragments of dead branches, bleached like bones. At 8,000 feet, poisonous snakes are rare. Sundance is too high for most insects, too. Just the brilliant western sky, broad-tailed hummingbirds around the porch, cool nights, and the sighing of the wind in the pines.
