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Outside Magazine's 2003 Family Travel Guide

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Multisport Dude Ranching
The New Dude (cont.)

By Tim Brookes


	A kitten wrangler at Sundance Trail Guest Ranch (Tony Demin)

After his first-morning talk, Dan led us down to the corral, where we met the wranglers, all age 20 or 21: Dustin, Josh, Lonni (the children’s wrangler), and Rifka. All four, in addition to having spent most of their lives in the saddle, were college kids working over their summer break.

"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."

We were all quizzed about our level of horsemanship and assigned horses for the week accordingly. The more experienced dudes were eyeing lean horses distantly related to the Maserati; I was hoping for something like a 1964 Land Rover. By then all I could remember of Dan's talk was that one end of a horse kicked and the other bit.

Sundance Trail has a stable of 21 quarter horses and leases 30 more for the summer visitors. My prospective mount, a roan named Redman, squinted at me sideways, his eyes barely open in a resentful and reptilian leer. "I am not a mountain lion," I told him. "I am not a bobcat. I am not a wolf."



	Saddle blankets (Tony Demin)

These calming words must have done the trick, for once I was up in the saddle, the ground a distant memory, Redman turned out to be amiable and touch-sensitive, if rather generous in his output of methane. By the second day I was giving him little more than a twitch of the rein or a nudge of the heel. I realized that "ride" is used in two opposite senses: to be in charge or to give up control. When your horse is descending a steep, narrow trail, picking its way through sand and stones, you have to ride by letting go, releasing your hips to go with the horse while the rest of you remains level—like surfing from the waist down.

Multisport Fun

Seven More Wonders of the Dude Ranching World

We graduated from one-hour rides, along the piney trails that surrounded the ranch, to three- and four-hour rides among the buttery rocks that made up the ridges. Dustin sang cowboy songs, Josh told cowboy jokes, and nobody got yelled at or stampeded. On the last day we rode out to a panoramic outdoor breakfast up on a rocky knoll, and those who were expert riders and hadn’t eaten too much galloped back. When we weren’t on horseback—and as the week went on, each family increasingly wandered from the herd—we took evening hikes to some of the surrounding outcrops, shot pool in the rec room, explored the area in the ranch’s jeep, and spent more and more time lounging around on the porch, talking more slowly.

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