my love letter to ranch life

On a morning when it was my turn to wrangle, I would get up at 5:00am, make coffee, get dressed, read my Bible, and attempt to take a few sips of that coffee before heading outside to meet Brittany at her door. We’d walk to the barn, tack up the two horses we left in, and hop on to ride out and get the rest of the herd. This is the actual wrangling part of being a wrangler. It would usually take some hollering and whistling, but the herd would start turning and lope toward the barn.

Occasionally, a group of horses would resist coming in. We’d have to ride all the way out to them and get behind them to herd them in – as the rest of the herd was galloping by. This is why we only wrangled on horses we trusted and in pairs, because it required actively fighting their instincts to run with the herd.

Our daily routine was this: start tacking horses up as soon as the herd was in, eat breakfast, finish tacking guest horses then get our own, take morning rides out, eat lunch, take afternoon rides out and/or feed/do barn chores, untack as rides come back to the barn, turnout the herd, then have a little break before eating dinner.

The work was tiring, but rewarding. Somedays, I was hoping to be on an afternoon ride with guests, and others I was hoping to be left at the barn to feed horses and get hay. There were eight of us wranglers who worked together everyday to get rides in and out. We each had a couple horses on rotation we rode most. My top two were Bucky and Bandit – two ponies who happened to be best friends. I also rode an old polo horse named Bonanza a good bit. Ironically all three of these guys look similar to each other and have “B” names (it became a running joke that the boys couldn’t tell them apart).

My ranch summer is an experience that is difficult to sum up in any way because we not only did so much every week, but were going on cool rides everyday. Sure, there were some times when I got sick of seeing parts of the same trails, but overall we were riding in gorgeous scenery all the time, with epic views, often doing epic things like bringing fishing gear on all day rides so guests could fish in remote locations. Once a guest said “Wow, not my average Wednesday!” and I replied, “Believe it or not, it’s mine!”. And I knew at the time what a privilege it was to be able to say that.

The western way is to keep the herd of horses in one corral during the day, and turn them out on grassy fields at night. This is much different from the east coast, English way of keeping horses in stalls. This meant we didn’t have to clean stalls, which was a huge deal to me. Nor did we need to clean many water troughs because the ranch was built so the creek ran through almost every field and paddock. Instead, we threw hay, fixed fence, and mucked our corral.

People ask me pretty often if my experience is what I expected it to be. Honestly, for the most part it was. What surprised me most how nice it was to do everything in pairs or as a team. As someone who’s mucked plenty of stalls alone, it was refreshing to know we as a unit were getting the bigger chores done together. Usually we had two wranglers to a ride, which was helpful although I enjoyed taking people out by myself, too.

There were a lot of surreal moments. I remember vividly my first real day of work, riding the orientation trail (a trail I’d ride at least 20 more times over the course of the summer), weaving through sagebrush, getting up high enough to see the Tetons. That was the first of a few “Wow I’m really doing this” moments.

There’s no way to sum it up, so I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves and just say that once again, God has been kind to me. I’m so thankful for Red Rock Ranch and the people and horses it brought me. My heart will always be at home in the cowboy state. ❤