Rocky Mountain Cow Camp Adventure (in English)

In 1991, I spent 5 months as a working student in a dressage barn in California. During that time, I got to watch the movie "City Slickers", and since then I've dreamed of participating in a cattle drive. Finally, 26 years later, this dream turned into reality - and it was not just a cattle drive, it was THE Rocky Mountain Cow Camp Adventure, led by the Master of Natural Horsemanship, Pat Parelli himself :-)

The first two days we spent on the beautiful Parelli Campus in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, familiarizing ourselves with our horses, the terrain and cattle work. There is an own science to handling cattle and riding cutting horses, so it was very helpful to have those two days of preparation for us 'greenhorns'. 

Breakfast among real Cowboys

On Wednesday morning, we loaded the trailers and headed out to camp, which was somewhere in the San Juan National Forest, off the little town of Dolores. 3 days in the wilderness, with no phone or internet, but yet much more luxurious than I had expected it to be - we had comfortable trailers for sleeping, pens had been set up for the horses, and the very best cooks you could imagine - they were masters of Dutch Oven cooking - treated us to wonderful food out in nowhere! Lesa did an awesome job in organizing the whole event, and she put effort into every little detail.



Anyway, we did not even get to camp right away, we stopped on some dusty road amd unloaded the horses. We had to ride in a long line and find the cattle, gather them from a huge area dense with vegetation and bushes. It was hard not to loose orientation, so when I followed some cows on their trail, suddenly I found myself alone in the wood, with noone else in sight! Not wanting to get lost on the first day, I let go of the cows and turned to find the other riders, which were thankfully not too far away :-)

Twice we went into these woods to bring the cattle out to the road, the second time we had to navigate a steep cliff that cut off the way the cattle had taken. Finally, we moved the herd into a pasture where they would spend the night. The next day, we drove the herd to Beaver Creek Corral, a historic roundup site. There, those with the wrong brands had to be sorted out, they went back to the pasture the next day.

We did it - the cows at their new pasture

After some roping lessons from Pat, one calf had to be branded and castrated, then we moved the herd to their final destination - a new pasture area further up the mountains. We moved them through dense forest again, the woods being so different from what I know in Europe. I especially love the smell of the pine trees and the wide lay of the land - although we were high in the mountains, it still had this wide openness to it, simply majestic :-)

From the final destination of the cows, we rode a wonderful trail back to camp, past the old farmhouse and through wide meadows. Then we had to load the horses and our stuff back into the trailers, had a quick late lunch and just as we drove out of camp, the rain started - which had spared us during our whole event :-)

Crowned by Pat's invitation to dinner, the whole week was a wonderful experience, not always easy, but very rewarding! I made wonderful new friends, learned a lot about cattle and horsemanship, and got to do the 'real deal' cattle drive I had so long dreamed of :-)

Thank you Pat and everyone else involved!