Scenes From a Dude Ranch on the High Plains

My horse was ready to bolt — his ears pricked, his muscles tense. A few feet ahead, a herd of wild horses stared back at us; they’d been unaware of us for most of our ascent from the valley below. Horned lizards shuffled in the sagebrush beneath us, but my horse’s gaze remained locked on his untamed brethren.

Moments later we were galloping at full speed beneath the rugged backdrop of the towering Absaroka Range. We fell in line with the back of the herd — alongside the foals scrambling to keep up with their mothers — and were bombarded by chunks of earth flying up from their thundering hooves. I squinted to keep the dust out of my eyes. A herd of pronghorn watched from a distance, well camouflaged among the gold-tinted grasslands of the Wind River Indian Reservation’s high-altitude plains.

In the summer of 2006, I traveled from my home country of Wales to Wyoming to spend a few months working as a horse wrangler at the Lazy L&B Ranch. There, as part of a team of seven wranglers, I took guests from around the world on exhilarating trail rides through rivers, valleys, forests, canyons and mountains, riding above 9,000 feet to find spellbinding views that stretched endlessly in every direction, without any sign of human presence.

My time in Wyoming was a fulfillment of a childhood fantasy of working as a horse wrangler on a ranch in the American West.