Horseback Riding at Terry Bison Ranch – In A Colorado Minute (Week 212)
Technically, the Terry Bison Ranch
is in Wyoming. But once you make a German girl’s life-long dream come
true and get on a horse to ride around the American prairie, you quickly
end up in Colorado, where most of the ranch’s grassland is located. So I
consider this to be a video about horseback riding in Colorado.
On
Erik’s last day in Colorado before returning to Hamburg, Erik, Scott
and I headed up to the border to Wyoming and visited the Terry Bison
Ranch, which is a fully functioning (and the nation’s 3rd largest) bison
farm and a Western resort (cabins and RV park) that features a small
zoo (regular farm animals and the more exotic kind, like yaks and
ostriches), a fishing pond, restaurants and offers what we came for: to
ride a horse in the Wild West.
We were greeted by picture-perfect
cowboys, who actually aren’t just actors (as anyone who has spent too
much time at Disney would suspect) but actually are fully involved at
the farm. Actually, our conversations with Joey Probert, the leader of our little pack (who did turn out to be an actor as well)
made the ride especially charming as he told us about having been part
of the farm since he was a small child (leading tours since he was 14)
and shared anecdotes about the changes around the farm, re-training
horses after their winter break and the bison calf, which had been born
90 minutes before out in the field (we saw the mom lick the calf while
riding by).
Our horses, Daisy, Gypsy and Spirit, were calm and
patient and only rarely tried to sneak in a bushel of grass. The ride
was both relaxing and exciting. Next time, I definitely want to take the
longer ride across the ridge and explore the wilder hinterlands, where
you can see elk and antelopes roaming. Or maybe the next ride will be
out of Estes Park, where you get to explore mountain trails.
In
any case, I definitely want to come back to Terry Bison Farm this summer
to watch the rodeo-style action as horses are broken in or retrained
after their long winter vacation. Also I might just have to shoot an
entire video about ostriches…
The music in this video is the instrumental version of the song “Water In The Creek” by Josh Woodward. This song is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 US License.
This video is dedicated to Rhonda S, a British YouTube friend, who makes great horseback riding videos and has been watching my videos for years.
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| Horseback riding in Colorado (leaving from the Terry Bison Ranch in Wyoming) |