Rodeos. Everywhere, every town, every nook and cranny of this state. There are cowboy boots and broncing four-legged critters bursting around dusty rings with Wrangler ads plastered on the sides throughout the summer, sometimes every night in some towns. Needless to say, there is a culture about this place that mimics the old rodeo ways. The people who are from this western world tend to have stories that revolve around working with animals, be it rodeos or hunting, cow handling or predator control.

We started the weekend in Cody, a town bustling with visitors that want to experience the wide open, rough and tough land of Wyoming. Every night of the week July-August there is a rodeo in Cody that is packed with onlookers. We ended up camping for a night in the Bear Tooth Mountains over the border in Montana and didn’t make it back for the rodeo in time. So I have yet to attend a Wyoming rodeo, despite having passed through a dozen towns hosting the festivity. Perhaps this next week during Carbon County’s summer rodeo?

We left Cody and headed over the Big Horn Mountains, chugging our little Honda up and around the 1,000′s of feet of elevation, eventually heading through the town of Sheridan and on east to the small town of Arvada. We were meeting a couple of skilled ranch workers at the Arvada bar to follow them in to a really beautiful and large ranch, Powder River Horses. The Arvada bar is one of a few places in the town- where the paved road ends and the dirt roads to the working ranches of the town seem to begin. Walking into the (fairly gritty) bar, cowboy hats strewn around on the strong faces of the locals sitting at the circular bar, cans of domestics in hand, we were faced with trophy heads of antelope, deer, etc. and some tried and true cowboys.

After following Rich and Sarah out to the ranch, they introduced us to some amazing people and beautiful horses. Rich, a former rodeo rider, hopped on a couple of horses and demonstrated how the horses did with ropes, rifles, and directions. It was inspiring to learn about the horses and their history, to talk with the people on the ranch about the work they do and the integrity of their working ranch. The ranch family works organically, raising long-horn cattle, weed eating goats and geese, and naturally maintained grasses. They focus on breeding quarter horses that are genetically sound, strong, and brilliantly colored. The horses originate from the Hollywood Gold and the Hancock lines, both strong western horses that handle the rugged miles of the west and know how to tightly turn and move cows. The experience of meeting these ranchers only made us more anxious for horses on the ranch and excited for the potential in focusing in on the proven strength in these historical breeds of horses.

The horses we saw really were beautiful and brilliant in color and form. But we were so engaged in the experience that we didn’t manage to take one picture- not one of the people, the horses, the cows, the geese, the grass… so instead the pictures below are the horses that were here at Meadow Ranch most recently, the horses that were broken by the family here, ridden to work cows, and sold after there was no one here to ride them. They are missed dearly… below are pics of Trof, Frosty, Sassy, Missy, & Principessa.