Saddle up for Colorado
THOMPSON
Snow squeaks beneath my horse’s hooves as we plod slowly through a narrow rift in the powder. It’s heavy going for Lola, a dappled mare who exhales great clouds of steamy breath as she picks her way through hoof holes made by the pack ahead.
The snow comes up to my knees, even as I sit 16 hands in the air, but it’s nothing to a horse like Lola.
She’s used to carrying bundles of heavy ski equipment to the top of the mountain so that her cowboy owners can make fresh tracks through the abundant powder on their land.
Skiing and cowboys are an unlikely combination, but ranch-owning families were working the land and skiing the slopes decades before the tourism boom of the Sixties.
‘‘There hasn’t been a day in the last 78 years that I haven’t either ridden a horse or skied the mountain,’’ says Ray
Heid, an 84-year-old cowboy whose family have been here for six generations. ‘‘As soon as the kids are old enough to walk, we strap skis on their feet and push them down the drive, and then the mountain.’’
He’s dressed in a battered cowboy hat and incredible floor-length fur coat made from the skins of elk he hunted himself – and assorted furs of roadkill. It’s not hard to see the appeal of the life the Heid family lead.
The countryside is unparalleled in its beauty: the skies above are almost obscenely blue, and all around us the icy landscape twinkles in the morning sun.
We make our way through forests of bare, brutal aspen trees, their bark scarred top to bottom by bear claws. Ray points out a coyote and a bushy coated fox which makes his British cousin look embarrassingly shabby.
It’s unforgiving terrain, covered for months each year by several feet of snow.
But these cowboys are hardy folk – on the drive back to Steamboat, we pass a farmer feeding his herd of cows with a pack of hay-laden horses, his young kids bundled into a sledge pulled behind.
As you’d expect, so much snow on the ground translates to an exceptional skiing experience in the nearby Rocky Mountains.
I’ve been skiing and snowboarding for 20 years in Europe, but I’ve never experienced anything like this.
Colorado is a paradise for snow sports enthusiasts: hundreds of miles