‘Cowboy Bucket List’ by Slim Randles
‘The Complete Cowboy Bucket List’ could keep you riding for years
“The Complete Cowboy Bucket List — 100 Cowboy Things to Do Before You Put Your Horse Up and Go to the House” by Slim Randles, with a few words by Johnny D. Boggs
Rio Grande Books, $15.95, 121 pp.
H ere’s a book that’s for you folks who aren’t cowboys — or cowgirls — but have secretly dreamed of being one.
It reads nice and easy as if personable Albuquerque author Slim Randles were advising you to choose items you want from his bucket list.
The list is comprised of things to visit and things to do. It is numbered from number 100 down to No. 1. Each listing receives its own page; photographs accompany the text.
No. 100 is see Horsehead Crossing of the Pecos (River). Randles writes that the crossing was initially used for cattle drives by Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving as part of the trail from Texas to New Mexico named for them. The crossing is near a farm road northwest of Girvin, Texas.
For the last-mentioned item, No.1, Randles suggests the reader sign up for rodeo bullfighting school in Branson, Mo.
In between are activities that could occupy you for months, if not years. It could mean traveling from the East Coast to Hawaii, attending rodeos, visiting museums, joining a wagon train, going to cowboy poetry gatherings, buying a GOOD cowboy hat. Or maybe taking a horseback tour of Mongolia.
Or it could mean exploring bucket list opportunities on day trips from home.
If you’re a New Mexico resident, you can take advantage of the list’s large number of activities right here in the state.
Visit Folsom Man Site, where a black cowboy discovered archaeological artifacts. Take a tour of the southernmost hideout on the Outlaw Trail (today it’s on the WS Ranch) near Reserve. See Kit Carson’s grave in Taos. Go to the Lincoln County Courthouse where Billy the Kid killed two deputies. Check out Carlsbad Caverns, which were first explored by a cowboy.
Worn out yet? Randles wasn’t when he completed the list.
“I could have done 200 without breaking a sweat,” he said in a phone interview.
Randles grew up in El Monte, Calif., back when it resembled Albuquerque’s South Valley today.
“We had an acre. A lot of people did... I grew up with horses, got my first at age 14,” he recalled.
“I was a mulepacker in the High Sierras for eight years and as a hunting guide I used animals as well. ...I was a packer, I trained horses, was a dude wrangler but I was never really a working ranch cowboy.”
Randles, a former Journal reporter/columnist, has been writing a syndicated newspaper column called “Home Country.”
For the sedentary, the back of the book has a list of “Cowboy Music” and a list of “Cowboy Movies.”
The book is part of Rio Grande Books’ bucket list series. Randles is currently writing a fly fisherman’s bucket list book.