bond during time at dude ranch
We rode our line of horses along a trail winding between giant saguaro cactuses towering nearly 30 feet in the air like spiky desert signposts.
Despite being in southern Arizona, we shivered in the December winds, the desert hills above us painted an incongruous white with frost. Our motley crew of the old, young and unsteady plodded along on horseback like a lost pioneer troupe. Fortunately, the grizzled veteran wrangler leading our trail ride signaled that the chuck wagon was in sight.
We were on a breakfast ride at Tanque Verde Ranch, a Western resort that’s been in business since the 1920s. This ride was a homecoming of sorts; I’d done the same trip as a kid when my family of five traveled from the Chicago suburbs to this venerable dude ranch over 30 years ago. Now I was back with 10 of us, three generations of family members from across the country to see how the ranch — and our idea of a family vacation — has changed.
The concept of a dude ranch vacation began in the 1880s, as Teddy Roosevelt and other East Coast “dudes” (an insulting term back then for clueless city posers) went out West to play at being cowboys. Since then, dude ranches have evolved to include highend resorts with a few horses, working cattle ranches, rugged horseback wilderness adventures and everything in between. The increasing popularity of experiential travel has been a
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These horsefocused activities filled my experience visiting the ranch as a kid in the 1980s. While the corrals remain the same, including wrangler Joe Valdez, who’s been taking city slickers out on the trails for 45 years, my childhood memories definitely don’t include the newer ranch activities of mountain biking, tennis, yoga, spa treatments and water aerobics.
Tanque Verde’s guest lodging began as a few rooms attached to the main building and has since expanded to more than 65 rooms ranging from basic “salas” to expansive threeand fourbedroom Santa Festyle haciendas whose pink and orange hues blend into the desert sunsets. The rooms can be rustic to a fault — some apparently not updated since my first visit — but renovations are planned.
The dining experience remains a communal affair in the main lodge, with hearty Southwestern buffets mixing frontier meatandpotatoes with healthy greens and Mexicanthemed food nights. The Doghouse Saloon provides preand postdinner libations, like the popular prickly pear margarita, along with card and pool tables. A clunky TV that used to be propped on a table has given way to multiple flat screens.
The family experience is part of dude ranch DNA. One family spanning four generations has been coming to Tanque Verde annually for the past 55 years.
“It’s about the traditions, the memories, the shared experiences that keep our guests coming back,” general manager Rita Cote said.
When I visited back in the day, I remember my little sister Amy, maybe 5 years old, almost doing the splits as she straddled the saddle of fat, docile Oats, the mellow, favorite horse for kids. This time, I watched Amy help her daughter Esme, outfitted in pink cowgirl gear, get ready for her ride atop another comically large horse.
Away from the trails, families share time at the ranch’s stocked fishing pond, around the campfire during barbecues and storytime sessions, and at the communal dining tables.
Tanque Verde’s kids club (ages 412) offers plenty of activities to keep the young ones occupied during the day, so it doesn’t always have to be family time.
Returning to the ranch as an adult, it was comforting to see that some things were still the same. The saguarodominated desert landscape remained unchanged. The horses still wanted to stop to eat shrubs on the trail. Kids still found equine flatulence hysterical. And the old wranglers were as cranky as ever.
“But after two decades here, Joe actually started speaking in complete sentences,” Cote boasted.
Pulling up to the breakfast campground, the setup was just as I remembered it: a covered wagon surFamilies
rounded by picnic tables and cast-iron griddles, staff cooking up flapjacks and dispensing coffee and hot chocolate as they waved away excess smoke with their cowboy hats. The scents of sizzling bacon and smoke from mesquite fires mixed with those of the sagebrush scrub and dusty horses, fully immersing me in old memories while I was creating new ones.
My dad, as usual, had slept late, but I’d see him on a trail ride in the afternoon, both of us sneaking in a lope when the wrangler wasn’t looking. He’d once again recall old John Wayne movies and tell of his imaginary past riding with the Apache and Comanche. My sister and I would roll our eyes — we’ve heard the stories 100 times. But these were fresh yarns for the grandkids, a new roundup of dudes enjoying an old tradition.