About Me

I always wanted to be a cowboy. My dad always had horses, but they were a hobby for him.

I got my first job on a ranch when I was 16. It was in eastern Colorado. The guy I worked for had about 300 cows. He also trained rope horses and cutting horses. He also had a lot of farm ground. I quickly learned being a cowboy in eastern Colorado meant baling hay all summer and feeding hay all winter. We got to ride about 2 weeks in the spring, and about 2 weeks in the fall. Luckily in the summer, we got to rope after work.

This is where I first learned to start colts. He had some pretty good horses. Compared to what I do now, the colt starting was fairly crude.

I worked for him until I was 18. Then I thought I needed to go make some big money. When I quit, an old guy that also worked on the ranch, told me “its’s not about how much you make, it’s about how much you get to keep.”

I worked in the oil field for about a year, the started working construction. The construction jobs brought me to Utah. I did that for about 8 years. It seems like I always had a colt to ride after work. Working construction was getting to me. I didn’t really like it. In the winter of 1982-83 I finally quit. I wanted to figure out how to be a cowboy.

In the spring of 1983 I got a job for a ranch based out of Salina UT. They had desert BLM permits for the winter, and forest permits for the summer. That was the first real cowboy job I had. I just rode, didn’t have drive tractors.

It was the summer of 1983, I read an article in Western Horseman Magazine about Ray Hunt starting colts. He was doing a clinic in Heber City that summer. Back then his clinics were 5 days and always started on a Saturday. He said the first day was the most important. I was able to get the weekend off and went and watched Saturday and Sunday.

I came away from there thinking, I didn’t have any business riding horses with what little I knew. I was hooked. That started my horsemanship journey and it continues to this day. I started absorbing anything I could find that had anything to do with Ray Hunt. That eventually led me to Buck Branaman, Brian Neubert, and I even found a couple of Tom Dorrance clinics.

My job on that ranch caused me to move to a little town in southern Utah named Hanksville. The cattle were on the desert range most of the year and Hanksville was the closest town.

In about 1989 The ranch lost most of the desert permits in that area. I had just and didn’t want to move right then, so I quit. Started taking colts to start. The trouble was, there weren’t enough horses in Hanksville to keep a horse trainer busy. So after about a year I took a job on another ranch in the area. Cross S Cattle Co. They ran their cattle on the desert year around in the area called Robbers Roost. A lot of the stories I’m going to tell happened during the years I worked for these 2 ranches.

It’s always been about the horses for me, so a lot of my stories are going to include my horsemanship journey and all the people who have helped me along the way.