Dude ranching isn’t easy. Dude ranch vacations are amazing, pampering, adventurous, and everything else you can imagine, but the business behind those vacations takes a lot of heart. Nobody stays in the industry who doesn’t truly love what they do. For the most part, there’s a guarantee you’ll barely break even, work long hours, and get injured somehow while on the job… but there’s also the guarantee that you will have the best job in the world. This idea of taking in strangers and showing them the real American West took hold over a hundred years ago. The oldest ranch in the Dude Rancher’s Associations has been run by four generations of the same family. Yes, indeed. Farming, ranching, and dude ranching aren’t easy, but they all hold one thing in common: sustainability.
Get a bunch of ranchers together to talk about the environmental movement, and it will be a hilarious conversation. Most environmentally conscious individuals have a desire to ‘save nature’, but most of them don’t know nature… not really. Not the way we do.
The ideals of nature and the realitiesof living in it are very different. Sustainability isn’t just an option for us: it’s how we live because it’s the only way we can survive. We have to save our forests – or we don’t have trails on which to ride. We must conserve resources – we don’t have enough money to wasteful. And frankly, we don’t have a choice about saving carbon credits because some projects are so remote or rugged we have to ride out to them on horseback instead of drive a vehicle.
So you could jet to an island where they spend billions shipping distant food to their fancy restaurants. You might contemplate a cruise on a gas-guzzling ship, even though the tourists on board are responsible for littering what would otherwise be pristine beaches. But if you really want an environmentally friendly vacation, you should probably go where the land has been preserved. If you want sustainable, you should find a place where the business had to be carved out of the wild. On those mountains and in those forests, you’ll find people who honor the land. We respect these places because it’s never just business with us: this is our home. We aren’t ‘environmentalists’ in the political sense of the term, but will do everything we can to keep our land clean and healthy. If you want to save the planet, you should give your vacation to the people who’ve been fighting that war since before ‘green’ became a political buzzword.
Come up to the high country and see the mountains’ full glory - the wilderness untamed. Sustainable, scenic, secluded: Latigo is waiting for you.
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