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Outside Magazine's 2003 Family Travel Guide

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Multisport Dude Ranching
The New Dude (cont.)

By Tim Brookes


	Dowdy Lake, in the town of Red Feather Lakes (Tony Demin)

Some of the more traditional western activities were less of a hit. When we drove 15 miles downslope to the bend-in-the-road hamlet of Livermore to watch the weekly calf-roping—a strange and demanding sport—some were bemused. ("Novel concept," observed Ken, an architect from Philadelphia. "Recreational cattle.") Others, like Barbara, were appalled at the squeals of the calves, rushing down the chute ahead of the cattle prods.

"You just ate beef kebab," I pointed out.

"Yes, but I didn’t play with my food," she retorted.

The beauty of Sundance was that everyone—the adults as well as the kids, who ranged from three to 15 years old—found and fell into his or her own rhythm. The two 15-year-olds, for example, invoked the Teenager’s Bill of Rights: One was happy enough not joining in much of anything; the other made a token appearance on horseback, then spent the rest of the week rafting. Our family found rhythms we’d never have expected. I overcame my unease around horses and my fear of heights (I thought that on rock-climbing day, they’d have to haul me up in a basket) and ended up whooping and swinging across the 60-foot rock face like Spider-Man. Yet I probably got the most pleasure from teaching Maddy and her new friends Faye, 9, Kirk, 10, and Patrick, 11, how to play cricket with a branch and a pine cone, a multicultural sporting feat beyond even Isabella Bird.

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Barbara followed Maddy over to the rifle range—a couple of shelves of tin cans set up in the trees—and, to her own amazement, turned out to be a markswoman.

Maddy, surrounded by so much that was new, never became entirely comfortable on a horse and balked at the rock face, but found her own fun, hiking and clambering up the boulders around the ranch with the other younger kids, in pursuit of a dozen cats. No one suspected that her favorite day would turn out to be the afternoon we spent whitewater rafting.

Even though the Cache La Poudre River, normally Class III and IV, was so low that August that we could have hopped out and walked—and our guide from Rocky Mountain Adventures did, whenever we ran onto rocks—we all paddled hard, screamed harder, and spun downstream. When the five-mile outing was over, Maddy and I fell out of the raft and floated around in our life jackets.

"Can we do it again?" she asked, and she’s still asking.

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