Guest Ranches

Saddle Up

Spend a Real Cowpoke Vacation at an Arizona Dude Ranch The calf bellows like a foghorn as you wrestle its rust-colored bulk down into the mud of the corral. Its eyes roll as you tie its flailing legs, then watch as a cowboy deftly cuts its earmark. Blood spatters onto your shirt, mingling with the morning's dust and sweat. As you trudge toward the branding fire, your boot squishes into a splash of green manure.

This is a vacation? You bet, pardner in fact, branding used to be considered a special treat at Arizona dude ranches that touted the joys of playing cowpoke. Although modern insurance policies have made guest participation in such dangerous chores mostly a thing of the past, you still can find a spread or two that will give you the taste of a real working ranch.

The Circle Z outside the little town of Patagonia near the Mexican border is one of them. Converted to a dude operation in 1926, the Circle Z claims to be Arizona's oldest continuously operating guest ranch. In earlier years, the outfit survived Apache attacks to become a successful family-owned sheep and cattle ranch.

During the 1880s, similar ranches began boosting their incomes by taking in paying boarders. Such were the beginnings of the earliest dude ranches, which offered jaded Easterners a chance to hunt, camp out, and help cowboys drive cattle, rope, and brand calves.

To preserve the atmosphere of an original working guest ranch, the Circle Z continues to earn part of its income from cattle and retains a year-round staff of hands. A few cows are kept down at the corrals, awaiting dehorning or other special care. Guests can pat their curly white faces and toss them flakes of hay.The rest of the Circle Z cattle forage for their breakfasts on the ranch's 5,000 acres of range where the foothills of the Santa Rita and Patagonia mountains rise in soft curves, joining and parting, rolling together. On their daily trail rides, dudes can expect to see scatterings of cattle grazing on hillsides, melding in harmony with the landscape.

The Circle Z's 70 mostly ranch-sired horses make another classic Southwestern picture, especially as they thunder along the banks of cottonwood-lined Sonoita Creek. Guests gather in the ranch's cantina to watch the fiery freedom of the gallop: red and gold geldings, mares with black tails flying, all caught up in a spirited race to the haystack at the corrals.

"For most guests these days, just seeing the animals is enough they don't really want to strainContinued from page 26 themselves doing chores," says Circle Z owner Lucia Nash. "But a few people come here with some real ranching experience and want to pitch in a hand to help the wranglers. You have to be a pretty good judge of character to tell which ones know what they're doing."

Saddle Up!

Nash relies on the judgment of her longtime foreman, George Lorta, a big, sun-weathered man who can tell a greenhorn from a wrangler with a squint of his brown eyes. "We ask each guest to take a few turns around the corral," says Lorta. "I can see by the way they handle the horse how much they've been around animals. "For instance, a few years back, a fellow from Michigan jog-trotted around like he'd been born in the saddle," Lorta recalls. "I wasn't surprised to hear he'd done a lot of jackpot roping back home. Now he comes here every winter and spends his whole time down by the tack room, roping and telling stories. Sometimes he helps us round up the horses and bring them back to the corrals."

The ranch's horse corrals snuggle under looming Sanford Butte, known to guests as Circle Z Mountain. The area exudes that comforting Southwestern smell: a blend of

WHEN YOU GO

sage and dust, a whiff of sun-warmed wood and tar, the hot-grass scent of dung, the salty-sweet essence of animals. The aroma awakens the feeling of getting back to the basics; you may even feel the urge for a satisfying dose of manual labor. Nash explains the fascination of the corral: "There's an emotional aspect to working with your hands around animals. We see this especially in teenage girls. Our wranglers sometimes let them put on their own saddles and bridles and curry their horses after a ride. Some of the kids even insist on hosing down the corals."

Guests who want to do less earthy work have a few other choices. "Sometimes we let cattle-wise guests help with cold-branding, a modern process that doesn't involve much pain or hassle," says Lorta. "And occasionally a really experienced hand can help bring in stray horses and calves. But for the most part, we try to convince folks that cowpunching is more fun to sit back and watch."

If you want to watch the real thing, you can get up before daybreak to join Lorta on a drive to nearby San Rafael Valley where as many as 800 head of cattle are shipped from various commercial ranches in a day. Sitting on a fence and swatting flies, you can see dirt-and-sweat cowboys push bawling critters up a loading ramp and onto a truck bed.

A day at the shipping yards should be enough to convince you that cattle handling has lost much of its former color and romance. Instead of cowboys on horseback with manila ropes, modern branding pens are often staffed with men on foot who clap and shout to maneuver the animals into a chute. Calves are put onto a mechanical table and branded with an iron that's been heated with a butane burner. Not many dudes or old-time cowboys for that matter would care to take part in the action.

Even in earlier days, cowpunching field trips taught Circle Z guests an important lesson about ranch work. Caroline Sanford, who stayed at the ranch as a girl in 1948, jotted down these memories: "One time the nearby Coleshaw Ranch was going to brand some cattle. The Circle Z wranglers went to help, and the guests went along for the fun.. There was a lot of bawling and the smell of burned hair and blood. (The calves were earmarked, too.) After we went home, all the guests who had helped hold the calves down were sore in the arms and legs."

Sanford's girlhood journal reinforces a truism: despite being glamorized in motion pictures and songs, cowboy life involves nasty, dirty, muscle-straining work that most people would rather not do especially on vacation.

Although for 50 years Circle Z brochures invited guests to "ride and work with the cowboys," there's some question about how many dudes actually took advantage of the opportunity.

For one thing, the excitement of the roundup occurred in the spring and fall, when guests had all retreated to cooler climates. For another, the chance of painful injury was very real. A pulled tendon or broken bone could put a crimp in any Southwestern holiday.

"You can't let one guest herd cattle and stop another from wanting to do it, too," explains Doris Simmons, who has helped manage the Circle Z since 1975. "To prevent hurt feelings, I bet that most of the work in those early years was done by the ranch hands, just like it is today."

A 1920s Circle Z brochure confirms Simmons' hunch: "During your stay, the cowboys are always busy riding the fences, treating cattle, or branding calves. The horse wranglers are also kept at work breaking horses and colts. The work is always done near the ranch house, and furnishes much amusement to the guests."

"Amusement" is the key word here.

Getting there: The Circle Z is on State Route 82 southwest of Patagonia. For directions to other guest ranches, check with the Dude Ranchers' Association (see further information below). Selecting a ranch: Here's a partial sampling of guest ranches. Near Wickenburg: Flying E, Kay El Bar, Rancho de los Caballeros, Wickenburg Inn. Near Tucson: Hacienda del Sol, Lazy K Bar, Tanque Verde, White Stallion, Triangle T, Wild Horse. Southern Border Country: Circle Z, Elkhorn, Price Canyon, Rancho de la Osa. Northern Arizona: Grand Canyon Bar Ten, Grapevine Canyon, Phantom, Sprucedale. Reservations: The season at most desert ranches runs from November through April. Some welcome overnight and weekend guests; others have a minimum stay of one week. All require reservations. Rates are usually on the American Plan, with meals, lodging, and activities included. Cowboy chores: When you make your reservations, find out if the ranch is a working cattle outfit or has access to a nearby working cattle ranch. If so, ask how you might be able to help out the cowboys. Other things to do: All guest ranches offer horseback riding, and most have swimming pools. Hiking, bird-watching, hunting, fishing, pack trips, camping out, and sight-seeing are frequent pastimes. Some ranches also provide polo, tennis, trap shooting, and golf. For further information: Contact the Dude

Ranchers' Association, P.O. Box 471, LaPorte,

CO 80535; telephone (303) 493-7623.

done strictly for the sake of entertainment, and there was an act for everyone in the family. Mom and Dad could marvel at rope tricks and fancy riding by the wranglers down at the corrals. Teenage girls could thrill to mild cowboy flirtations on moonlight rides along the creek. Their kid brothers could get bug-eyed listening to tales of hidden treasure around a campfire. It sure beats getting blisters on your hands trying to rope a renegade steer.

The tongue-in-cheek attitude toward guests doing real work is epitomized in an early brochure published by the Circle Z's neighboring dude outfit, Rancho de la Osa. A grinning man in a white shirt and black tie pins a steer with his knee and raises a smoking branding iron. The caption reads, "A Chicago cowboy does his stuff."

If the Chicago cowboy felt he was getting a cleaned-up version of ranching chores, so did the wranglers who helped him pose for the photograph. The frivolous existence of a dude-ranch hand is lamented in cowboy songs such as "The Dude Wrangler:"

Oh I saddles up their pumptailed ponies,

I fix their stirrups for them too,

I boost them up into their saddles, They give me tips when I'm through.

It's just like horses eatin' loco,

You cannot quit if you try,

I'll go on wranglin' dudes forever, Until the day that I shall die.

For all that he's ridiculed in traditional Southwestern lore, a good dude wrangler must possess skills that set him apart from the working cowboy. A riding teacher, entertainer, social organizer, and campfire cook, his main job is to keep the guests healthy, happy, and relaxed.

"Believe it or not," says Simmons, "one of our wranglers' biggest challenges today is trying to convince male guests to wear queen-size pantyhose." A practical aid to prevent saddle sores and chafing, the pantyhose are a great source of goodnatured joking at the Circle Z.

Such laughter is part of the warm, oldfashioned atmosphere that characterizes the dude ranch today. With accommodations for about 40 guests, the Circle Z embraces you like a friendly family cattle outfit that's throwing a continual house party.

Every evening includes an hour in the adobe cantina where guests become comfortable pals. Dressed in blue jeans and boots, French counts and Japanese business magnates mix with Phoenix schoolteachers, New York magazine editors, and plumbers from Milwaukee. Conversation revolves around horses, hitches, and riding trails. Nobody really cares what you do when you're away from the Circle Z.

This horsey simplicity is part of the appeal that's drawn people to guest ranches since they began: the chance to escape the clutter and claptrap of the cities; to connect to the vital, animal closeness of our common past.

Now that the Circle Z has had to limit its invitation to guests to participate in most cowboy chores, you still can reach back to the romance of the old days by exploring the area's history.

On a slow trail ride across the grassy rangelands, it's easy to daydream yourself back into a time when farming and ranching were the center of life here. Indian potshards remind you that the creek once nourished a Pima farming village visited by Spanish Jesuit missionary Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino. Tumbled adobe walls mark the futile efforts of Spanish and Anglo ranchers.

The settlers who left these ruins knew the rigors of manual labor. But they also knew the peacefulness of Nature, the wholesomeness of food, the sweetness of sleep. These simple pleasures not just an endless string of chores were part of Arizona cowboy life. You can enjoy them today in abundance at old-fashioned guest ranches like the Circle Z.MFor a close-up look at the spirit and culture of real-life cowboys, we recommend Ranch Album: A Portrait of Arizona Cowboys, a 60-minute Arizona Highways video that focuses on ranches in the grassy highlands near Prescott. For information, or to place an order, telephone toll-free 1 (800) 5435432. In the Phoenix area, call 258-1000.

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