I spent my summer 2000 in America mostly. As I am studying English, I had to do a "Stay abroad" in an English speaking country for three months at least.
There was no question where to go. It has always been one of my dreams to go to America's Wild Wild West and work on a ranch. So I started to look for ranches on the internet, concentrating on the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana and sent out bunches of emails, asking for a job as a wrangler. Most ranches had their positions filled already or they couldn't offer me the job I wanted to do so bad, until I got an email from a place that was called Ranger Creek Guest Ranch, settled in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming, the most beautiful place I could think of. The owners were interested in hiring me for the job as a wrangler. So, I saw my dream finally come true, after I almost had lost my hopes. And that's the way the story goes.

Somehow I could not believe that I finally would have the chance to spend my summer on a "real" ranch. There are even people in Europe who don't know that ranches exist in the USA. So I went on to start my adventure.
First of all my trip took me 27 hours. I had some flight delays so that I missed a connection flight but I finally arrived in Sheridan, Wyoming where I was picked up by Sue Comisford, one of the owners, as well as Jessica, another girl wrangler from Virginia and Melissa, the daughter of the Comisfords. It took us 1 1/2 hours to get to Ranger Creek Ranch, settled in the beautiful Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming, a US state with only 400,000 inhabitants. My adventure was about to start.

It was amazing, I got to know the whole family and the rest of the staff and we clicked right from the beginning and I felt like being at home, being part of the family. Bill Comisford was the head of the ranch whereas Brandon Comisford, the eldest son was the head wrangler. He was my boss and showed me around and what it means to work as a wrangler. I got used to everything pretty soon and I had lots of fun. My day started at 7.00 am when we ran in all the 27 horses of the ranch. They were fed, groomed and saddled before breakfast. As the Ranger Creek Ranch is a guest ranch, we had a lot of guests of course, who were mostly staying for one week. So I got to know a lot of different groups of people who were from all over the United States; from California to the New York Island. Most of them enjoyed riding even if some have never ever done this before. After breakfast we started our first 2 hour trailride followed by another one after lunch. In the evenings we had an entertainment program, such as line-dancing, singing at the campfire or a presentation about Buffalo Bill. Once a week we went to Cody, a cute little Western town, where the guests were able to do some shopping and to see the famous Cody Nite Rodeo.

Happy Trails

For an info brochure within European countries, send an email to: ranger@tanjaqua.com

For more information about me, check out www.tanjaqua.de (in German)