Like many people, I had my own horse since I was old enough to ride. I grew up on a cattle ranch and started colts in my teenage years for the neighbours. My biggest learning curve came at seventeen; I went to work for a big game outfitter. His hunting area was 160 kilometers from the nearest road and everything was done with horses. For fifteen years I would go to the mountains at the end of July and come back into town at the end of October. My jobs consisted of skidding wood, starting colts, rounding up, trimming and shoeing the horses, and trailing the new horses in and old horses out over the hundred-mile trail to the highway. Back then my teachers were the Outfitters and Guides. Some of them had ten, twenty, thirty years experience before I showed up. Every year brought more challenges and experiences. The one consistent lesson taught was – no matter what the challenge was you had to get the job done. Quite often you were the only one within a twenty kilometer radius and the situation had to be dealt with immediately. And if you didn’t know how to deal with it, you did it anyway. When these situations involved a horse they often got a bad deal only because we ran out of horsemanship skills and knowledge.