A Horse Girl Grows Up

After a childhood spent dreaming of the open range, Carrie Dennis makes good with an untamed ride across Idaho.

- Carrie Dennis

RIGHT Riding with Idaho's Silver Spur Ranch.

IN FRONT OF ME were six miles of open plain, distant peaks, blue sky, and a herd of nearly 50 horses thundering through sagebrush and wildflowers, flinging rocks from under their shoes. I held the reins in one hand and used the loose ends to thwap my mare, Honey, to keep her moving. She kicked out as if offended, then abruptly stopped and grabbed a mouthful of grass. I swooped her around and drove her back to the pack with a “Yeehaw!” On the other side of the herd, my best pal, Victoria, was flying on her paint horse, Axel, and smiling from ear to ear.

We had just begun a three-day, 80-mile horse drive across Idaho, a trip Vic and I had booked impulsively a year and a half earlier. Well before that, the two of us were second-grade friends who held invisible reins while hauling ourselves over brooms balanced between two lawn chairs.

Sometime before we turned 10, we started riding real horses and spent summers at our trainer’s 15-acre farm in Pennsylvania, waking up at 6 a.m. to haul feed to a dozen horses. It was bliss. So when Vic, who traded our native New York home for Los Angeles more than a decade ago, suggested we reunite for the ultimate horse-girl vacation, I said, “Let’s go.”

There are different flavors of horse girls. Some show, some barrel race, some have never ridden a horse but love the works of Marguerite Henry. When we were kids, Vic and I just wanted to choose horses and pretend they had preternatural connections to us and no one else, get crud under our fingernails, and go fast and jump high. Not much has changed, except we both now live in places unfriendly to horses galloping free.