Although we don’t have any guests around right now, the ranch is nothing but quiet these days. The off-season is a time for knocking out projects on the to-do list, cleaning up from the winter, gearing up for the summer, and taking a little time off too.
This year, the off-season at our Colorado ranch began with a Wilderness First Aid training for many of our staff. It was an intense 4 days of training, but well worth it. You hate to think about the worst case scenarios, but it’s important to do that so if it ever happens we are prepared. With that done, we can focus on the best case scenarios and how to make the summer full of those! Before the winter season leaves our memory for too long we will have our End of Season meeting to talk through what worked and what needs tweaking. It’s that never ending quest for “betterness” (a Vista Verde made-up word) that keeps us all fired up and looking ahead. In addition to that meeting, Dace and I spent a couple days earlier this week in Denver at the Colorado Dude Ranch Association’s spring meeting. It’s always fun to get around other ranchers, share ideas and learn new tips and tricks. We had a cool experience this time of having one of our former guests come as a speaker on Labor Law. Not the most exciting topic, but Matt gave a lot of the ranchers much to think about and some really good tips for making sure we’re doing things the right way. It was also a pretty intense meeting for me as I am serving as President of the Association this year, so I had to be on my game and lead the group.
So between meetings, trainings, getting the Nordic center turned over into the Adventure Center, doing inventory in Fancy’s Merchantile, starting to work with some of the younger ranch horses who need tune-ups and keeping up with the recent snowfall (we thought it was spring?), it’s not exactly quiet around Vista Verde these days!
