The History Of Horseshoe Canyon Ranch by Barry Johnson

Amy and I bought the property In 1994.  I was 26 yr old at the time…

…I had decided to make a shift from what I was doing – I was doing financial planning and group insurance for federal and postal employees. I had been doing that for about 3 or 4 years right out of college; and found some success doing it.  It allowed me to have a little bit of money in the bank but I was traveling a lot – too much.  And when my oldest son, Cameron, was born (he is 21 now), I wasn’t willing to continue to pay that price anymore.  That’s when we decided to make that lifestyle switch.…

…so, we had looked for suitable properties to develop for about a year.

We were up in Harrison looking at another piece of property, not too far from here, a larger track about 700 acres.  But the access was poor — about 10 miles on a gravel road — and for other reasons, we didn’t’ feel comfortable with purchasing that property.

But, back at the motel that night, we had picked up one of those real-estate guides that you pick up at the super market, and there was a new listing in there.  It said something along the lines of:

“Beautiful Horseshoe Canyon – 350 acres,  good for cattle, and good for this and that and whatever…”

…we came out that following morning and looked at the property, and knew it was exactly what we were looking for and we offered and accepted that day; and away we went.There was nothing here when we bought it…

…only a single road down to that old chimney, where we parked our trailers out near the front.  And the previous owner had a pen there, where he gathered his cows.  That was it.

All of the roads and all of the structures; we had to build all of that.

The vision for the layout wasn’t very complicated.  We pictured that we needed a barn; an activity center to base the horse operation out of; and a lodge where people can gather and we can feed every body.  And we knew we needed cabins.

It was just a matter of walking around with stakes and ribbons and saying, “this would be a good spot,” and we just staked it all out and started building.  Most of the cabins were just kinda sketched out in a legal pad.

I had some construction management and finance background that I started in college, so I was comfortable with the construction aspect of the ranch.  We did find a home plan for the lodge that we converted and redrew to fit our need for the commercial building that it is.

We always new that the purpose of buying this property was to develop it into a family guest ranch.  I wanted it to be similar to my experience out west.

But the most important part was that we wanted to build a dude ranch where families could come, reconnect with each other and reconnect with the outdoors.

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