I WAS STEELING myself for what was going to be a three-hour horseback ride through Great Sand Dunes National Park when I realized I was unprepared. First, I didn’t have a ten-gallon hat. (I learned early on that not a single outfitter within a two-hour drive of Colorado Springs Airport carried a Stetson that would fit over my dreadlocks.) I knew that the hat wasn’t required, but not wearing one just felt odd—like playing baseball without a cap. Second, I didn’t have chaps.
“Do chaps actually anything?” I asked Ruby, a wrangler at Zapata Ranch in Mosca, Colorado. As I gazed out over the desert before us, Ruby patiently explained the many practical reasons chaps are a good idea (thorn-bush defense, rope-burn protection). She’d done this before—reassuring city people like me who had binged and were looking to the rough country as a means of escape.
