Hasta la vista

when a horse dreams of paradise On a ranch of rolling grasslands and wooded canyons, horse trainer Leslie Hammel-Turk raises a barn for her high-performance Arabians.
By Charles C. Poling Photography by Arnd Bronkhorst

When you lope a horse across the summer-lush pastures of Rampart Ranch with a tremendous bowl of upturned sky overhead, the sheer walls of Hermit’s Peak behind you, and a rolling, endless panorama of grasslands unspooling ahead all the way to Texas, you know you’ve touched the primal link between horses and people in their native habitat. That relationship was born in a place like this.

Rampart Ranch, named for its rocky outcrops, serves as the location for the breeding stable known as Turk Arabians and the horse training and instruction business of Leslie Hammel-Turk and her husband, Brad Turk. You might say this is Leslie’s native habitat. A scant few miles north of Las Vegas, New Mexico, it’s a horseman’s paradise: 340 acres of flat and rolling ranchland pasture and a deep, wooded canyon, roomy stables and riding arenas, a spacious, architecturally grand main barn, and a cozy residence saturated in sunlight and far-as-the-eye-can-see views. Here Hammel-Turk practices her craft.

“Horses are the palette for me to work my art,” she says with an expansive gesture. That art is a kind of enlightened horsemanship lately becoming more broadly popular in the equestrian world, a milieu not marked by its frivolous adoption of newfangled ideas.

The movie The Horse Whisperer helped popularize this style of “natural horsemanship” among mass audiences. Trainer, teacher, and circus-style showman Pat Parelli has insinuated it deep into cowboy America through his multimedia road-show extravaganzas, complete with merchandise sales and high-energy music. It’s arena rock of a new order. But Hammel-Turk traces her lineage through a quieter, more senior mentor, Ray Hunt, who learned the old, gentle vaquero ways from legendary horseman Tom Dorrance. Parelli also credits Hunt and Dorrance as personal mentors. Hammel-Turk has hosted Ray Hunt clinics at Rampart Ranch.

The gist of natural horsemanship is learning to work so closely with a horse that it thinks everything you do while riding is its own idea. That involves huge doses of horse psychology, clear communication, gentle positive/negative feedback training, and more patience than a preschool teacher on a downtown field trip.

“I’m catering to a small group of people interested in finishing horses”—or taking them to a high level of training—“and digging deep inside themselves to figure out” how to do it, Leslie says.

While Hammel-Turk was living in Santa Fe and developing a client base there as a riding instructor and horse trainer, she realized she needed more room to put this philosophy of horsemanship fully into practice.

She also was embarking on a parallel breeding program through which she could develop her own line of performance-oriented Arabian horses with the genetics, the bodies, and the personalities to compete in high-level Western reining competitions. Horse properties big enough to accommodate such a large-scale operation around Santa Fe are scarce, dry (not much pasture), and exorbitantly priced. She knew the grassy, wide-open, and affordable Las Vegas area from years of driving through to visit grandparents in Kansas. It seemed the natural move.

Leslie had always wanted a ranch in northern New Mexico, a place where she could pasture her horses. Having grown up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, she only half jokes that she “always had this regret that I should have been born into a ranching family.” This is certainly big-ranch country: in all that view from the back of a horse, only a few homes interrupt the landscape. Cows graze across the dirt county road and elk roam the canyon. Although the place might be an hour from the wealthier market of Santa Fe, she says, “I love being away from the madding crowd.” Few visible signs of modernity break the spell.

“We had been looking for a slower pace of life and found that Las Vegas accommodated that, along with very nice people,” Leslie says. And she knew she wanted raw land. Brad had loved the Front Range of the Rockies since he went to school at Colorado College. A physicist and building scientist, he had long hoped to build his own home. After a 10-year search, this parcel came along and they “made the plunge.”

Next they brought in architect Roy L. Woods of Conron & Woods Architects in Santa Fe, who had designed the previous house Leslie had shared with her father, Jay Hammel, in Santa Fe. He also “knows horses,” in her words. If you know horse people, you know the punch line: Woods designed the barn first, then builder Leroy Vigil came and built it in late 2002, while Leslie and Brad lived in a trailer near the future home site. Only after the barn was completed and occupied by its equine residents did they begin the house, which remains ever so slightly unfinished. Brad, with his background in building sciences, was closely involved in constructing the home, which has a number of green features, including heavy insulation and passive solar gain—but that’s another story.

Woods began the project by establishing an overall site plan. About the only “given” was the placement of the entry road, which hugs the western boundary and runs a large fraction of a mile across the property to the constellation of stables and home. The house perches on an escarpment above Bonita Creek, a drainage running through a steep narrow canyon from the Hermit’s Peak country of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains down into the Storrie Lake reservoir immediately north of Las Vegas. (Leslie points out that their property straddles the divide between waters draining to the Rio Grande and Mississippi River.) Piñon, juniper, and the beginnings of the ponderosa forest embrace the site.

Looking south from the airy, just-right-sized living/dining area of the home, your eye skims over the canyon to the glimmering waters of the lake, then across a scattering of homes and barns and businesses on the outskirts of Las Vegas to finally settle on more open land, broken hills, the forested ridges that begin the Rockies, and a billowing cloudscape. I bet you can often see two weather patterns forming simultaneously from this cusp position caught between the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, a foot in each province.

Walk outside and the house immediately recedes from view. “We were adamant that the house not stick out,” Leslie notes. The horse facilities sprawl to the west, dominated by the high-peaked barn, which despite its size remains humbled by the surrounding infinity. Woods designed the barn as a T shape, which kept the central core open. Wings separate mares and stallions in eight stalls while making possible future expansion in two wings to 20 stalls without creating a long, linear cell block—all those extra steps count when you’re lugging a hay bale or pushing a wheelbarrow full of horse bedding. The projecting arms of the T and its leg are made from prefabricated steel beams and panels; the central, doming hub is all custom, clearly marked by this skilled architect’s hand and masterfully crafted by Leroy Vigil.

Inside the barn, Leslie keeps her top stallions, pregnant mares, mares with young foals, and others in current favor. They get rotated around depending on season and their particular needs. Everyone has a roomy stall and turnout space. Her two top stallions—Gunner and Prospecktor, full brothers—follow us around in their respective turnouts, docile as guide dogs. It’s hardly the kind of testosterone-fueled posturing one expects in purebred Arabian stallions. I’ve been in pens with studs whose pacing and nipping and bullying recalled the tiger cage at the Rio Grande Zoo. I feared for my life. Instead, these guys look me over and stand quietly while Leslie points out their conformational qualities and I run my hand down their backs, living proof that her philosophy of gentle suasion while maintaining firm boundaries really yields well-behaved horses. With Prospecktor standing quietly as a living anatomy model, she explains how his hip, shoulder, and arching neck exemplify the goals of her breeding program.

We could talk horses all day, but it’s the 5,000-square-foot barn I came to see, with its soaring, 25-foot-high octagonal ceiling. Massive beams radiate out and down from the hub at its peak. The airy, central space below is big enough to host a training event on a rainy day, which Leslie once did with the aforementioned guru Ray Hunt and guests. Vast doors open to the east and west. An aisle of four 12 x 12 stalls stretches north-south to form a wing of the T. Around the central space at the start of each wing, Woods designed an office, a grooming area, a horse wash rack, a tack room, and an artificial insemination lab (where’s the fun in that?).

Farther west of the big barn, a few shed-row stables dot the broad flat meadow before it plunges treed into the canyon. Mares and foals, scrawny two-year-olds, and impertinent young stallions wander about in spacious pens, cohabitating civilly. A handful of adolescent males drag-step like nonchalant teenage boys over to the pipe rail fence to see what food or entertainment we’ve brought. Not enough. Their interest wanes. We move on to the next pen, the next group of happy and relaxed horses. Leslie will train many of them, many will be sold, and others will remain on the farm to continue the breeding program.

Leslie specializes in Western reining, a highly skilled equestrian art in which horse and rider complete a set pattern of quick starts, sharp turns, spins, flying lead changes, and galloping stretches punctuated by exclamatory sliding stops on the horse’s hocks. In the equestrian world, particularly out West, Arabians have a reputation not unlike Paris Hilton: flashy, narcissistic, and can they do anything? As a once-dedicated Arab owner myself, I can attest to their athleticism, phenomenal endurance, and quick minds. The reining work proves it.

Leslie has also ridden dressage, a European-derived school of riding that emphasizes minute control and invisible cues as the horse traces intricate patterns—if you’ve seen the Lipizzaners, you know the form. But Leslie found the emphasis on rigid control and on style was less interesting than the horse’s outright performance. Reining is scored simply on getting the maneuvers done:

“It enables what I do, which is setting up communication for the horse to do what he wants to do, not by force.” Her training approach leaves much of the problem solving to the horse: “I set up a rectangle, with a cushion, that the horse operates inside.” It’s all about “honoring the horse.”

If marketers invented a slogan for natural horsemanship, it might be, “Everything I’ve learned about life, I learned from my horse.” The art is built on self-mastery, self-understanding, and clear communication.

“I’m in the old vaquero tradition. I’m letting the horses teach me, and they are such amazing teachers. They’re so clean—there’s none of the yucky stuff people bring to a situation. They pick better leaders than people do. If you let a horse walk over you, you’re in trouble. When the horse sees you as a good leader, they’ll willingly work with you. It’s the same with people. If you’re not vindictive, you set good boundaries, you’re consistent, you let them do a job their way, not yours, you let them figure out the best way,” then they’ll gladly cooperate. And it’s fun. “It’s amazing what they’ll do to get along and to figure things out. Where we tend to fail horses is by not believing they want to get along. But it’s so hard-wired in their nature to cooperate. I can’t help people who don’t believe horses want to get along.” That negative view becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, she insists, the same as in human relations.

When the relationship finds balance, horses can enable people to enjoy solitude in good company. Horses communicate constantly, but it’s mostly through body language: posture, ear position, eye movement. They don’t yap or bark; they don’t chatter endlessly about themselves. Every horse is also capable of a heart-stopping, adrenaline-surging surprise move, even in wide-open country like this. All of which is to say they often intensify the rider’s experience of the present moment. Horsemanship that draws together horse and rider into unity of purpose in that moment achieves the status of art. Just ask Leslie Hammel-Turk.