GRAND JUNCTION — Tracy Scott spends most of her days caring for 24 formerly wild horses and a burro that roam 42 acres of dry, sagebrush-dotted land behind the coral and teal-colored home she shares with her husband on the outskirts of Grand Junction.
It’s hard work — hauling hay, filling tubs with water and working with the mustangs on trusting humans. Recently, Scott has been doing all the work herself. Her husband had to take a job in town to keep the couple and Steadfast Steeds, the wild horse sanctuary they’ve run since 2010, afloat.
“Caring for that many horses is cumbersome,” Scott said. “The love is there. The care is there. If I had money, I’d hire somebody to help me.”
But for Scott, the hard work is worth it. Had she not adopted the horses, many would still be sitting in government holding pens, where wild horses go after they’ve been rounded up and taken off the Western Slope ranges they call home.
“I had no idea that’s what we were doing with excess horses,” Scott said. “It’s the most horrible place they could go. Yes, they’re cared for, they have food and water, but every bit of their life is stripped from them.”
Tracy Scott, co-owner of the Steadfast Steeds sanctuary near Grand Junction, pets JJ, a mustang who came from the Virginia Range in Nevada. (Celia Frazier, Special to The Colorado Sun)When she’s not working on the sanctuary, Scott meets with other wild horse advocates and government officials on Zoom and in towns across the Western Slope. She’s part of a group the Colorado legislature established in 2023 to look at new solutions to the decades-old problem.
But the group’s time is coming to a close, and Colorado’s wild horse management is at a crossroads. While a bill continuing the group’s efforts passed the legislature in April, it won’t take effect for another year and any projects will be limited by the state’s tight budget. Even then, Colorado’s wild horse management faces yet another challenge: Many of the people advocating for wild horses, like Scott, are growing older.
“There haven’t been a whole lot of younger people stepping in to pass it off to,” Scott said.
A long history
For decades, the Bureau of Land Management has managed four wild horse herds — about 1,400 horses — stretching along the western edge of Colorado. The areas consist mostly of rolling hills and sagebrush, while some boast big canyons and mountainous terrain. All four herds share the land with other wildlife and two with sheep or cattle.
Managing these horses and the land they roam is no easy task — especially given that the herds in two of these areas exceed what the federal agency considers sustainable, given the land’s often scarce natural resources.
Jason Lutterman, a public affairs specialist with the BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Program, said maintaining herd populations at a “natural ecological balance” is important.
“That’s our way of best ensuring that these animals have the food that they need to eat, the water they need to drink, the space on the range that they need, while also allowing for other wildlife and other animals to enjoy the land,” Lutterman said.
Wild horses show up at a watering hole in Sand Wash Basin on June 17. The basin is a cold desert that spans over 150,000 acres and water is scarce. (Gerry Morrell, Special to The Colorado Sun)In Colorado, the agency relies on partnerships with local groups to help care for the horses and the rangeland. These groups, all led by older women, work to improve water sources, repair fencing and manage herd populations through fertility control darting.
Horse populations grow quickly, and for years, the solution to the overpopulation of horses has been to gather hundreds of them — often using helicopters to chase them into pens — and send them to facilities across the country where they await adoption, often confined to small areas.
And adoptions only go so far.
About 5,000 horses were adopted or sold in 2024, but that same year, the agency took more than 13,000 off the land nationwide. As of April, some 62,000 horses remain unadopted. In fiscal year 2024, the agency spent $101 million — two-thirds of the wild horse program’s budget — looking after unadopted horses and burros.
The state steps in
In 2023, Colorado lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill to create the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group.
The group met regularly for over a year and was made up of 23 people from across the state — including members from the BLM, local nonprofits that partner with the agency, wild horse advocacy groups, tribal nations and ranchers. They held their last meeting on May 15 and expect to release their final recommendations this summer.
“I am happy that we’ve stepped up,” said Wayne East, the wildlife programs manager for the Colorado Department of Agriculture who led the group. “I’m hopeful that this continued collaborative effort, this emphasis from the state, will continue to make things better in the future.”
The bill asked the group to make recommendations to the legislature on what to do with wild horses once they have been gathered by the federal agency — from incentivizing the adoption process to finding more places to house them. It also allows the group to manage fertility control efforts on the range — a solution many group members view as key to keeping herd sizes in check.
Besides fertility control, the bill limits the group’s recommendations to the management of horses the BLM has already taken off the land. That means the group cannot recommend stopping helicopter gathers or eliminating livestock in the areas — two things many members of the public push for.
“If you think of a pie chart — just all things wild horse in Colorado — this bill really gives us one tiny slice of that pie to look at,” East said.
A mare waits in a pen during an adoption event hosted by the Bureau of Land Management in Castle Rock on April 12. Each horse wears a tag around their neck with a unique number that potential adopters use to identify the horses they wish to bid on. (Celia Frazier, Special to The Colorado Sun)The bill’s narrow focus led to criticism from some, including Kerry Ferguson, the executive director of the Colorado-based Cloud Foundation, a wild horse advocacy nonprofit.
She said the group’s discussions are important and they’ve done a good job, but she wishes they weren’t so limited.
“It would have been preferable for more meaningful, wider scope of change to be addressed, rather than just the off-range solutions,” Ferguson said.
Cindy Wright, one of the group’s members and the co-founder of one of the wild horse nonprofits that partners with the BLM, wishes they had more time, but she’s proud they were able to set aside differing opinions and agree on several recommendations. She said this isn’t very common in the wild horse world, where people often disagree on when, if at ever, removing horses from the land is necessary and how to do so.
“I think it’s a very, very positive step,” Wright said. “I hope that if we can continue our momentum forward, there will be something that’s a counterbalance that goes ‘You guys, you can yell and scream all you want, but look at what we have done when we collaborate and work together. We can make a difference.’”
Funds help build capacity across the state
The 2023 bill allocated $1.5 million to the Colorado Department of Agriculture to spend on fertility control efforts and long-overdue range management projects, such as increasing water on the landscape.
In the Sand Wash Basin, a cold desert that spans more than 150,000 acres in northwestern Colorado, Wright’s group, Wild Horse Warriors for the Sand Wash Basin, used state funds to create a new well and repair two old wells. She said the wells have been a huge help in ensuring horses on the land have enough water — something that has been a challenge in the past.
“We could never have done the three of those. We just didn’t have the funds to do it without the state funds,” she said.
Tensions get high when different bands of wild horses show up at the watering hole in Sand Wash Basin on June 17. Wild Horse Warriors for the Sand Wash Basin used state funds to create a new well and repair two old wells to provide water for the animals. (Gerry Morrell, Special to The Colorado Sun)Friends of the Mustangs, the group that partners with the BLM in the Little Book Cliffs Wild Horse Range near Grand Junction, used some state funds to hire workers from the Western Colorado Conservation Corps, a program that recruits youth to complete service projects on public lands in western Colorado. Corps members worked with the group for four days repairing fencing and replacing water tanks.
Judy Cady, the group’s president and a working group member, said the corps members helped her get a lot of work done — work she, at 70, couldn’t have accomplished on her own.
The state also signed a $100,000 contract with USDA Wildlife Services to hire eight full-time, paid darters to help with fertility control on the ranges this year, with plans to continue through 2028. The work has previously been done almost entirely by volunteers, several of whom live hours from the ranges, have full-time jobs or are retired. These volunteers collectively volunteered more than 15,000 hours in fiscal year 2024, according to the federal agency.
Alan Bittner, a member of the working group and the deputy state director for resources and planning at the BLM Colorado office, said he’s hopeful this partnership will result in real change.
“With the state as a partner, we find ourselves in a really good spot, with a really good opportunity to get this thing completely under control,” he said.
While the group won’t be meeting again this year, a bill passed in April transfers the wild horse program’s duties to the Colorado Department of Agriculture and allows the department to provide fertility control and other support. It also creates a permanent Wild Horse Advisory Committee within the department, with a similar makeup as the working group.
But the program still faces an uncertain future. The advisory committee won’t begin until July 2026, over a year from the working group’s final in-person meeting. The gap has some working group members worried about losing momentum.
“We want to keep going because we really feel like we’re really on the edge of making some major changes, and we’ve got a good group of people, and we don’t want to lose our forward motion,” Wright said.
Another concern for some is funding. This session, lawmakers cut $1.2 billion in state funding to balance the budget, and the state’s financial situation is only expected to get worse.
“There’s absolutely going to be a fiscal impact and limitations on what we can do on wild horse projects until we get a budget,” East said. “So that’s the hope in the long run, (that) we will have some money here to do some of these projects.”
“I’m really, really happy with the recommendations that the group was able to come up with,” Wright said. “I’m just really, really sad that the state is in a place where they’re not going to be able to fund much of anything, and we’re not sure where we go from here.”
Advocates are growing old, burning out
As wild horse advocates like Wright, who runs Wild Horse Warriors with her older sister Aletha Dove, start to age out, there is worry that there aren’t enough young people getting involved to take their places.
The two first got involved in 2016 after witnessing the removal of 29 horses from the Sand Wash Basin, and created the organization the next year. Last summer, they signed another five-year memorandum of understanding with the BLM. Wright said it will likely be the last.
Cindy Wright, co-founder of Wild Horse Warriors for Sand Wash Basin and a working group member, poses for a portrait at a working group meeting in Craig on Oct. 30. “If we can keep moving with our Colorado wild horse working group and what we’ve got going, I think we are on the cusp of making major changes,” she says. (Celia Frazier, Special to The Colorado Sun)Kathy Degonia leads Piceance Mustangs, the group she co-founded with Scott in 2018 that now partners with the BLM on the Piceance East Douglas range near Meeker. Cady has been volunteering with the group she now leads, Friends of the Mustangs in Grand Junction, for over 35 years. Both women said they’ll stick around as leaders of their respective organizations, not because they want to, but because there’s no one to hand it off to.
Scott said Steadfast Steeds won’t be taking in any more horses.
“My husband and I have agreed that most of our horses will age out and we won’t replace them, because we’re going to age out too,” she said.
And if no one steps in to take their place?
“The range management progress that we have made will just go back to kind of a zero,” Wright said. “All forward motion will stop.”
They’ve discussed these concerns in their meetings with the BLM, but as Wright puts it, “It’s (a) conversation without a resolution because we don’t know how to make that different.”
There are a myriad of factors that could contribute to low youth involvement in the wild horse world — generational differences, young people moving away from rural communities, career and family demands — but one stands out: a lack of knowledge about wild horses and the problems they face.
“For so many of our kids, there’s a lack of education, there’s a lack of understanding, but mom and dad are so incredibly busy, and financially, money is normally fairly tight,” Wright said. “They’re not out there. They’re not exploring. They’re not able to take the trips that just say, ‘Look at this amazing world we have out here, and we have to preserve it.’”
There have been a few efforts to get youth involved in the Sand Wash Basin area, Wright said, but they’ve been few and far between.
Konnie Fries leads students from her Wild Horse Course class to a round pen where they will learn basic horse care, including how to halter a horse. Fries teaches classes through Vista Charter School, an alternative high school in Montrose, Colo. (Celia Frazier, Special to The Colorado Sun)Bittner, the working group representative from BLM, recognizes the partner groups’ need for young recruits, though he says it’s largely up to them to recruit youth.
“Partnerships nowadays are more about the partner bringing more to the table than the BLM, just because of the lack of resources that we have,” he said.
Of the $153 million the agency spent nationwide on wild horse management in fiscal year 2024, over 80% went to removing horses from the land, off-range holding and adoptions, leaving few resources for on-range projects like fertility control darting or youth recruitment. And the budget will likely only get tighter. President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget request, released May 30, proposes cutting the program’s budget by 25% to $106 million.
“It leaves nothing for the horses that are on the range or for the range management,” Wright said. “Until we can somehow turn that tide, I don’t see it getting better.”
Training the next generation of wild horse advocates
While there aren’t many young people getting involved in darting horses or working on Colorado ranges, groups across the state are teaching kids and teenagers how to train mustangs in hopes of giving them a better chance at adoption.
Wild Rose Mustang Advocacy group, based just north of Fort Collins, runs a summer program that teaches youth how to train mustangs. Last year, the program saw the most participants in its history: about 12 kids. The group has helped find homes for about 70 horses since they began in 2018.
Then there are horse-training competitions. The Meeker Mustang Makeover, a northwestern Colorado organization, has run such competitions since it began in 2019 and was recently awarded at least $200,000 in funding over two years from the BLM. This year, 31 trainers, eight of them younger than 18, have 120 days to train their wild horses. In late August, they’ll show off the horse’s skills before judges and potential buyers.
Another group, Great Escape Mustangs, partners with trainers across the state to improve mustangs’ transition to domestic life, particularly through adoption and training.
Brittany Ference, the organization’s executive director, says her goal is to train the next generation of youth trainers.
“The key to the mustangs’ future is targeting those younger generations and making sure that they know that they’re the next generation of advocates for mustangs,” she said.
Konnie Fries teaches one of her Wild Horse Course students, Vicky King, how to lead Akasha, a mare from the Silver King herd management area in Nevada, on March 26. Fries teaches classes through Vista Charter School in Montrose. (Celia Frazier, Special to The Colorado Sun)Konnie Fries is one of the organization’s trainer partners. She runs a mustang training program at an alternative high school for at-risk youth in Montrose, about an hour south of Grand Junction. Each quarter, she teaches several teenagers how to work with mustangs. Along the way, the teens learn to manage their emotions.
“If there’s an anger issue or a patience issue, the wild horses kind of mirror that and teach you how to become patient, not just with yourself but with others,” Fries said.
At the end of the quarter, Fries hopes the kids will have gained confidence. As for the mustangs, she says the time they’ve spent with the kids will help prepare them for adoption.
“It’s not only saving the youth’s life, but we’re getting mustangs a chance, a fighting chance to continue on,” Fries said.
Lutterman, the spokesperson for BLM, said youth training programs like these are important for increasing the number of animals the agency can place into private care.
“There’s just a ton of interest from young people with training horses and finding them homes,” he said. “I would hope that would translate also to the other side of the program, to the on-range part, but I just don’t know.”
Throughout the uncertainty, one thing remains constant: a love for horses and a desire to make progress.
“There’s days when I’m definitely burned out, there’s days when I’m very hopeful, and there’s days when I’m overwhelmed,” Wright said. “So it’s a real roller coaster. But I am optimistic.”
“If we can keep moving with our Colorado wild horse working group and what we’ve got going, I think we are on the cusp of making major changes,” Wright added.
Wild horses Prince and Moonlight stand at the back of their pasture at the Steadfast Steeds sanctuary near Grand Junction. The two older horses were removed from the Sand Wash Basin herd management area near Craig. “They were together on the range for as long as anyone can remember,” says Tracy Scott, co-owner of Steadfast Steeds. (Celia Frazier, Special to The Colorado Sun) Read More Details
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