Ami Cullen is more at home on a Colorado dude ranch in her muddy work boots than she was in a courtroom. 

On an unusually warm February day on Granby’s C Lazy U ranch, she saddled up her horse, Squirt, a palomino gelding with a silver mane and tail she “typically uses for the kids at the ranch.” 

The 8,500 acre C Lazy U, a five-star resort near the west entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, was relatively quiet as she worked a few of the 200 horses on the property and then hit the trail with her Blue Heeler, Esther. 

The 45-year-old’s Western way of life is a far cry from her days as an East Coast attorney fresh out of law school anxious to wrangle the corporate world as an associate in a big-time Maryland law firm. 

It was what her parents wanted for her. 

“I didn’t want to go to college … I was dragging my heels because I always wanted to do horses for a living but my parents asked me to take classes,” she said.

She graduated early, did well on LSATs, went straight to law school and entered the rat race. 

However, a soul-searching experience upon passing her bar exam gave her pause. 

That’s when a friend dragged her to Colorado for a girls’ weekend thousands of miles away at Grand County’s C Lazy U dude ranch . 

She ended up loving the vacation so much that she made a girls’ trip every year until she decided to take a six-month sabbatical from the stressful grind of depositions and courtrooms.

That time-out led to a permanent change of heart, as Cullen traded her high-heels for cowboy boots and moved to the C Lazy U for good. 

After a time as a ranch hand making $10 per hour, she worked her way up to become director of equestrian operations for the property.

She also married a high school friend from her home in Philadelphia. Mike Cullen had ties to Colorado and the two settled in at the ranch together, where he serves as director of ranch operations.

Trouble on the horizon

The Cullens’ lifestyle change was a hoot until Oct. 14, 2020, when smoke started drifting in on westerly winds from the East Troublesome area in the Arapaho National Forest. At first, Cullen wasn’t extremely worried.

“There were so many fires that summer it seemed like smoke from another fire,” she said. “But a couple of days later, it was raining ash.”

Mike Cullen remembered the day they decided to close the ranch down.

“We had a final coffee with the last guests with the red sun behind them. It looked like a blood moon,” he said.

Incoming guests had to be called and turned around, and trees near guest cabins were cut down to keep the oncoming fire from spreading. While the Cullens and ranch staff were on pre-evacuation orders, they “got overconfident” but stayed busy moving out valuable items, such as photos, century-old paintings, and saddles.

However, a week after the East Troublesome fire started, high winds sent it roaring up over the ridge, and “we made a mad dash out,” remembered Mike Cullen.

“The next day, the fire had swallowed 10 member and team homes, a guest cabin, a barn, 800 tons of hay, 15 snowmobiles, and 100 miles of wooden fence lines,” he said.

Two hundred horses had to be relocated from one meadow to corals and then to a neighbor’s pasture, but every one of them survived the fire.

Ami Cullen credited dozens of people from the horse community through two evacuations. The Grand County agricultural community helped them get the horses to safety during the first evacuation, but when a second evacuation became urgent, “the state of Colorado showed up,” including people who lived five hours away.  

“That was the year of COVID,” she said. “On top of that, it was the year of the awful election when no one wanted to talk to each other. The operation was amazing to witness in a year that wasn’t such a great year.” 

Running free

The experience of how her dramatic lifestyle change led to saving the C Lazy U  during the East Troublesome fire motivated Cullen to write a book.

“Running Free“ is somewhat autobiographical, though the personal life of the book’s heroine, Emme, took a few different turns from Cullen’s. 

Like Cullen, Emme also sacrificed her first career as a big-city attorney to become a ranch hand, and, also like Cullen, Emme chronicles the East Troublesome fire and the “nearly impossible” job of leading a team of wranglers in rounding up ranch horses in driving winds. 

The East Troublesome fire became the second-largest wildfire in Colorado history. It wasn’t contained until Nov. 30, 2020 after eating up nearly 194,000 acres. 

Today, C Lazy U’s miles of wooden corral fence have been mostly replaced by metal. A barn that burned down has also been rebuilt.

And Mike and Ami Cullen are back at home, comfortable in knowing that the courage to make a major life shift was monumental in helping save the ranch, where some customers love it so much they’ve been vacationing there for 50 years.

Most days, the Cullens are up at 5 a.m. and they turn in at 8 p.m. 

It’s the life Ami Cullen always wanted.

“Every day is different. Some days I work horses, people get hurt, and between meetings, someone will leave the gate open, but it’s never boring,” she said. “You have to be willing to pivot.”