Marvel – “John Wayne” is looking for a way to avoid work.
When it’s clear he won’t escape, he directs a little kick at a loitering Siamese cat.
Meanwhile. Patron, the handsome zebra dun in the small corral, is doing a nervous little side-to-side dance step. Lily is amusing herself by tugging at her big round rubber water trough with her teeth.
Orlando “Orly” Valencia, who at 58 looks younger than his cowboy hat, takes a well-scuffed boot and kicks his toe into the ground to see just how far a light rain in southwestern La Plata County soaked in, if at all.
The top quarter-inch of soil is wet. The arena and corrals where he trains horses and mules and riders won’t be so dusty today.
Mules?
Valencia says he was born 100 years too late for his chosen profession. But he says the future looks bright because he sees the famously sure-footed animals growing more popular.
“People are really getting into riding them. But most horse trainers shy away from mules,” Valencia says. “If you don’t like them, don’t mess with them. They can tell if you have negative feelings against them.”
Jerry King, a North Carolina-based auctioneer, says interest in saddle and pack mules is so strong that he’s run a regional event, Rocky Mountain Mule Days and Auction, in Montrose during the past two summers.
He says people are discovering that mules outperform horses in the backcountry.
“The mule has finally gained the respect he deserves,” says King, who learned to love them on hunting trips. “A mule is no longer something the comical cowboy rides. I’d rather fall off a good mule than ride a horse any day.”
While a spooked horse might dive off a cliff or run through a fence, Valencia says, a mule has a strong instinct for self-preservation.
As for their legendary stubbornness, Valencia chalks that up to smart animals with long memories.
“Once you start a problem with them, you gotta problem,” he says.
When men and women around here have a problem with their mules or horses, they look to Valencia. He’s been booked all summer.
“Mules are not hard to train,” he says. “Mules watch and study everything that goes on.
Holly Jason is a 31-year-old Durango businesswoman who takes riding lessons from Valencia. Riding her mule, Max, transports her from the pressures of everyday life into a simple realm of rider and mount, woman and mule.
“I pay Orly to yell at me,” Jason says, happily. “He’s the most real cowboy I know.”
He is indeed a bona fide bachelor cowboy. But Valencia aspires to be an artist.
He can take cowhide, scrape off the hair, cut it into long thin strips and then weave them into intricately beautiful and profoundly sturdy bosals, hackamores, bridles and other tack.
“To make a real nice mount is an art,” he says.
The youngest son of 11 children, Valencia grew up with draught horses, sheep and goats on a farm in southwest Colorado.
His first effort in equine training was inspired by a horsemanship magazine a cousin brought over. There was a picture of Trigger rearing back on hind legs. Valencia trained his mare to do the same.
He thinks his “lively, happy attitude” is one key to success.
“The animals like it. They think it’s fun. You’ve got to get them interested in a subject,” he says.
And Valencia imparts that little spark to John Wayne, who finally embraces the Monday lesson with some enthusiasm. And then Patron behaves like an angel, so that when Valencia dismounts, he beams and says: “He doesn’t know it, but he’s just a pleasure to be on.”
After more than 30 years in his line of work, Valencia won’t say whether he prefers horses or mules, but there seem to be more good mule stories.
“Once they get attached to you, they’ll take care of you,” he says. “They’ll give you their body and soul.”
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or edraper@denverpost.com.
