My name is Terri Safford and I’m a serial entrepreneur! I presently make my home in a suburb of Denver, CO.

I grew up riding, breeding and competing with Quarter Horses and Paint Horses.

I was very blessed that my parents were pretty well off and my Dad shared my obsession with horses. I wanted the best, and, well, my Mom & Dad wanted the best for me.

When I was 9, we moved from Colorado to Utah because my Dad bought a Licoln-Mercury dealership in Ogden. After living in the city for a year or so, we started considering: Do we want a boat, or a horse?

Well! The horse won out! We found a boarding facility right down the road (about 3 miles, which was walking distance back then) called Glassman Ranch. It was a several hundred (if not thousand) acre ranch right in town, complete with pond and LOTS of open space to ride. They also had their own racing horses they bred there. Then through my Dad’s connections, we found a nice starter horse, named Ginger.

Ginger and I – we had some experiences! One thing about her – she didn’t like ride double (with 2 people on her). One time my friend Laurie and I rode her double and Laurie was sitting in front – I thought since I had more experience, I should be in back (dumb!). Well, she couldn’t control Ginger and Ginger ended up bucking me off. I tore all the ligaments in my leg and was in a straight cast for a couple months!

After I found out about gymkhana, we decided we needed a better horse, so in came Desi, my first registered Quarter Horse, and the start of our herd!

After a couple years boarding, we (Dad and I) decided we needed horse property. When we would all go look at houses, my Mom would go look at the house and Dad and I would go look at the barn!

We found a few acres in Hooper, UT, which is where our true obsession started! The man we bought the place from had a QH stallion, we bred him to Desi, and our herd was born! Boy, did my Dad LOVE babies!

I started up with the local riding clubs and we were busy all summer, competing in gymkhanas, 4H horse shows, and local shows. I had the FEVER!

Soon after that we met Clark and Annie Parker, who would become my horse trainers, and much like parents, since I spent so much time at their house in Paradise, UT, which was about 2 hours away, by Logan.

Through Clark, we found and bought many expensive and beautiful Quarter Horses, including my Heart Horse, Roanie.

Roanie and I won most events pretty much everywhere we went – in fact, people started saying that they were competing for second place when they saw us show up! Much of the time we won All Around Champion. I used to have SO MANY trophies. I had an entire ROOM full!

Alas, all things must come to an end, though! After I graduated high school, I was also too old for Youth competitions. I didn’t want my parents to keep paying my way in Amateur classes, so I basically quit. And adulthood set in!

I had wanted to carry on and go into stable management, and keep horses all my life but my Mom told me that there was no money in that, and that I needed to learn something else. So I started college, majored in PARTY and then dropped out after a couple years. I often wish I had followed my dreams, although life would definitely be different, and I wouldn’t have my awesome son, Nick, since there’s no way I would have been with his dad if I had followed horses.

I’ve had a few horses off and on since then, but haven’t competed much. One time I did do the Pony Express reenactment on the 100th anniversary of Pony Express. That was fun!

By creating this blog, I am living vicariously until each of my bucket list items are ticked off (fat chance they’ll ALL be ticked off, there’s so many of them!) My goal is to ride in all the places that I write about!

In the process of researching all these destinations I decided to create in depth guides using the info that I found plus some personal tips from my riding experiences.

I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I do, and hopefully we will meet on the trail somewhere!