Yee-ha! I’m unleashing my inner cowboy

If ever a man needed to 'man up' it was me - so I decided to visit a 'dude ranch'

"On day one I was woken at the crack of dawn and told to saddle up" (Getty)

I once crashed my car miles from anywhere, high up in the mountains of northern California’s Shasta Trinity forest. I had been rather unsuccessfully attempting to hunt Bigfoot and was faced with a 20-mile hike through an area brimming with armed and paranoid marijuana farmers.

Fortunately, a man out picking mushrooms spotted me. He gave me a lift to relative safety and delivered me from an uncertain fate. It turned out that he ran a “dude ranch”. These, I discovered, were places set up to cater for lily-livered east-coast gentlemen who want to find their frontier spirit by shooting guns and riding horses and generally “manning up”. I made a mental note about visiting one of these institutions. If ever a man needed to “man up” it was me.

So, seven years later I find myself at Cold Creek Ranch in the high desert bordering Arizona and New Mexico in an off-grid ranch run by a Donald Sutherland look-alike with an unexpected love of Tintin.

On day one I was woken at the crack of dawn and told to saddle up. Once I’d donned cumbersome leather chaps and other suspiciously comedic cowboy accoutrements, I was ready to roam the range. We rode out for an hour or so through magnificently epic country until we found the area where we wanted the cows to assemble. I assumed that we’d drop the protein blocks of food and then herd the steers expertly towards their power breakfast. I was wrong. Jean, the lady of the ranch, told me that cows respond to matriarchal commands and that she would simply call them to us.

With that she turned and started bellowing “HEEEEEEEYYYYY COOOOOOOWWWWWSSSS” to the empty hills. I looked around but could see no cows. Jean continued her cow-calling. Over and over she bellowed “HEEEERRREEE COOOWWSS” and her words echoed around the high desert, wrapping round high cliffs and becoming warped and unintelligible until they ended up sounding like some hypnotic Apache mantra.

The no-show of the cows was all great stuff for the show that I’m making in the United States. I was preparing to gently tease Jean about how badly trained her cows were when suddenly, over a distant hill, I spotted one. A second later another appeared, then another, and soon a veritable cavalcade of beef was heading our way. I was impressed. Jean, while not exactly a cow whisperer, was a bona fide cow-caller. Once the herd had assembled we rode off to find any stragglers immune to her vocal charms. Ten minutes later I found myself alone, but for my horse, Popcorn, and Jeff, the border collie turned cow dog. I found some sulky teen cows mall-ratting in a canyon and managed to get behind them and start driving them towards the distant target. Just for a brief second, I time-travelled. I was Lucky Luke, I was a frontiersman, I was … a man. Travel is most definitely the only thing you buy that makes you richer.