Hire a Pack Goat to Haul Your Lunch Down the Dolores River

Picture a goat carrying your lunch. Your fly rod too. And your binoculars, your trekking poles, your watercolor kit, and one of those big shade umbrellas that you would normally refuse to lug a quarter mile.

That is the actual pitch down in Cortez, and I love it.

Wild West Excursions runs out of Cortez, down in Montezuma County in the Four Corners. Their signature summer thing is a pack goat river walk along the Dolores River Canyon. You hike. The goats haul the gear. All of it, included. So you get to just wander the canyon with your hands free instead of hunched over under a pack, sweating through your shirt by the first bend.

Here is the part people miss about the Four Corners. Most Coloradans treat it like flyover country inside their own state. You blow past it on the way to somewhere else, or you never point the car south at all. But this corner of the map has Mesa Verde, Canyon of the Ancients, Hovenweep, and a river canyon that most of the Front Range has never set foot in. And now there are goats involved.

So what actually happens on one of these

You book the walk, you show up, and a string of pack goats does the heavy lifting down the Dolores River Canyon. The company pairs the hike with what they call forest bathing and nature-sensory activities, which is a fancy way of saying you slow down and actually look around instead of speed-marching to a summit.

One of the packages is the High Country Wildflower Safari, built around a Geyser Springs pack goat adventure. They bill it as an easy hike with a riverside lunch. Easy hike, river, wildflowers, a goat carrying your sandwich. I mean, that is a pretty hard day to complain about.

The goats themselves were raised up in the high mountain country at the company's Cow Camp in 2025, so these are not petting-zoo animals. They are bred for this. Sure-footed, mountain-raised, and apparently fine with being your personal Sherpa for an afternoon.

The gear list is the fun part. Fishing tackle, watercolor kits, binoculars, trekking poles, backpacks, and shade and rain umbrellas. All of it goes on the goats. All of it included. So if you have ever wanted to fly fish and paint watercolors on the same afternoon without deciding which one you were willing to carry, this solves that specific and admittedly ridiculous problem.

Hayley heard about the watercolor part and immediately said we are doing that, which tells you exactly who is running our summer calendar.

It is not just goats

The pack goats are the headline, but the operation runs deeper than that. They do horseback trail rides that take you right through working cattle. Actual cattle drives and roundups. Fly fishing. And farm-and-ranch meals cooked over an open fire, which is the kind of detail that makes a place feel real instead of packaged.

They also guide out to the big three down there. Mesa Verde National Park, Canyon of the Ancients, and Hovenweep National Monument. So you can stack the goat walk against a day at the cliff dwellings and make a real trip out of it.

And this is a year-round outfit, not a summer novelty. Come winter they swap the hiking for snowshoe outings, and the goats still come along. Snowshoeing next to a pack goat in the San Juans is a mental image I am going to be thinking about for a while.

The part that makes this doable

Here is the thing that actually matters if you live in Denver. You do not have to commit to a full cross-state drive to get down there. Cortez has a real airport, and Denver Air Connection flies direct from Denver and from Phoenix straight into Cortez. So the goat hikes are reachable on a long weekend instead of a full expedition.

The company even runs luxury 4x4 Suburban shuttles and limos, both to the Cortez Municipal Airport and up to Telluride and Mountain Village. Which means you could theoretically fly into Cortez, walk the Dolores with goats, and then get shuttled up to Telluride. That is a strange and wonderful itinerary.

Quick real estate side note, because I cannot help myself. Cortez and the Montezuma County stretch is still one of the more affordable corners of Colorado to own in, especially compared to what Telluride does to your bank account an hour up the road. If you have ever quietly wondered about a small place near the Four Corners, this is the kind of trip that plants that idea. Which is dangerous for me.

How to book it

Wild West Excursions takes bookings at (970) 739-1700, or you can email Ride@WildWestExcursions.com. Ask about the High Country Wildflower Safari and the Geyser Springs pack goat walk if the easy-hike-with-a-riverside-lunch version is what you are after.

So if your summer road trip needs one genuinely oddball day in it, this is your Radically Colorado adventure. Buckle up, drive south, and let a goat carry your lunch for once.