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'Jeez, it's colder than a welldigger's chootee today, isn't it?' chips Charlene, a beige-faced Nashville blonde who's one of my fellow dudettes on the first 'ride out' of Lost Valley Ranch's Women's Week. 'You have to watch it in these parts, you know, 'cus the weather blows through kinda fast. Have you heard the legend of the Gillyman? He was found frozen up on a rock near to Cheeseman Point a few years ago - lips blue, stiff as a doll. No one knows where he came from.... they say his soul howls out across the mountains.'

Colorado lore is soaked through with the romance of the eccentric loner. This was the Wild West of fable: unimaginably expansive lands far from east-coast civilisation, largely peopled by hard-as-nuts lone males. These tobacco-juice spittin' souls lived to drive their cow herds west to east - across Colorado's desert-like plateaus, alpine mountain ranges and Great Plains - to their slaughter and final resting place furnishing the dinner plates of Chicago and New York. The cowman's fate was a drab one indeed, scarce brightened by a diet of moulding biscuit, salt beef and 'cowboy coffee' (mixed with clumps of egg shell to settle the grounds). No wonder, then, that many an old boy was reduced to the inhumanity of penning morose rhyming couplets or French-kissing goats.

Apart from a smattering of bonneted frontierswomen and the odd bonkers ranch-owner - such as 'the unsinkable Molly Brown' who survived the demise of the Titanic to settle as far away as possible from fandangled, boat-building civilisation - women were pretty much out of the picture in old-time Colo. They certainly weren't out on the ranch. Even after the invention (1901) of the sidesaddle, the great tarpaulins of Victorian lady-dress made horseback riding akin to trying to swim inside a duvet cover. The few women who gained notoriety in neighbouring cow States were either circus acts (Ohio's sharp-shooting Annie Oakley) or lessons in how not to get yourself a man (the broad-shouldered Calamity Jane, who stood by Wild Bill Hickock in gunning down the pesky injuns, only to dumped for the nearest piece of fluff in Crinoline).

Deep-vein misogynism obviously thrives at high altitudes, and it's only in recent that a duststorm of change has been kicked up on the coralle. Female 'rough stock' riders such as Brazil's JJ Rodeo have stormed the Western-State cowboy shows with their rope skills and willingness to be buffeted around by bucking broncos, and ranch breaks - once the preserve of big-city boys hanging their paunches over a pair of chaps and swaggering around like an Oxfam Clint Eastwoods - are now big news for ladies too. Specialist ranch breaks for girls are springing up faster than mushrooms on a cowpat: ranging from the boot camp (riding with the gauchos in Uruguay) to the new age (yoga on horseback at Colorado's Elkhead Ranch). Cowgirl breaks are the antithesis of wipe-clean women’s spa break culture – no swathes of white towelling or frangipani-scented enemas here – and I was keen to climb into some battered leathers and join a group of urbanites in getting ruddy faced (and stuck into some mud that didn’t hadn’t been transported from The Dead Sea at an extravagant cost).

Crouched deep beneath cotton wool clouds in the pine-bearded Rocky Mountains of east Colorado, Lost Valley was one of the first ranches to catch on to the money-making potential in every treasured American myth. Founded in 1883, the working ranch was hosting would-be city 'dudes' from the 1930s, amongst them Walt Disney, who visited during in 1956, and whose burnt 'D' brand - along with thousands of others and a few startled moose heads - decorates the panelled wooden interior of the Lost Valley dining room. Even today, it has the resinous reek of a man's man's world. Forget horseback yoga and a half a field of foliage on your dinner plate - Lost Valley's women's ranching breaks are the real deal; a crash course in everything a girl needs to know to become a dudette: from lassoing, to cattle penning, scything across the hills on horseback, firing a deer shooter and surviving on meals that look as if they've been scraped out of the nearest U-bend. Lost Valley, therefore, definitely aint - as wrangler Ben Martin assures me in the broad Coloradoan slur that's redolent of someone slipping in and out of consciousness - 'for chicks who squat on their spurs'. I'm to forget the yoga (tellingly, Ben greets my reference to this ancient eastern practice as if I've asked if I can piss in his Stetson). In the next couple of days Charlene and I, and a mixed herd of wholesome-as-milk horse riding girls and over-caffeinated city slickers, will learn 'to think like a cow'.

A quick glance around confirms that a few of us may have a head start here, but I'm keen to get stuck in. And, if anyone can wup us into shape, broad-shouldered native Coloradoan Ben can. With skin like a roasted chicken, eyes bright blue and crinkled into a permanent squint from gazing into the far distance, and leg cocked up on a stump with chaps framing his genitalia, this is the sort of cowboy-by-blood who'd yank off a digit, then happily walk bleeding ten miles to the nearest town (Deckers) for a Band Aid and tot of anaesthetising whisky.

Goldie snorts out a volley of dust and indignation as I mount her, lifting her tail to indulge in a steamy stream as Ben fills us in on the day one's adventures. For starters, we're to abandon any sissy notions of 'riding English' i.e. with both hands delicately balancing a bobbing rein. In the Old West a girl rides one-handed, with one paw free for lassoing and a horned saddle for 'dallying up' (attaching with rope) her packhorse (the weary beast who lumbered behind with the provisions on its back). The saddle horn - nicknamed, for reasons inscrutable, 'the biscuit' - also functions as a steadier for the horseback novice. It also occasionally catches the rider's shirt and rips it open with a Benny Hill-like flourish. Becky, a 20-year-old Michigan girl who’s come to Lost Valley to learn the ropes in the hope of joining her four brothers as a summer-seasonal wrangler is the first of our group to experience this unsought-for retailoring: ‘God, that’s boocoop embarrassing, isn’t it?’ she laughs, pigtails and body parts jiggling about in gleeful agreement.

Next, we have to get a handle on 'loping' (fast cantering to the Brits). 'So you've got to scoop a 'c' with your hips to Goldie's rhythm,' shouts Ben above the heartbeat thud of hooves. 'Pretend you're serving up ice-cream.' Twenty minutes later, Charlene's grunting in my wake and I'm scooping, if not like a pro, then at least like a third-rate Euro dancefloor gigolo. Soon the earth is sliding around Goldie's hooves like short crust pastry in the fingers of a ravenous foodie, and I get time for a long look at my new frontier. The Colorado sun smiles down on a vivid peach land, tranquil as a double dose of Valium and barnacled by shocking red fingers of Indian pampas grass and pines standing erect like sentinels. When Disney left Lost Valley, the then rancher-owner (father of current rancher Bob) asked him how liked the Rockies. 'Hard to say,' he apparently quipped, 'I couldn't see for the trees'. Sadly, the view's a little different today. In 2002, Lost Valley's mountains suffered the dreaded 'burn-off', a forest fire that razed mile-log swathes of vegetation and left the scent of barbecued cow lingering in the air for months. The State's tactics to quell the three-week long fire made international news when a water 'scooper' plane shovelled a scuba diver out of a reservoir and deposited him on top of a charred tree.

After lunch back at the ranch - a toughened wattle of meat smothered in something resembling tubercular snot - we were straight onto lesson two: driving. You've got to remember that cows will break through a fence to be with the herd - they're real herd-bound,' advises Ben, ‘this is how, to be a good cowgirl, you have to think like a cow. Now, imagine where you’d want to go if you hated to be alone.’ ‘To the mall?’ piped up Becky absentmindedly, eyes trained on the assemblage of knots and holes her cowboy short had been reduced to.

Driving - or the skill of rounding up cattle on horseback and threading them forward through an opened gate - is often likened to playing cow pinball. Evidently in my case, the balls were subject to bizarre alien magnetisms. For, no sooner had I herded six lumbering beasts together than one would break off, belying the nature of his breed for a stab at independence. 'Well, aint you a piece of cake,' chuckled Charlene, as stamped out of the coralle two hours later, cursing my beefball score of 25%. 'Ha! You wait 'til tomorrow - gun skills', I muttered darkly as I huffed uphill through the thin air towards my cabin and Ben's recommended night-time reading, Colorado magazine's lavish centre spread on 'Understanding your horse's hindquarters'.

'There'll be a revolution in this country before they take away our guns,' warns Carlos, with a nuance of menace, as we approach the shooting range the next day. A middle-aged Argentinean American with Kilroy Silk silverfox hair and a permanent crackling bad humour, Carlos knows how to shoot sharp, and 'looking the part' he tells us sagely, 'is 80 per cent the story'. Jamming the shotgun into my clavicle with an unforgiving force, he tells me to first cast my eyes up the glossy flank of the gun, before bending forward from the hip and training my barrel forward.

Our bullets slice through the soft air, ricocheting between mountains that once echoed with frontiersmen's gunshots, and scattering spent canary-yellow cartridges around box-fresh cowboy boots. Kim – a soft-voiced 40-something American charity worker on vacation from restructuring agricultural practises in China – surprises us all by firing off rounds with the trigger-happy thirst of an Israeli army cadet. Lined up, four sunburnt women packing steel and bloodletting big-city attitudes, we felt elated - high on clean mountain air and the dirty American dream.

By the time, that evening, I'm kicking back in Lost Valley's hot tubs (a sole concession to spa-break culture, bearing the imperative 'no spurs allowed') I've also blackened my soft city hands at lassoing (circle your wrist as if you're whisking thick custard); horse shoeing (get the horse pissed on a 'drunk shot' of ketamine or get booted 20 feet across the coralle); and branding (nitrogen for namby-pamby horses, molten metal for cows, who are as quick-witted as plankton). Later, as an inky night outlines the Rockies, silver-mounted by the touches of the moon, Lydia - the resident cowgirl poet at Lost Valley – slips us an illegal brew (Lost Valley prides itself on being ‘as dry as the summer earth’) and tells us of her yearning for: 'The glory of horse and saddle/Every day without a change/And a desert sun a blazin'/On a hundred miles of range.' In 48 hours we'd ridden, we'd roped, we'd shot, and we'd confronted the elements. In short, we bunch of no-good dames had lived America's most cherished male myth and favourite movie genre. And did I hunger after a life lived out on the range, beneath a capacious sky? Maybe, if they could serve up a soy cap with those eggshell grounds.

Cowgirls get to choose…
Lost Valley Ranch, Colorado, 001 303 647-2311 www.lostvalleyranch.com. Ladies-only weeks, teaching traditional cowgirling skills. Women groups welcome at all other times. Female wranglers work during the summer months.

Cowgirl University at Riley Ranches near Fort Worth, Texas, arranged through the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Fort Worth (www.cowgirl.net; 00 1 817 336 4475). Wrangler skills and rodeo.

Cowgirl Bootcamp at Alisal Ranch, near Santa Barbara, California (www.alisal.com; 00 1 805 688 6411). Fly-fishing and penning cattle.

Elkhead Ranch, Hayden, Colorado www.ranchweb.com/elkhead; 00 1 970 276 3920). Yoga on horseback, anyone?

Leconfield Jackeroo & Jilleroo School, Tamworth, New South Wales, (www.leconfield.com; 00 61 2 676 94328). Become a 'jilleroo' at cowgirl school in Australia.

Brown Creek Ranch Vacations (www.browncreekvacations.com; 00 1 403 625 4032). Women's week Leather & Lace in the Canadian Wild West.

Timote Gaucho Rides, Uruguay (www.gaucho-ride.com; 00 59 894 311 441). Ride with the gauchos in South America, a mix of cowgirl skills and ranch- to-ranch riding.

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