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Lucky looks at me. I look at Lucky. The age old eye-balling of horse and human, beast and man sizing each other up.

‘Good horse,’ I say. ‘Nice horse.’

Lucky whinnies and paws the ground. He’s already decided who’s boss on this trail. And it isn’t going to be me.

I’ve wanted to be a cowboy ever since I saw Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid at the age of six. I had the whole outfit as a child - guns, hat and chaps, in which I’d terrorise my sister in the name of justice and the American way. So when I heard about dude ranches in Arizona where you can live out the cowboy fantasy for a week I packed my spurs, polished my boots and headed west.

Dude ranches are nothing new - they began in the 1800s when rich east-coast Americans headed west each summer to view ranches they’d invested in. Arriving by train they’d change out of smart city clothes and ride around for the summer chasing cattle. The real cowboys so admired the dudes’ urbane elegance that they adapted features for their own dress, such as waistcoats and colourful scarves.

In recent years, the movie City Slickers has done much to promote dude ranches, with more Europeans galloping west, encouraging mainstream tour companies such as United Vacations to offer dude ranch holidays. As ranch specialist Desiree Blum explains:

‘A dude ranch is now like Club Med with a western atmosphere. The primitiveness is glamorous. My friends from Beverly Hills think it’s marvellous.’

I chose to go to Arizona. Partly because it’s classic cowboy country - Tombstone, scene of High Noon, is in the state’s southeast corner. But mainly because it offers 300 days of sunshine a year. You might as well get a tan on the range, after all.

My first stop was Rancho de la Osa, three hours south of Phoenix, right on the Mexican border. It’s one of the oldest ranches in America, first settled by Franciscans in the late 1500s. It became a guest ranch in 1928, welcoming famous dudes such as President Lyndon Johnson, and entered history in 1946 when William Clayton, Under-Secretary of State, drafted the Marshall Plan there. Today it’s a small 40 guest ranch owned by Richard and Veronica Shultz from Kentucky. They’ve done much to restore its original ‘Mexicaness’, using antique furniture and restoring the vibrant Mexican colour scheme - deep ochre, honey and bright blue.

‘We didn’t want anything antithetical to its nature,’ says Richard. ‘We’re kind of trying to create perfect imperfection.’

They describe the atmosphere as ‘creative’ and point out that a third of their visitors do not want to ride, just chill. Which is pretty easy. Seventy miles from the nearest town, this is big open country. At night all is quiet save for the Great Horned owls that dwell in the eucalyptus trees and the guests slamming tequilas in the Cantina. Being a cowboy sounds like a great idea, until you’re faced with a horse. Richard was cautious.

‘These horses are up to fifteen times larger and forty times more powerful than a human. They can kill you.’

But Al from Los Angeles was 82 and he’d just come back from a ride. And Mary from Seattle was encouraging;

‘These are really good horses, they do what you want.’

And Nona was in charge. She’s from a fourth generation Wyoming ranch family and is proud to be one of the few female head-wranglers in Arizona:

‘Down here there’s still some of that Spanish machismo. But I think women have more patience with older people, and with the horses. ‘

She was patient with me.

‘Cisco minds very well,’ she explained, helping me up onto my horse’s ample bulk. Apparently I had to look at his ears - if they were back he wasn’t happy. Fortunately they seemed distinctly forward.

My fellow dudes were a mixed bunch - a group from San Francisco, a Norwegian woman and American boyfriend, and the McCroy family from Kansas, decked out in cowboy gear.

‘Well you wouldn’t go to the beach without a swimsuit would you?’ said Jim McCroy, pulling on leather riding gloves. None of us had ridden much before - indeed the McCroy’s preparation for the trip had been ‘renting City Slickers one and two.’

Over the next three days we rode every morning and afternoon, out into the desert. We skirted the Mexican border - a four foot high straggly barbed-wire fence, spotting where illegal immigrants had crawled underneath, shedding blankets and water bottles as they went. The scenery was spectacular - at times there was no sign of human kind as far as the eye could see. In the distance rose the bald rock peak of Baboquivari, a mystic mountain for the local Indian population. As Jim from Kansas put it:

‘I don’t see how you can look at that scene and not believe in some greater power.’

At times I sat back and marvelled at the fact I was part of a riding tradition on this land going back over 1,000 years. Cisco trod carefully, up and down ravines, past the Saguaro cacti, as tall as trees, past spikey ‘jumping cholla’, whose thorns ‘leap at you when your back’s turned’, past the spindly ocotillas, and through thickets of ebony mesquite trees. As ranch foreman Don had warned us: ‘Everything in this desert will either bite you, stick you, or sting you.’ We didn’t go fast - indeed most ranches seem to prefer you to proceed as if pony-trekking, so if you’re an experienced rider and are seeking a challenge, check first for the riding levels offered. Gradually I began to understand how horses have characters. Others were frisky, some downright mischievous, but Cisco was solemnly content. His ears never went back.

Soon I was swaggering bow-legged with the best of them. I never tired of saying ‘Howdy’, ‘Yee-Ha’ and my favourite: ‘See you back at the ranch.’

At night we ate like kings, enjoying Veronica’s excellent south-western cuisine, followed by margaritas and western dancing in the Cantina. A ranch holiday is a communal holiday - you eat together, drink together and ride together, but fortunately this is America where strangers are embraced, often literally, and everyone chats freely. Conversations at the diner table were always raucous, from cowboy tales to Presidential jokes.

On my last night I came across foreman Don, standing on the steps watching the sea of stars.

‘We had a couple here from New York City,’ he recounted. ‘I was hammering this new roof and I saw them dragging their chairs closer across the yard. Why are you doing that I asked. We miss the noise, they said.’

From the Mexican border I headed northwest of Phoenix to the Wickenburg Inn, more of a resort than a ranch - a series of well-appointed apartments with swimming pools, tennis courts and jacuzzis, perfect for families, who seemed to make up the majority of guests. The entertainment is a little more resort-like too - on my first night we had a cowboy cookout under the stars with Gary Sprague ‘The Singing Cowboy’, but even this was informative. Gary told us how horses and bulls were first introduced by the Spanish, how in real life cowboys didn’t wear guns on the range because they got clogged up by the dust, and how a horse eats 20 pounds of hay and drinks 20 gallons of water a day. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I soon established a pattern - sit by the pool in the morning, ride into the desert in the afternoon, then another sojourn by the pool before a hot tub and a large meal. Under an electric blue skirt of the night sky I listened to parents issuing the ultimate warning to their children against straying too far;

‘Be careful. There’s rattle-snakes out there.’

Each dinnertime, I gorged myself on traditional cowboy fare of chicken parmigiana and chips, and began to worry about making the 18 stone weight limit permitted to get on a horse. Chief wrangler Frank Bennett allayed my fears. An ex-rancher, he looks like a Hollywood cowboy and is enthusiastic about the dude ranch phenomenon:

‘Ranching can be a lonely business. Here I like the interplay with people.’

He outlined his advice for those thinking of a dude ranch holiday:

‘Read about the history of the American West. People here are outdoorsy, and still very in touch in with the land. The best dudes are those who excited about experiencing it. And get in shape. Ride a horse back home first, if only for an hour. Come with an eye to improving horsemanship and experiencing all the cowboy skills.’

As I climbed onto ‘Lucky’, Frank concluded:

‘Man and horse have been partners for 4,000 years. Together they can do things than neither can do alone.’

As I rode off into the sunset, I reminded Lucky of this fact and hoped that his ears stayed where they were.

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