There’s a stereotype about how teenagers spend summer vacation — watching TV, playing video games, endlessly scrolling or relaxing by the pool.
But this year, around three dozen kids chose to trade their screens for the back of a mule at Utah’s annual Cowboy Camp. Or in some cases, it may have been chosen for them.
“I didn't really, like, want to come, but my mom was, like, ‘I signed you up for Cowboy Camp,’” 15-year-old Hadlie King said with a laugh. “So, I was along for the ride.”
King and a posse of campers steered their mules into a single file as they wove through red rock canyons on a sunny morning near the south-central Utah town of Tropic.
Like many of the kids here, King lives in a city — in her case, Eagle Mountain. Yet after a couple hours of mule time, the camp won her over.
“I love it,” King said. “Definitely will be coming back.”
Growing up in Utah has become a largely urban experience. Around 90% of children aged 10 to 19 now live in cities, according to 2024 data from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. The three-day camp put on by Utah State University Extension hopes to get more young Utahns off their phones and onto the old dusty trail.
“I want them to take those skills — like riding the mule, learning that they can do hard things, building their confidence — and translate it into all parts of their life,” said Heather Thomson, camp director and youth program coordinator with USU Extension.
They try their hand at everything from archery to canoeing to cowboy poetry. Working ranchers, farmers and other experts also teach the campers about things like soil health, pollinators and drought.
Thomson, who launched the camp in 2022, said the goal is to get more middle schoolers and high schoolers excited about agriculture and rural issues through hands-on experience — even as the state becomes more urbanized.
Another mule rider, 16-year-old Graysha Hansen, came from the Ogden area.
“Not a lot of room for animals up there,” she said, referring to her hometown. “So, it's really cool for me to be able to come down here and do this because I never get to do this in my normal life.”
Another part of the camp’s appeal for Hansen is connecting with other people her age who are into all of this. Campers who live off the Wasatch Front shared that sentiment, too. Even though Ruby Foster, age 15, is from a rural town in northeast Utah with plenty of farms, she has struggled to find peers who have common interests.
“Not many of my friends are super interested in ag stuff,” she said, as she sat at a camp craft station hammering designs into a piece of leather. “So, it's just nice to have other friends who are, even if they don't live super close to you.”
One of those friends is 15-year-old Wyatt Jensen-Brown, whose home in Utah County is a good three-hour drive from Foster’s. Despite the distance, the two returning campers have bonded over their shared plans to become horse veterinarians.
“Everybody here has some sort of interest in cowboys, farming, that kind of thing,” Jensen-Brown said. “It's a really great thing to be able to make friends here, because I've run into her at horse shows, state-level competitions, and been able to have friends and say, ‘Hey, I know you.’”
Other campers plan to pursue a wide variety of careers when they grow up, though — pilots, welders, wildlife managers — a lot of work that’s not on the farm.
And that’s OK to Thomson.
“I understand that a lot of these kids probably are not going to walk away and be a farmer and rancher,” said the camp director. “In fact, the climate right now, it's very hard to get started in the industry if you don't already have a connection.”
The future of Utah agriculture faces challenges supercharged by economic pressures, drought and development. So Thomson sees value in making sure the next generation of Utahns understands the realities of farming, no matter what career they end up in.
“I just want them to walk away feeling empowered — to support those farmers and ranchers, to enter these conversations, to help us create a more sustainable future,” she said. “Our next generation is going to be these guys.”
Attendees are evenly split between those who came from agricultural families and those who didn’t. The way that Thomson has seen interest in the camp grow over the past few years shows it’s meeting an unmet demand.
Toward the end of the day, campers circled around a plastic bull to take turns testing their lasso skills. There were collective groans at each near miss or cheers when a fellow camper roped the fake horns.
It’s a bit sad to think about camp ending, Graysha Hansen said, because it meant saying goodbye to her new friends.
“Community is a big thing, and it's something that a lot of teenagers are lacking nowadays, especially with the rise of social media,” she said. “Community is a good thing to find, and it's a hard thing to find if you don't know what you're looking for.”
She’s grateful to have found some of that here, and she hopes they’ll all get to see each other again at next year’s Cowboy Camp.
