Caleb Zwahlen

Caleb Zwahlen Spent half my life chasing horses
Still not done
Single horseman. Ranch life. Real stories.

Cyrus taught me nearly everything I actually know about horses over the better part of fifteen years, patient in a way t...
09/15/2026

Cyrus taught me nearly everything I actually know about horses over the better part of fifteen years, patient in a way that made me impatient with myself for not learning faster, and two weeks before he passed he sat with me at his own round pen fence and told me something I did not fully understand at the time about a c**t he was starting, that the horse was not slow, that I was just in a hurry to see progress that was already happening in a form I had not learned to recognize yet. I did not think much of it in the moment beyond filing it away the way I filed away most things he told me over the years. He passed two weeks later, sudden, no long illness to prepare anyone for it, just gone one week and a funeral the next. I have thought about that fence-rail comment almost daily since, applying it to a c**t I am starting myself now, watching for the progress I used to rush past looking for something bigger and faster. He is not here to see whether I finally learned the lesson properly. I like to think he would recognize it in how I am working this c**t now regardless. Some lessons only finish teaching themselves after the teacher is gone. 🐴

The diagnosis came faster than I wanted it to and the hearing loss has moved quicker than the specialists initially pred...
09/15/2026

The diagnosis came faster than I wanted it to and the hearing loss has moved quicker than the specialists initially predicted, enough that I have started relying on hand signals for basic groundwork the same way I imagine I will eventually need to rely on them for a great deal more than horses. What I did not expect was how quickly Marlow started picking up on the shift before I had formally taught him a single signal. I raised my hand instinctively one afternoon instead of giving a voice command my own ears were struggling to confirm I had even said correctly, and he stopped clean, like he had been waiting for a clearer channel this whole time and voice commands had simply been the version I was more comfortable with. I have since started deliberately pairing hand signals with the commands I still have voice for, building a system before I fully need one, and he is picking it up faster than I trained any horse using voice alone. There is something in that I have not fully worked out yet, an animal adjusting to a change in me before I had even accepted the change myself. He is teaching me as much about accepting this as any doctor has. 🐴

I stopped showing four years ago after a panic attack in the warm-up pen that I am still not fully ready to describe in ...
09/15/2026

I stopped showing four years ago after a panic attack in the warm-up pen that I am still not fully ready to describe in detail, and I told myself and everyone else it was because I had lost interest, which was a lie I got comfortable telling. Saturday I entered again, same circuit, same kind of crowd that used to make my chest go tight before I ever got near the gate. It found me again about ten minutes before our run, the same tightness, the same certainty that I could not do this. I stood at the gate with my hand flat on Buckshot's neck and I did not try to hide any of it from him, and he stood absolutely still under my hand the entire time, patient in a way that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with something I cannot fully explain about how some horses read a person's worst moments and simply refuse to add to them. We rode. I do not remember most of the pattern. I remember that we finished it, and that Buckshot never once reacted to whatever was happening in me the whole time I was falling apart quietly before the gate. Four years is a long time to stay away from something because of fear. One horse standing still got me back through the gate. 🐴

I sold Storm nine years ago during a stretch when keeping three horses fed was simply not something my budget could abso...
09/15/2026

I sold Storm nine years ago during a stretch when keeping three horses fed was simply not something my budget could absorb anymore, and I made the hardest phone call of that whole year to a buyer who seemed decent and promised to take good care of him. I never heard anything after that, the way you usually do not, and I made my peace with it the way you have to. Last month a friend sent me a sale barn listing two counties over with a photo that stopped me cold, an aged grey gelding with a very specific blaze pattern I would know anywhere. I drove out on a hunch I was half embarrassed to admit to myself. I stood at the pen fence looking at thirty horses milling around in a holding pen, and one of them lifted his head, locked onto me across the entire pen, and pushed straight through the others to get to the fence where I was standing. Nine years. Thirty horses in that pen. He knew exactly who was standing at that rail. I bought him back that same afternoon for more money than I have ever spent on impulse in my life, and I would spend it again in a heartbeat. 🐴

I started this with two rescued horses and one referral from a juvenile court counselor who had run out of programs will...
09/15/2026

I started this with two rescued horses and one referral from a juvenile court counselor who had run out of programs willing to take a kid with the specific history mine had, and I did not build any grand plan around it beyond a hunch that an animal who also needed a second chance might teach a lesson about trust that a classroom never quite manages to land. Eighteen kids through the program in four years now, every one of them starting exactly where that first kid started, mucking stalls and doing basic groundwork with a horse who does not care one bit about a police record, only about whether the person leading him today is steady and calm and paying attention. I do not claim the horses fix everything. I claim that not one of the eighteen who came through this barn has gone back through the system since, which is not a coincidence I am willing to attribute to luck alone. Rebel came to me as a rescue nobody thought had much use left in him. He has taught more patience to more teenagers than any single human instructor I have ever watched try. Second chances work better, it turns out, when both parties actually need one. 🐴

My parents rode together for most of their marriage until my father passed eleven years ago, after which my mother simpl...
09/15/2026

My parents rode together for most of their marriage until my father passed eleven years ago, after which my mother simply stopped, not out of any injury or fear about the horses themselves but because riding had always been something they did together and doing it alone apparently felt like a door she was not ready to walk back through. I asked her Sunday, gently, if she wanted to just sit on Dakota at a walk with me holding the lead the entire time, no pressure, no expectation of anything beyond a few slow laps around a round pen built specifically to feel safe. She said yes faster than I expected. I got her mounted and led her at the slowest walk Dakota knows how to offer, and she started crying before we had even completed our first lap, not from fear, she told me after, but from how much the motion under her still felt exactly like it used to feel with my father riding beside her all those years. We did three laps. She asked for a fourth. Eleven years is a long time to stay away from something that used to be shared. Watching her find her way back to even one lap of it meant more to me than most milestones I have witnessed in a round pen. 🐴

I planned the day off with good intentions. I arranged the barn sitter and I drove away at eight and I drove to the city...
09/03/2026

I planned the day off with good intentions. I arranged the barn sitter and I drove away at eight and I drove to the city ninety minutes from the ranch and I had breakfast at a restaurant and I walked and I did the things that day-off people do. By eleven in the morning I was checking my phone for the barn sitter's updates with a frequency that told me something about the quality of the day off I was having. By noon I had received three updates, all fine, and I was not reassured in proportion to the updates being fine. By one in the afternoon I understood that the specific quality of rest I had planned was not available to me in the city in the way I had imagined. I drove back at two. Not because anything was wrong. Because I do not rest well away from the place I rest in and the place I rest in is the ranch and pretending otherwise for a full day was not going to produce the rest I had intended. I arrived at four. I fed early. I sat in the barn for an hour. I was genuinely rested by six. The day off I am capable of having is not the conventional version. I have stopped pretending it is. There is no embarrassment in knowing where you are most yourself. 🐴

: I took the course because a woman at my boarding facility had a horse go down on a trail two counties from home and th...
09/03/2026

: I took the course because a woman at my boarding facility had a horse go down on a trail two counties from home and the delay in appropriate response made a bad situation worse and I heard about it and I sat with the specific discomfort of a man who has owned horses for fourteen years and has never formally learned what to do when something goes wrong in the field. The course was two days. An emergency vet and a large animal specialist ran it and they covered vital signs assessment and wound triage and colic recognition and emergency trailering and a dozen other things I had partial knowledge of from experience but had never had organized into a coherent framework. On day one I realized how much I did not know. On day two I realized the not-knowing was correctable. I came home on Sunday evening and I spent three hours in the barn. I reorganized the first aid kit based on the priority list from the course. I posted the emergency vet numbers in three places instead of one. I updated the horse health records so they were accessible and not buried in the filing cabinet. Three things that took three hours and that I had not done in fourteen years of ownership because I had not taken the course. The horses are the same horses. I am a more prepared horseman. The two things are not unrelated. 🐴

I had been in a period of performing. Not dishonestly. Just presenting the managed version of myself in every conversati...
09/03/2026

I had been in a period of performing. Not dishonestly. Just presenting the managed version of myself in every conversation and every room for about three weeks and the accumulation of managed presentation was doing something to my interior that I recognized as a kind of depletion. It was a Sunday and the forecast said rain all day and I looked at the saddle and I made the decision. I saddled up in the barn and I rode out into the rain without any particular destination except the open trail that runs along the west side of the property for two miles. The rain was the steady committed kind. I got wet immediately. The horse's ears adjusted to the rain sounds and we moved at a trot that felt honest in the way that riding in the rain feels honest, like there is no surface left available to perform on because the rain has removed it. I rode for ninety minutes. I came back soaked and cold and more myself than I had been in three weeks. I do not know exactly why rain does this to a person on a horse. I know that it does. It removes something. It levels everything to the actual. In rain you cannot be anything other than what you actually are and sometimes that is exactly the thing that is most needed. 🐴

Murphy was twelve and he had been in every year of the ranch and every year of the horses and he went on a February morn...
09/03/2026

Murphy was twelve and he had been in every year of the ranch and every year of the horses and he went on a February morning with the vet there and me there and everything done right and the grief arriving all at once on the drive home. I went to the barn that afternoon. Not to train. Just to be in the barn. The next morning I trained. I want to be clear about what training through grief is and is not. It is not distraction. You cannot distract yourself from missing a dog that was with you for twelve years and you should not try. What it is, specifically, is a useful occupation for the body while the mind does the work it needs to do. The horse requires your physical presence. He requires your attention to be in the arena. He requires your hands to be doing the right thing at the right time. That requirement gives the grief a container it can sit in while you are training and a size it can be while the training is happening. At the end of six weeks I was not done grieving Murphy. I was also the best I had ever been in the arena with that horse. He gave me somewhere to put it that was useful. That is one of the things horses give. It is not a small thing to have available when you need it. 🐴

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