Sarah Haas, Peak to Peak.   At this point in her life, having lived through 46 snowy Colorado winters, Carol Koltz is a snowbird, or, in her words, “right about now I start to long for the deep south.”

Right about now, in the beginning of November when snow falls every other day and in-between it’s windy, you can’t blame her. It’s not that Koltz doesn’t have the chops to weather the winter, (rather she’s expertly whipped up a batch of chicken soup without a dirty dish in sight), it’s just that she’d rather extend the season of “working her horse in the pasture under sunny skies.”

Come December, Carol and her horse, Boss, will make the trek down to South Carolina where the duo will be working students at Eventing Naturally, an equestrian center that helps its students learn to “think like a horse.” For us humans, such a switch in perspective can be a novel, if not awkward, approach to husbandry, especially in the Wild West where horses have long been regarded as a tool and a means to an end. But for Carol a horse is an end in and of itself, a being with a heart, “a heart that is much bigger and stronger than ours.”

It’s a wisdom that’s always been a part of Carol for horses have always been a part of Carol’s life. When she was a kid growing up in Texas, her father kept rescues and later, during her impressionable years in New Jersey, the family added boarded horses to their ever-growing herd of rescued Tennessee Walkers, a breed of gaited horse prized for its unique four-beat running-walk.

Originally bred for framework, the breed’s flashy movements earned it renown in horse shows where they were shod with heavy pads on their feet to achieve extreme movements in their gait. When the horses would inevitably succumb to injuries caused by such extreme demands and over-use, most were sold to kill-buyers, save for the few bought by kind-hearted folk like the Koltz family.

Once back home on the New Jersey farm, Carol’s dad would head off to work where he worked long hours as an aeronautical engineer, leaving young Carol to take care of the farm.

“From the age of twelve I ran that place,” she says, laughing proudly. “I would fix up their boo-boos, switch out the nasty shoes they used on them, and would let them go to pasture. We wouldn’t do anything with them except to bring them in once a day for a massage.”

It was there, as a teenager with her hands on a horse, that Carol first experienced the resonance between a horse’s energy and a human’s and realized deep down the kindredness that existed between the two species. But back then, in the 1950s and 60s, there was very little science to back up her intuitively gained knowledge. So, Carol had no choice but to follow her gut as she set out on a life lived by the healing touch she’d discovered in her hands.

After graduating high school in 1972, Carol loaded into a VW van with her German Shepherd puppy and headed to Colorado. Once here she worked a series of odd jobs while learning how to be a midwife, and then later, a massage therapist. Along the way, she had kids of her own, fought for midwifery rights and regulations, and developed an equine therapy practice, specializing in magnetic therapies, light therapies, craniosacral therapies and herbal remedies, all of which she still does today for area horses. During all the years she worked and gained proficiency in her equine work, science caught up to what she already knew, confirming the presence of emotional coherence between horses and humans.

In the early aughts, scientists at the Heart Math Institute in California began measuring the beat-to-beat changes in heart rates, known as heart rate variability or HRV, to study the resonance between horses’ HRV and that of their human compatriots. By studying the heart’s related electromagnetic energy, they were able to tell the story about what’s going on inside us both, physically and emotionally. They determined that when a human is in a positive emotional state, a horse’s state becomes one of positive emotion too.

One can read the studies to see the proof or simply watch Carol work with her horse, Boss. Originally from the Calico Mountains in Nevada, Boss was gathered as a yearling and spent a year in holding before being “adopted by brutes.” In 2011, Carol’s friend rescued him, before gifting Boss to Carol in June of 2015.

“My friend had him for four years and felt that Boss had the worst case of male gender aversion he’d ever seen,” Carol says. “He put up a list of requirements and I met them all and he gifted him to me. We are a match made in heaven.”

Copper colored in his winter coat, Boss is a small Kiger mustang, a breed of horse known for keeping to themselves rather than integrating with other wild herds and Carol can relate to his introverted ways. But when the two of them are together, all traces of shyness fade away as they embrace one another like family. Even though the warm weather down south is calling, they seem perfectly content here in the snow, so long as they are together.

A weekly column about locals living along the Peak to Peak. To suggest someone for a profile please email Sarah at mountainfolktales@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the November 8, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)