Cathy Ringler was enjoying a day out on horseback recently when her horse, Zigzag, stopped on the trail. She used both hands on the reins and held her feet tight against him to keep the frightened horse from bolting.
“We heard shaking up in a tree,” Ringler said. “We looked up and a bear cub had climbed up a tree right over us. Zigzag is kind of a timid horse already, and then who comes up on the trail, but the mother. She is not a happy bear but she was beautiful. She had this beautiful buckskin nose.
“Well, everything was OK. I could feel Zigzag’s heart beating under my leg and then the bear made this sound. It wasn't a grunt, it wasn't a growl, it was something in the middle.”
Ringler paused dramatically, allowing the moment to sink in before adding, “Zigzag had it and he turned tail.”
Ringler was unable to reach for her phone for a picture and would have stayed longer to watch the bear, but her horse decided that their encounter was long enough. Even though she was unable to record the bear in a photograph, it is fair to say that the incident will make it to the written word in one of her stories and become an adventure a future character will endure.
Ringler is a storyteller who has recently published her second book about a strong-willed girl, Miya, living the adventures that Ringler herself had experienced. One dramatic adventure in her second book, “Miya’s Mountain,” was an exaggerated description of a scene Ringler had witnessed from horseback years before.
“I’ve seen a rockslide from a ridge over,” Ringler said. “It was a smaller one than the one in my book, but still, the magnitude of the rock sliding down the hill, or when you hear a boulder coming down off the mountain, is something I have experienced.”
Ringler has also been sharing her everyday experiences from horseback, describing a world that many of her readers have only dreamed about.
“I write about the difficulties of packing along those really narrow trails,” Ringler said. “Of being afraid and looking down all those hundreds of feet and seeing the tops of pine trees.”
The Dude Ranch: Gateway To Wyoming
Ringler grew up all over the United States, riding horses and avoiding the teeth of their kid-eating pony, Jingles. In her sophomore year of college, her dad encouraged her to go an adventure for the summer rather than to drop out of college.
“If you don't waitress in the summer, my dad told me, just do something totally different, go someplace totally different,” Ringler said. “There was no internet, so I got a book, and it was jobs for college kids. The first job I got was at a fishing resort in Alaska.”
However, when Ringler did the math, she realized she would spend all her money just traveling to get there. Instead, she decided to head to Wyoming to a dude ranch on the North Fork, the Flying L Skytell.
“I met my husband at this dude ranch, and he was the wrangler, and I was the bartender, but I was this college kid, and I didn't know how to make any drinks,” Ringler said, giggling over the memory, “We'd go to the rodeo every night and during my free time, I got to ride up the North Fork. Sometimes I would go with Von, and we had horses that would walk stride for stride so we could hold hands as we rode.
“I went back to college, and then that's actually when I changed my major from Food Science and Human Nutrition to education. I did a lot of thinking horseback, and then I came back the next year and worked at a camp up in Sula, Montana, where we took pack trips out in the mountains.”
Stories From Horseback
Eventually Ringler married her wrangler, and they moved to Park County. Her two daughters were the ones that inspired her to start telling stories from the back of her horse.
“After I had my kids, we would always ride in the evening,” Ringler said. “We'd barrel race, and when we ride home, they'd always say, ‘Tell me a story!’ So, I started telling them stories and then when we would take pack trips up the mountains around here, they'd always ask for stories.”
Ringler had landed her dream job by then as a teacher at a small two-room classroom in Clark, Wyoming, for K-6 students. She took these stories she was telling her daughters into her classroom and discovered that they were a valuable teaching tool.
“I figured out that if I use storytelling when I taught, there was never any classroom management problems, because the kids are always so engaged in the story,” Ringler said. “I started telling stories before lessons and using them to motivate my students.
Cathy Ringler is a cowgirl, former schoolteacher, storyteller and award-winning author of two books for young teens; “Maya’s Dream” and “Maya’s Mountain.” (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
Cathy and Von Ringler raised their daughters on horseback where Cathy would tell her girls stories to keep them entertained. Her daughter, Ashley, is riding the family horse, Cheyenne. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
Cathy Ringler is teaching at the two-room schoolhouse in Clark, Wyoming, on hat day. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
Cathy Ringler, left, with her two daughter on South Fork. During these horse trips, her daughters would beg her to tell them stories as they rode along. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
“We had no trees or grass on our playground,” Cathy Ringler said. The district finally agreed to plant grass, and the parents and students got together to plant a tree belt. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
The K-6 students at the two-room schoolhouse in Clark, Wyoming, were taken on several field trips through Wyoming to give them a chance to explore outside their rural community. Their teacher, Cathy Ringler, took them on an overnight Gillette field trip. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
Cathy Ringler’s daughter Ashley getting off the school bus in Clark, Wyoming. Ringler is a cowgirl and storyteller who was inspired to write by her daughters and students about their adventures in Park County. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
Cathy Ringler and her co-teacher would take the entire student body on field trips. This day they went to Gillette and explored some of the future reclamation. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler) 
A coworker and Cathy Ringler at the dude ranch, which was the gateway to Wyoming for Ringler. She’s wearing the MSU T-shirt until she changed loyalties to the Cowboy State. (Courtesy Cathy Ringler)
The Adventures At School
She taught at the Clark Elementary School for 27 years, learning as much about the joy of living in a rural community from her students as they learned from her.
“The wind blows out here,” Ringler said. “The kids would love to take tumbleweeds and they would shake them at each other. They chased each other around with those great big tumbleweeds or they would put their coats out like wings, and they would fly. Sometimes they actually would fly! I just loved this sense of community.”
As a rural schoolteacher, Ringler encountered problems that wouldn’t be seen in an urban school setting.
“I almost stepped on a rattle snake once when I had pushed the door open to unload some stuff, and it came into the foyer,” Ringler said. “There was also the time our lunch card machine wouldn't work. A teaching assistant took it apart and discovered that a black widow spider was spinning its web inside, messing up the machinery.”
The total enrollment ranged in size from 12 to nearly 30 students over the years. By teaching several grades at once, Ringler got to know her students well and they became the inspiration for her stories.
“You just expand your family tenfold,” she said. “You spend so much time with them, they do become like your own kids.”
Like her daughters, Ringler’s students begged her for stories and especially wanted stories that they could relate to of kids, like them, growing up in a rural community surrounded by horses.
“I know it's the neuroscience is why these stories work so well and keeps them engaged,” she said. “The kids always wanted stories about kids. Then they want to know about stories about cowgirls.”
The Books
After retiring from teaching, Ringler took one of these stories her students loved and wrote it down. She won a short story award from Wyoming Writers and was encouraged by one of the judges to write it into a novel. With this prodding, Ringler did just that. Her story was based on two of her students who had made a large impression on her.
“I started writing about two kids who came to Clark but only stayed a little while,” Ringler said. “I was so impressed with those kids, and I thought, someday I'm going to write a story about them, because they tried so hard. I would say, go to recess, take a break. But they'd say, ‘No, no, we got to get this right.’
“That's kind of when I started writing about Miya. I wanted to choose a kid who had that kind of determination and resilience.”
Ringler also based her stories on her own adventures and on those she witnessed in her small school.
“I wanted it to be so gripping that you have to turn the next page, and so I decided to write an adventure story,” Ringler said. “It also became a blueprint for kids that are dealing with anxiety and fear.”
“Miya’s Dream” went on to win several awards including the 2019 Moonbeam Children Book Awards. With the encouragement of her publisher, Ringler wrote a second book featuring Miya that was released this past June called “Miya’s Mountain.”
“She does all kinds of things, and it is everything that's ever happened to us in the mountains, but exaggerated like rockslides and encountering grizzly bears,” Ringler said. “She takes on the mountain, you know, internally and externally. She really has to reach down deep to save the life of a boy.”
Ringler has been retired for eight years but this does not mean she will be slowing down anytime soon. She still rides whenever she can and continues to write. She volunteers during the summer with young adult writing groups in Powell and Cody and travels the Cowboy State sharing her adventure stories that are uniquely Wyoming.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
