Life is too short not to enjoy all sides of it, which is why the cowboy life suits Scott Perez just fine. When one job is done, it’s time for the next.
“I’ve been this way my whole life,” Perez said. “I never have been able to hunker down, do just one thing until I retire.”
The cowboy lifestyle claimed Perez when he first came to Colorado 50 years ago. He started off working ranches and dude strings in the Boulder area. He’s since worked from the Canadian border to the Mexican one: as a rancher, a guide, a mechanic, a carpenter. He’s even been a professor at Cornell and Wells College, with a graduate degree in natural resource management and American Indian studies.
You name it, he’s probably done it, including some of the more romantic sides of cowboying—Perez is also a poet, a writer, and an actor.
“I found out that they paid me far more to look like a cowboy than anyone ever paid me to be one,” he said.
Perez called himself an “accidental actor” because he got his start when a commercial was being shot at the stables where he was working. He has done a fair share of film crew work, did some pickup-truck publicity with GMC, and has landed spots on TV and film productions, including Hostile Territory and Expedition Unknown.
The acting is not something Perez takes super seriously. What he takes very seriously is keeping Durango’s heritage, culture, and landscapes alive.
“That’s why I got involved with the Durango Cowboy Gathering,” he said. “Cowboy Tuesdays at the Diamond Belle Saloon. I work for the rodeo. I do reenactments. I do gunfights. Some of us go up to Georgetown and do train robberies and gunfights every summer.”
Perez is noticing an uptick in such activities coinciding with the 150th anniversary of Colorado’s statehood. For him, that interest signals that the essence of these traditions—of the sort of hard, joyful life he built for himself—is alive and well.
“If I can do this for the rest of my life,” he said, “I’ll be happy.”
By Zach Hively
