Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch has offered “legendary hospitality” — as the family puts it — since 1946, when Maurice and Mayme “Tillie” Jessup bought a run-down 125-acre property along the Big Thompson River after Maurice spent twelve years dreaming about the place he’d first glimpsed as a college student hitchhiking to a summer job. Today the ranch spans 3,200 acres in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Loveland, still family-owned, now in its second generation under Maurice and Tillie’s daughter Susan and her brother David.
This is an authentic working horse and cattle ranch, not a resort dressed up to look like one — guests join genuine cattle drives, roundups, and team sorting, ride American Quarter Horses bred and raised on the property, and are assigned their own horse for the week to properly build the bond. Named “Best Family Vacation” by Frommer’s Colorado guidebook and ranked among the top ten Colorado dude ranches by True West Magazine, Sylvan Dale has built its reputation on precisely this kind of hands-on authenticity.
The Experience
Your week moves to the working rhythms of an actual cattle ranch: cattle drives and roundups if you want to test your skills against real livestock, gymkhana games and lessons if you’re still building confidence, an overnight pack trip into the backcountry to the ranch’s historic Cow Camp, where you’ll sleep under genuinely dark Colorado skies. Your horse is yours for the whole stay — bred and trained right here on the ranch — long enough for a real partnership to form.
Beyond the saddle, the Big Thompson River running through the property gives you trophy trout fishing, while hiking, hayrides, tennis, and horseshoes fill the days between rides. If you’re here for the Fourth of July, the ranch’s beloved family softball game and homemade ice cream cranking are as anticipated as any trail ride on the calendar.
Susan Jessup, who has run the ranch’s day-to-day operations for decades, is often around personally — a level of owner involvement you won’t find at most guest ranches this size. Her parents’ original vision, she says, gets validated every time a guest tells her what the week meant to their family, and by the end of your stay, you’ll understand exactly what she means.
About Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch
Sylvan Dale’s history predates the Jessup family by several decades. In the early 1900s, the Neville family ran a small cattle operation at the mouth of the Big Thompson River, later building cabins and a lodge to accommodate wealthy hunters from St. Louis who wanted to bring their families along. The property passed to Cotner College, a Nebraska Christian school, before the Depression closed the college and left Sylvan Dale operating as a youth camp — which is precisely how, in 1934, a twenty-two-year-old Oklahoma college student named Maurice Jessup first hitchhiked his way to Loveland for a summer job, and immediately decided he’d someday own the place.
Twelve years later, in 1946, that dream came true: Maurice, on special leave from the Army Air Corps, successfully bid on the run-down 125-acre property, and he and Tillie built it, over the following decades, into the 3,200-acre operation it is today. Their daughter Susan and son David now carry that legacy forward, including through the Heart-J Center for Experiential Learning, a nonprofit the family launched in 2014 to extend the ranch’s educational mission beyond guest vacations alone.
What distinguishes Sylvan Dale within Colorado’s guest ranch scene is this unbroken, deeply personal thread of family ownership — eighty years and counting, with the same brand, the Heart J, representing both the Jessup name and a genuine love of the land that shows in every corner of the operation.
Our Stewardship
The Jessup family, who own Sylvan Dale, founded the Heart-J Center for Experiential Learning in 2014, a nonprofit extending the ranch’s educational mission to land-based and experiential learning beyond paying guests.
