Ami Cullen spent her childhood in Pennsylvania, developing a love for horseback riding. However, in 2020, the lawyer-turned-wrangler found herself in a dire situation as the 2020 East Troublesome fire raged out of control. “Living in Colorado now about a dozen years, it seems like there’s always fires,” recounted the author of Running Free.

Growing accustomed to seeing plumes of smoke in the distance nearly every summer, Cullen had grown complacent. After all, those smoke plumes on the horizon disappeared as suddenly as appeared. However, that wouldn’t be the case with the 2020 wildfires in Colorado. “I was not prepared,” confessed the C Lazy U Ranch employee as she raced to evacuate 200 horses.

While the director of equestrian operations didn’t think a wildfire would ever threaten the ranch, by mid-October 2020, the flames had reached within 10 miles of the ranch. That’s when Cullen knew that she needed to evacuate the horses. However, moving 200 horses from the Granby ranch was no easy task, and their mission turned into a race against time.

“It was just absolute insanity and nothing that I would have ever been able to prepare myself for… I had moments while we were evacuating horses and things were burning around us, and Grand Lake was going up, where I felt this was not even real.” Ami Cullen confessed to The Gazette. Her book, Running Free, is a fictionalized story based on this very real experience.

Cullen couldn’t believe how they averted disaster, even after the horses and everyone else reached safety. When it finally sank in, the former medical malpractice lawyer penned her first book. However, during her conversation with The Gazette, the author didn’t take credit for herself but rather gave it to the equestrian community.

She said it was the “kindness” of the community that gave them a place for the horses. “The guy that put them up in Evergreen, he just gave us his property,” revealed the horse wrangler. Had it not been for the selfless act, Running Free would’ve had a very different title. That’s because the second-largest wildfire in Colorado history devoured several employees’ homes and the ranch’s ‘Evergreen’ cabin. Thankfully, the community has never shied away from extending a helping hand.

The equestrian community came together in the face of disaster once again

Four years after the tragic 2020 East Troublesome fire, a different disaster ravaged another equestrian hotspot in the U.S. In the final days of September 2024, Hurricane Helene bulldozed through the nation’s Equestrian Capital, Florida. And just like the people of Colorado four years ago, the community in Florida stepped up to safeguard the horses.

The largest equestrian center in the USA, the World Equestrian Center, situated in Orlando, Florida, opened its doors. According to a report by the Garden & Gun, 1200 horses found refuge inside WEC. Meanwhile, Jennifer Roth had an eerily similar experience to what Cullen faced in 2020. While she didn’t face the bunt of the storm, Roth and her animals were lucky to escape unscathed.

“It’s been a good lesson… I’m exhausted, but the neighbors have been great,” Roth told The Chronicle of the Horse, praising the equestrian community’s selfless actions. And it’s this tradition of extending a healing hand that Ami Cullen has tried to capture in her book.