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By Clare Tone Feature photo: the author riding Clooney, circa 1974 The year was 1971 and a five-year-old girl was growing up in love with horses in the suburbs of Chicago. She hadn’t yet started weekly horseback riding lessons with her sister, those would start next year. She was shy and butterflies darted in her stomach every time she thought about horses, which was almost every minute of every day. Across the country that same year, in a beautiful hamlet on the brink of a tumultuous transition from rural to cosmopolitan, 110 residents of Boulder County gathered on February 7th at the National Bureau of Standards to form the Boulder County Horsemen’s Association (BCHA). Perhaps it was no fluke that BCHA came into being in what is known today as The National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST on South Broadway in Boulder. This is the place that houses the clock by which all clocks in the country are set. A clock that has ticked just shy of 1,576,800,000 times to mark the near fifty years BCHA has done its important work of promoting, protecting and unifying the equestrian community of Boulder County through education, recreation and legislation. Fast forward to 2020 and that little girl is now 53. She can’t help but imagine back to February 7th, 1971 wistfully, picturing 110 people gathered at NIST dressed in flowing flower-patterned shirts and high-waisted bell bottom jeans nearly obscuring dusty cowboy boots. Although her imagination has always run a little wild she knows one thing for sure: If it weren’t […]