CARTER CITY — The Lazy Gait Horse Camp grew out of one couple’s shared passion for horses and their love for the family’s old homestead in Carter County.

It has since grown into a flourishing business that is proving to be an economic driver for an entire rural community that has struggled to find a replacement for its fallen cash crop — tobacco.



Lazy Gait is the life dream of its patient and outgoing owners Jack and Joyce Cales, who built the camp to share with fellow horse enthusiasts.

Located a mile and a half up Halfway Branch outside Carter City, it opened its stalls and trails to the public more than four years ago. The camp offers more than 60 miles of trails that lead through hilly forests and wildflower covered fields to hidden waterfalls, box canyons and caves.

The property has three converted tobacco barns on site for stabling horses, one of which has a loft area that serves as a dining hall, community center and even a cowboy church on Sundays. It has 16 electric sites and 8 primitive camping sites with more than 30 stalls for horses. The couple also own more than 20 horses and will loan them to visitors who want to ride.

The site also offers a fishing pond — stocked with bass, catfish and bluegill — along with an arena and small horse pen for visitors.

Jack Cales, 64, grew up on and around the farm, even helping to build one of the tobacco barns as a child. Joyce Cales, 60, is a Miami, Fla., native. They met in Florida, where Cales was stationed as a pilot and decided to move to eastern Kentucky after finding out they had more in common than they ever thought.

The couple discovered they both had a passion for horses. Jack likes to train them and Joyce likes to ride.

“It just didn’t come up. We had so many other things going on,” said Jack Cales, who is in the process of retiring from flying for DHL.

“I like to think of a coincidence as God’s handiwork. He put it all together for us,” he said standing in the shade beneath one of the farms towering Sycamore trees on Wednesday.

In the years following that discovery, the couple slowly began down the trail that brought them to Lazy Gait. They bought the old family farm and began riding and traveling extensively across the U.S. camping and riding their horses. For a period of about six years they spent nearly 100 days a year camping and riding, according to Jack Cales.

Slowly they developed their dream to have a horse camp of their own to open to the public and share with their own children and then grandchildren.

“We got this farm here and he said, you can’t farm this here, it’s only good for two things. Riding and looking,” laughs Joyce Cales, “And it is beautiful because of all the creeks and cliffs to look at.”

“We started 33 years ago here and we’ve been adding too all the time, and developing,” said Jack Cales. The couple now owns 750 acres, which were once three separate farms.

They also partner with several neighboring landowners to use and maintain others trails that run across their property. One such neighbor, John Lands, also has 750 acres and allows riders to use the trails through his property.

Lazy Gait’s success has inspired Lands, who said he may add some rustic lodges to his property to accommodate even more visitors.

The Cales have 60 miles of trails on their property that go almost all the way to Carter Caves State Resort Park. They have all been blazed over the years by the couple, family members or volunteers. Some are old jeep trails that needed to be cleaned up and maintained while others were designed and then sculpted by the Cales to take advantage of the terrain’s best assets.

Jack Cales said they are just two days of hard work away from connecting their trail system to that at Carter Caves. The park offers 17 miles for riders, which Cales said will be “a big edition,” to what is already offered in Carter County by the Cales and others.

Several other projects including a Rails to Trails path to connect Olive Hill to Carter Caves is also in the works and will help draw more visitors to the area, Jack Cales said.

“We are really hoping that our facility will help our whole community,” said Joyce Cales.

“There is a restaurant down in Carter — Kaiser’s Restaurant — that has horse ties and people ride down there and have lunch and then Buffalo Market delivers meals here. And then of course, people when they come and stay a while they like to ride a couple days and take a day off, so then they go on down to JF’s Furniture Store and Garden Gate Greenhouse and do the Carter Caves thing too,” said Joyce Cales.

“The craft mall — the Chicken Coop Mall — a lot of people they go over there,” added Jack Cales.

“They usually ask us what there is to do in the area and we give them all these ideas,” said Joyce with a nudge.

The Cales said they are getting support from a variety of local officials who have helped them to secure a small amount of tobacco settlement money — just a few thousand dollars they had to match — through the Carter County Agriculture Advancement Council to make improvements to their property.

Both Joyce and Jack said they see more opportunities in the future for businesses like theirs as state officials promote adventure tourism and outdoor recreation in eastern Kentucky.

Most recently the Cales received about $5,000 help to add an arena and a small round pen for their visitors to enjoy and play different riding games. Jack Cales hopes to continue clearing the hillside facing the arena to build stadium seating for visitors to watch the extreme cowboy games, which are the current craze sweeping the horse riding community.

The couple got that idea along with several more from other horse camps they visited across the country. They have incorporated their favorites into Lazy Gait.

“We just found all the things that we wanted to put into a campground that we enjoyed so that’s the way we’re designing everything,” said Jack Cales. They picked up lots of different ideas including an ingenious way to handle all the manure coming out of the barns — build a ramp right into a manure spreader that can be hooked up to tractor and pulled away.

Above all else, Jack Cales said the couple wanted to ensure their camp offered a safe, family atmosphere to campers.

“We wanted a place where families would feel safe and secure and happy and have the things that everybody enjoys. Safety is a very important thing with our trails. We have six grandchildren and we designed the trails so even though they are beautiful to look at with deep ravines and high cliffs they are also very safe because our four, six and eight year olds ride now and we want them to be safe — and so do their parents,” he said.

CARRIE STAMBAUGH can be reached at cstambaugh@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2653.