Tuesday, Nov. 16, 1999 | 9:58 a.m.
Linda Lippincott is looking to the past for her future.
While many entrepreneurs in the Las Vegas Valley are hitching their dreams to glitzy megaresorts, the 45-year-old horse trainer and travel agent is hitching hers to a chuck wagon.
The wagon will be a major drawing card for the Saddle Up Guest Ranch, where city slickers will be able to get a taste of the thrilling days of yesteryear when the facility is completed within the next few months.
"We will have barbecue chuckwagon dinners served on tin plates with guests sitting around a campfire listening to cowboy poets and Western music," she said.
Lippincott, a native of Battle Creek, Mich., said the time and the location are right for an idea she has been working on for more than three years.
The Old West is new again.
"Young people today are watching John Wayne movies, just as my parents did," Lippincott said. "It must be the romance of that period."
The owner of A Better Discount Travel, formerly located at Camp Verde, Ariz., near Sedona, set her sights on Las Vegas for a dude ranch because more than 30 million people visit here each year.
"That means I don't have to entice them to come to my area," she said. "The tourists are already here."
While the timing was important, so was the land on which the ranch would be built.
Lippincott said she searched for the right spot for more than two years, finally finding it in an area of far Northwest Las Vegas where there is still a large horse population -- even though development is swallowing up much of the available land for subdivisions.
What she found were 10 acres adjacent to several hundred acres of open desert near Ann Road and U.S. 95, down the road from where the Ritz Carlton hotel-casino is under construction.
The site, about 15 miles from downtown, is at 7725 N. Rainbow Blvd., near the Mountain Spa Resort.
She hopes to add 50 to 100 acres to the land she bought earlier this year from Jerry and Annabelle Stanford, a well-known Las Vegas couple who over the years held many Republican fetes at their rambling, multilevel home on the scenic property that is landscaped with 400 trees.
"This was the first house built in this part of the desert," Lippincott said. "Before this, there was nothing here."
In addition to the 4,900-square-foot home, which will be converted into a steak house and saloon, there is a guest house, which will be turned into a bunkhouse that will sleep as many as 26.
There also is a horse arena and a number of stalls, which Lippincott currently rents to horseowners.
She wants to add more arenas for amateur rodeos and horse shows and more stalls for a string of 20 or so dude horses that guests at the ranch will use for trail rides out into the desert.
Alas, there will be no cattle drives for those who may have visions of rescuing and adopting an orphaned calf a la Billy Crystal in "City Slickers."
Plans call for construction of a 36-guest lodging facility, retail shops and an Old West town where gunslingers will have shootouts.
"It's not going to be huge," Lippincott said of the faux town. "But guests will experience the flavor of the Old West."
She estimates the cost of the project, which she hopes will be completed early next year, at about $15 million.
The dude ranch will host weddings, banquets and parties in addition to a variety of western-themed activities.
Lippincott's interest in things western began when she was about 17 and her family moved from their Battle Creek home to a farm, where she began raising and training Tennessee Walker horses.
In 1982 her parents moved to Southern Arizona and she followed. In Arizona, outside of Sedona, she developed a horse breeding and training facility. She and her husband also had a horse operation in Lodi, Calif., where they had about 50 Arabians.
Today she has 12 horses and no husband.
In 1990 she became a travel agent and in 1996 opened her own agency in Arizona.
As she sent clients to Las Vegas, a city whose roots are firmly embedded in the Old West, she happened upon the idea of providing a service called "An Evening in the West" for all those tourists who would like some relief from the neon and din of the Strip.
The original idea was a simple one -- bring tourists from the Strip to a rural setting for a chuck wagon dinner under the stars. That evolved into the Saddle Up Guest Ranch concept.
"There was nothing else like it here," Lippincott said.
Overly optimistic, she put an ad in the Yellow Pages in February touting the facility she expected to be completed by August, but then a deal with the original investor fell through and she had to find other investors, putting her at least four months behind schedule.
"We've been getting five or six calls a day, every day, just from that ad," she said. "I almost hate to answer the telephone. We have to turn away business, I mean big business, because we aren't ready."
But she assures potential clients that the day isn't far off when the ranch will be ready. Some day, she predicts, there will be 60 or 70 employees at the site. For now there are just three -- herself, R.C. Taylor and Corky Chaple.
Taylor, a real-life Montana cowboy, manages the horse operation that is at the location now. Chaple is in charge of the chuck wagon. And the steak house. And turning Lippincott's ideas into reality.
"Linda's the dreamer, the idea person. I see that they get done," said Chaple, who has a degree in hospitality management from Michigan State University.
Chaple is a professional chef and has managed a number of resorts and country clubs all the way from Wyoming, where she was director of operations for a dude ranch, to Florida, where she managed a country club for five years.
She said she came to Las Vegas more than a year ago and opened the Casino Legends Hall of Fame at the Tropicana. Chaple and Lippincott met through a mutual friend shortly after Lippincott moved to Las Vegas.
"Corky was the missing piece to my puzzle," Lippincott said.
Chaple says that the public is champing at the bit for the dude ranch. "There's an incredible demand for this. People are clamoring for it," she said.
But till the dude ranch finally opens, folks are just going to have to hold their horses.
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