Wednesday, March 20, 2002 | 11:11 a.m.
Meg McNamee ate like a truck driver and never gained an ounce.
City slickers talked to her horses through 80 acres of knee-high green pasture and their slickness slipped off.
That was Silk Purse Ranch, one of the first and eventually the largest horse training and boarding facility in the Las Vegas Valley. It opened in 1977 as a novelty Meg and her husband Joe had to explain, at a time when horse riding was more of a backyard pastime and less the expensive sport it has become today. If people had horses, they generally rode into desert from their backyard. Silk Purse will shut down its 50 stalls, five arenas and last few acres of pasture at the end of the month. Las Vegas-area horse riders say the closure signifies the end of an era for them, and will leave a vacuum not likely to be filled anytime soon -- if at all.
"We had the best of everything at the best time," Meg, 55, said, in a phone interview from California, where she retired four years ago to care for her husband. "It's hard to explain, but we were just there at the right time. The place was a gift."
Rising land values, encroaching development and costs of high-risk insurance all make it unlikely that another ranch will be able to provide one horse haven for so many riders.
At its peak, sustained through much of the 1980s and into the late 1990s, Silk Purse boarded 63 horses and spread over 110 acres.
Today, an estimated 60 horse boarding and training farms elsewhere in the valley sit on closer to an average of five acres. Many are landlocked by tract housing, as Silk Purse has been in the last few years. And few facilities are listed in the phone book, in part because most are uninsured, backyard operations.
Janine Karas, manager of Silk Purse since 1994, said most days the ranch "was like Grand Central Station."
Horses valued from nothing to $250,000 were loosely chained in front and rear outside box stalls built around a 3,800-square-foot center arena. In the arena, on loam made from a mix of recycled sneakers and groomed soil, students practiced English-style riding, jumping and dressage -- a discipline Karas says has been described inadequately as a ballet of horse and rider.
Early on, when old-school cowboys were lured to the new ranch by the night-time riding under lights -- something they'd never seen -- Meg says the men chuckled about the smaller "pancake" saddles her students rode. But she won their respect with the good condition of her horses.
Eventually they shared an occasional beer. And on horseback, Meg traded English half-passes and pirouettes for their western rollbacks and spins.
Meg insists there was no romance about ranch life, that it was all work. "We were tough as nails, covered in dust."
But like most at the ranch, Meg was obsessed with the horses. "My mother says I came from the womb grabbing for horses."
Karas is another one. She came to Silk Purse in 1982 as an 18-year-old graduate of Eldorado High School with plans to go to University of Nevada, Reno to become a veterinarian. She dropped out of college after less than a year.
"I came out as a working student, stayed in the housing, and I would sell my soul to the devil, do anything I could to ride the horses, as many as I could ride in a day," Karas said.
Blue D. Shadow, one of as many as 50 ranch horses buried on the property, was a favorite of many students, including Ruth Lastuvka, who still rides, even though last week she celebrated her 75th birthday.
"Blue D. helped me through a lot of difficult times out in the desert. I'd talk and she'd listen," said Lastuvka, dressed in a loose coat with her riding pants tucked into white, flower-print socks.
She and Karas were looking southeast over the last five acres of pasture, which was burned to a pale straw, at a vista of Spanish-tiled roofs and whitewashed homes, stacked about seven units to the acre. The view starts directly across the street.
The two women could have been looking in any direction.
Five years ago, the houses broke the southern horizon. Today, the ranch is surrounded. After April 1, it will be mowed under and more homes will be built. Some streets may be named after the horses. Gun n' Run, Mr. Bull, Sassy Seven and Silk Fire are a few of the names that Las Vegas city planner Laura Martin, who once rode at the ranch, is putting together.
"I thought we had at least 10 more years," Karas said.
Lastuvka said, "It makes my heart sick."
In 1977, Meg and Joe McNamee hauled a downtown home and old barn 17 miles north on two-lane Rancho Road -- now U.S. 95 -- to a cement pad on five acres of raw desert.
Meg was a secretary from back East. She wanted a horse or two or three.
Joe was a Las Vegas native from a family of attorneys, ready to trade in his three-piece suit to work the dirt.
They didn't know the business, but they wanted to escape the grind of Las Vegas. They bought the acreage from the 1,400-acre Gilcrease Ranch in trade for $4,000 in legal work. The home was the so-called sow's ear, Meg said. She and Joe used it to build their Silk Purse Ranch, disproving the adage that "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
Now the city has closed the gap, bringing express convenience stores from within a 20-minute drive to five minutes.
Many more have fallen before it, Assemblyman Tom Collins, D-North Las Vegas, said. Ranchers buy the land cheap, work it for 10 to 15 years, equipment runs down and developers offer a graceful exit, he said. In 1959, the Joey Brown Downs made way for the Las Vegas Convention Center site. In the 1960s, J.K. Houssels gave up his 640-acre horse ranch so the county could develop Sunset Park. Lorenzi Park was built over another former ranch that survived to the late 1960s, the Twin Lakes. "These places just keep moving out over the years," Collins said.
But Collins, Karas and other horse enthusiasts say the sport and culture is thriving in Las Vegas.
Development may squeeze out the larger ranches, but new trail systems pending approval in Las Vegas and elsewhere in Clark County should at least allow riders to travel to open desert from their backyards as in the past, said Ellis Greene, president of the Southern Nevada Regional Trails Partnership. Still, fewer people choose to share open valley floor with all-terrain vehicles, bulldozers and joggers, said Terri Weiss, owner of the Willow Pines Ranch in northwest Las Vegas.
"We trailer out," Weiss said. "The whole experience, the whole flavor of owning horses is changing in the valley. It's more urban now."
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