Meet Steffie & Dusty from Horsin’ Around!

Hi there! We’re the madcapped duo behind Horsin’ Around. We’ve been into Broncos and off-roading for decades, and we love to share our passion for it with other Bronco enthusiasts. With so many new Bronco groups, shops and self-proclaimed gurus popping up in the Bronco community with the introduction of the new Sixth Generation Bronco, we thought we’d tell you a little bit about us, if you’re interested 🙂

Meet Steffie

I’m from the midwest and the South, if you didn’t guess it from her accent in the Horsin’ Around videos. I’m a country girl from rural Missouri with stops in Oklahoma, Florida and Mississippi, where I earned my biology degree from Ole Miss. I dreamed of going into veterinarian medicine but transitioned into teaching when I married Dusty and came to California in the late ’90s. Looking back as I near retirement, I wouldn’t change a thing, having touched the lives of countless students, nurturing their interest in science and engineering.

I’m proud of our involvement with So Cal Broncos, one of the longest active Ford Bronco enthusiast communities in the country. For over 22 years I’ve helped manage the group along with coordinating it’s largest annual gathering, the Big Bear Bronco Bash. Through our shared interest in off-roading and back-country exploration, and the friends we’ve made doing it, I’ve grown to love the mountains and deserts of the Southwest and my adopted state of California.

For years I’ve striven to engage more women in the sport of off-roading and other outdoor pursuits. Never one to sit idly in the passenger seat, I’m always eager to take the wheel and take the lead on the trail. And I encourage other women to do so as well. Through my own Bronco Babes off-road lifestyle brand, leading Ladies Runs at several prominent Bronco events each year, and my activism in the Bronco community, I work to empower other women to step up and take their place alongside the men in the off-road world.

My other interests are diverse. I am an accomplished breeder of champion English Mastiffs. I’ve coached championship-winning teams in robotics and archery, and have been designated my district’s Teach Of the Year twice. I enjoy hunting fishing, hiking and camping, and brewing beer. My favorite adult beverage is a Moscow Mule (always with Tito’s!), and I prefer Country music on the radio.

Meet Dusty

I’m a native Californian, born in the southern part of the state, raised in the northern, educated on the central coast and settled down in Inland So Cal. My parents were serial entrepenuers, providing me and my siblings diverse opportunities to dive into a wide array of odd jobs and endeavors while growing up. We each, at times, worked as farm equipment operators, mechanics, gas pump jockeys, bait & tackle salesmen, produce handlers and convenience store clerks.

A passion for off-road is a Sharp family tradition. Grandpa Sharp was a founding member of one of the first Jeep clubs in existence, back in the 1950’s, of which my dad also served as a president. In high school, my first car was a 1961 Jeep CJ5 handed down from my brother, Matt, which I kept throughout my college years at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

At SLO I studied business and marketing, and played football for the first couple of years. Somewhere along the way I added a ’64 Lincoln Continental to my little fleet of vintage iron. By the time I got out of college both of my brothers, Matt and Pat, now had Early Broncos so I had to join them, buying my first one, a ’75 rust bucket, back in the mid-90’s. 

Both the Jeep and the Lincoln were eventually sold or traded away, regretfully of course. But that first Bronco proved too rotten to save so most of it was cut up and fed into the trash bin each week a little at a time. But some of the salvageable parts of it lived on in mine & Steffie’s two current Early Broncos. Coco still has it’s transmission and transfer case, and the pile of parts of my old ’70 trail rig includes a few odds and ends such as the radiator and dash panel.

Back in the early days of the Internet, I became active on the “Early Bronco Mailing List” to get tech advice as I was working on these old Broncos. It was a great resource but I started to wish there was a similar group with a more local focus, so we might be able to put faces to names, meet in person and even hit the trails together. Eventually that idea became So Cal Broncos, which we launched on Yahoo Groups on July 4, 2001. The following year, me, Steffie and a group of core SCB founding members came together up in the mountains for the first annual Big Bear Bronco Bash, which will be in it’s 23rd year in 2024.