We Asked a Real Horseman to Ranch-Test the Crocs Cowboy Boots

The new Crocs Classic Cowboy Boots are hard to miss. They’re plastic or something close to plastic. Metallic stitching in quasi-western style decorates the boot’s faux-leather upper. The vamp is cast in a shiny black Crocskin texture meant to imitate alligator skin. And they have spurs: plastic detachable ones that fasten to the heel strap. They cost $120 and look like a caricature of a boot. I’d been wearing mine for a week when my neighbor rode over to my house. He’s in his 70s and been a horseman all his life. When he saw the boots, he crossed his hands over the front of his saddle and canted his head to one side like a dog trying to understand English.

“Those are cute, Will,” he said. “Really cute,” he said. I pulled off my left boot and went to hand it to him, but his horse shied and backed away when I approached. After the dust settled, he asked, “Are they supposed to be cool or something?”

His nine-year-old grandson knew the answer to that. The kid, who owns and cherishes a pair of camouflage Crocs, had tagged along that day to watch us work horses. I handed him the boot. He held it up and turned it in his hands like he was examining a piece of art. “These are very cool,” he said.

Looking cool is any self-respecting cowboy’s top priority, and the Crocs boots pull their weight, which isn’t much. They’re very lightweight—under 30 ounces for a pair. They’re so light that you’ll forget you’re wearing them until you step off your horse onto a gravel driveway or try to use a shovel. At which point the proprietary Croslite sole will betray every rock underfoot or fold like a dishrag over the shovel step.

The spur, of course, is what makes the boot a cowboy boot. Unlike a real spur, the Crocs spur does little to impress a horse. Thankfully, however, the spurs are detachable. One of the biggest risks to wearing real spurs is getting bucked off a horse and having the spur hang up on the saddle so that the rider gets rag-dolled over the prairie until the spur strap breaks or the horse stops bucking. No such danger exists with the Crocs boot.

You can do some ranch work in the Crocs cowboy boot, but you can do some ranch work barefoot. The ventilation holes in the boot’s vamp render it less of a boot and more of a sandal. A little horse manure on the sock never bothered a cowboy, but the accumulation of dirt and everything else in the footbed is tiresome. Perhaps one of my friends, who grew up on a ranch, recognized the boot’s most niche functionality: “Maybe they’d be good for irrigating a hay meadow.”

The season for irrigating hay meadows—in which the ranch hand spends many hours walking through flooded fields of tall grass—had come and gone by the time Croctober rolled around, so that evaluation will have to wait until next year. Generally, the boots can handle light to moderate ranching. On horseback the boots are serviceable as long as the riding is mild. Welding is probably not a good idea because they seem prone to melting. As another friend suggested: “They might work for cleaning the house.”

The only problem with cleaning the house in the Crocs cowboy boots is that cleaning the house is among a cowboy’s least favorite things on Earth. Essentially, the Crocs cowboy boots are what they appear to be: an injection-molded play by a company whose branding knows few limits. According to Crocs, fans have been calling for a cowboy boot for years. The company’s chief marketing officer, Heidi Cooley, told The New York Times last month that running a limited-edition Crocs cowboy boot was, in effect, a no-brainer. Crocs announced production of the boots on October 5. When they went on sale on October 23, two things happened. First, the website crashed. Then the boots almost completely sold out. Go figure.