How Noah Cyrus Saved Herself

Growing up in public hasn't been easy, but she's gotten through the painful years

- Julyssa Lopez

A bucolic, family-run riding center perched off a chalky street in Calabasas, California, takes some effort to find. If you’re in a car, you wind your way down Ventura Boulevard and around anonymous office buildings, past the flower- strewn pet cemetery where Humphrey Bo gart buried his cocker spaniel Droopy, through groves of bursting palms and spiky hedge plants. The reward, once you’ve made it, is a rush of silence. From the entrance of the farm, the perpetual roar of the 101 and the anxiety of Los Angeles fade away, replaced with rustling trees and the occasional bray of a horse.

This has been Noah Cyrus’ sanctuary since she was about 10 years old. She’s been riding her entire life; one of her earliest baby photos shows her wearing a tiny red cowboy hat atop Roman, a towering, blue-eyed Appaloosa that her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, broke himself on his farm in Nashville — though not before Roman fractured one of the most famous noses in country music. “He bucked, drug my dad through the mud,” Noah says. “That was the love of my dad’s life.”

When the Cyrus family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-2000s, Far West Farms owner Nick Karazissis — an amiable, award-winning rider now in his seventies — took Noah under his wing. “Tuesday through Sunday, every morning, I was here riding with him for about four hours a day, five hours a day. In the summer, it would be all day, every day,” she says. Karazissis was calm and reassuring, a welcome force for the youngest kid in a sprawling showbiz family. “Obviously, I had a family that was split up a lot,” she says. “Here I had something so permanent. . . . They would always make sure that when I came here I was Noah. I wasn’t a Cyrus, I was just Noah.”