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Ranchers in the semiarid, western Great Plains encounter highly variable inter- and intra-annual climatic conditions, combined with markedly fluctuating market prices that are globally-influenced. However, both rancher decision-making processes and ranchers' perceptions of successful social, ecological and economic outcomes have been excluded from conventional grazing experiments, resulting in an incomplete assessment of both the process and outcomes of rancher decision-making. Using a case study approach, we examined how 17 ranching families in SE Wyoming and NE Colorado made grazing management decisions and documented the ecological conditions on their ranches. We paired qualitative interviews of ranchers with field-based ecological measurements of rangeland conditions on their ranches to explore 1) how ranchers made grazing decisions and what decisions they made, 2) how ranchers defined successful outcomes of these decisions, and 3) the relationships between rancher decision-making processes, the grazing decisions they made, their definitions of success, and measured ecological outcomes. Grazing decisions are influenced by a complex combination of human dimensions and ranch characteristics, both of which vary among ranches. By taking a holistic and rancher-centered approach to studying ranch decision-making processes and outcomes, the results of this exploratory analysis shed light on the human dimensions of adaptive grazing management. By doing so, this study addresses an identified gap in range science and may begin to explain the discord between past experimental research on grazing outcomes and the outcomes observed by managers.