"Wildlife is so much easier to spot and track when there is fresh snow on the ground"
far and long through the Cascade Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Range in our 10 years together, but I feared that he couldn’t make a trip like the one I was proposing.
Not knowing exactly what to do, I headed south to a friend’s house in Susanville, California for a visit to escape the pressures I was feeling. While there, he took me to see the mustangs at the Bureau of Land Management holding facility where I saw hundreds of mustangs that had recently been rounded up by the BLM and needed to find a new home. Much like my dad, they were once wild, but were now trapped in this cage where they had no control. It didn’t take more than a few minutes to see that my answer was there, standing in front of me. In my entire life I had never taken a wild horse, untouched by man, to be the guiding hand as we go from Wild to Willing and in doing so, setting them free.
However scary it might be to listen to the rhythms of this world for your guiding direction and follow your path, when you slow down, shut up, and listen, you will begin to see. You’ll notice the little nuances that are right in front of you, in front of us all. When we travel through this world faster than 3mph we pass these by. When we’re looking down at our phones which have taken up so much of our lives, or are so consumed with the vision of our own grand goals we miss these things.
April 10th, 2017, I left the town of Campo, California on the
border of Mexico and the United States. Leaving behind any concerns of what the mustangs and I had not learned about each other during our training together, for the discovery of what we will learn on the trail. Leaving behind the emotional pain of a failing relationship with my girlfriend at the time, for the healing that only a simple compass reading can give. The doubts in my mind, for the human experience that laid before me in the people I will meet along the way. At the time, I didn’t understand what the expression 3 Miles Per Hour meant, but 517 miles into my ride, I had gained a clear vison of its meaning.
After waking on the morning of the 6th of May to rain, sleet, and blustering wind storm I was thankful for the picnic shelter I had made camp in the night before. I decided to change my route and not go up in elevation and climb over the mountain in front of me as I had planned, but to stay low and ride along the roads at its base in the hopes of finding shelter from the wind by using the mountain itself. With the wind at my back for a short while that morning I eventually turned around the base of the mountain and found myself on the leeward side. With the new direction the skies began to clear, and I was able to relax my shoulders, sit up straight in my saddle and feel as if I have to no longer shelter myself from the storm. In awe of the sweet smell that only comes after a fresh rain I looked down at my feet to look at the wet ground we were traveling on. There looking right back at me was a tarot card, face up. I thought for a moment that maybe I should leave it where