Big Country

It's been a month and one day since I left home or what I used to call home. When people ask me if I will be riding back or trailering to colorado I explain that I won't be doing either because I am moving to Bellingham Washington by horse. So far they've all grinned and nodded their heads in what seems like an expression of awe mixed with some doubt and a little wary intrigue. I don't know if they realize it but I feel very much the same way. Each day I am surprised that I am still riding. Sometimes I look back on the last month and I wonder who this person is who is wandering around Wyoming with her horses. Even thinking about the last two years of planning and dreaming and then launching of
my westward horse travel adventure still amazes me. It almost terrifies me because now I know how possible the supposed impossible really is.
My first leg of this trip took me from Livermore Colorado up and through Roosevelt National Forest, over the Wyoming border into the Medicine Bow Routt National Forest, then up into the Snowy Range for an attempted southern crossing. Due to the four foot snow drifts we had to turn around and ended up making nearly a forty mile back track.
I wrote once that I thought I might cry when I crossed my first state line. I thought that the sense of accomplishment would well up into tears and roll down my cheeks as we stepped over the border. But the truth was that I had already shed so many tears from the sheer hardship and grandeur of each day of our travel that any more tears were just the same as the constant passing of clouds and sagebrush. I had a hunch from the beginning that I would never be able to accomplish this trip without the help of locals. And I was right. Since the day I started I feel like I have been handed off, not that unlike a relay baton, from place to place, to person to person. I go where we are invited, I stop when it storms, I stay where it is good. And I get to meet the people. The people who live here, in big country. People I probably would not encounter if I traveled like a modern American. A week ago we arrived at the Little Sandy Grazing Association where I have been punching cows every morning with Doc Foster. We wake up no later than 4:30am and are saddled and ready to ride by 6am. We march our ponies out into the pasture as the sun climbs out of the east lighting the desert for again, a wild range round up of clacking hooves and spewing curtains of dust. When it's a good day we call off the dogs by 10:30am. But some days we ride till 2pm. Those days we get back to camp dragging our horses and carrying the dog in the saddle. We climb down weak-kneed and wobble around our horses to unsaddle and hose them down before we turn them out. And somehow we find ourselves feeling lucky. Lucky for the chance to see a sunrise from horseback, lucky because what ends our workday is a trip to the barn to hang up saddles and tack, lucky because we get to work horses, lucky because we can taste the dirt of "big country" between our teeth. For now I will stay here with Doc working cows and tuning up my horses. After I have worked out a few more kinks in his dog and pony show I will head west. West on the oregon trail and the Mormon Trail, along sections of the Pony Express Trail towards Big Piney where a good friend and his family have a ranch.


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