Donkeys

It was a love triangle here at Longhopes Donkey Shelter in Bennett Colorado. A mini, let’s call him George (the names have been changed to protect the innocent) only had eyes for Daisy, who only had eyes for Rex. Daisy let George tag along, never letting him stray very far, while always looking for Rex.

Though they have evolved from the same ancestors, donkeys today bear more resemblance to their African cousins, the Ass and the Zebra, than to the horses they often share the pasture with (see this fellow below). Their histories are different as well, donkeys being employed more for domestic use, agriculture and transportation. Their sturdiness, not their speed, made them valuable in this regard.

Donkeys are different in so many ways, as anyone who has heard them bray at dinner time can attest to. It is a full throated holler, belly puffing like bellows, the sound of French Horns blasting through the teeth, lips and nostrils, then afterwards returning to the same impassive posture as before, as if to say”well….?”

Donkeys bond in very close ways, and in ways not too dissimilar from us. Where horses depend more on the herd, and can adjust to a new group in time, donkeys become forlorn if pairings are broken up. These bonds go on for life, and the life of a donkey is long, up to forty years or so.

Longhopes Donkey Shelter is a kind of Continuing Care Facility, with everything from assisted living to full time nursing care. There are many longtime residents. The people who take care of these donkeys are extraordinary and seem to speak the silent language of the equines, knowing what their needs are without waiting for an incident. You can learn more about them at https://longhopes.org.

A note about Legend, whom we mentioned in our last post. You might wonder how we know the names of these horses. It is because they have been closely monitored since 2004, the first year that every foal on the range was named. Since then a database has been created by group of advocates who can identify each horse by their markings, and track the movement and constant reconfiguration of the bands. Here is a photograph of Legend in his prime with one of his young, Colorow.

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True Wild

The true wild exists at Sand Wash Basin, not far from the Wild Horse Refuge, where the life of the mustangs can be one of gentle summers or months of endless drought. Winter can be cruel.

Foals arrive in the spring. They run in small bands, protected by their elders, aunts, uncles, and not necessarily their dam and sire. Bonds that form in the herd are created by circumstance, opportunity and survival. Lead mare, stallion, bachelors and maidens, the extemporaneous family units.

Sand Wash Basin is vast, 157,000 acres with nearly 500 horses. Yet you are lucky to see them. You might come across a loner. Dirt roads stretch on forever. You ask where so many horses can be. At a watering hole late in the day we were lucky to see one small band. They drank briefly and then disappeared into the hills above.

Stallion battles continue. On our first day we came across Legend, perished from his injuries, perhaps only a week before. His emaciated body lay decaying in the sand, somehow beautiful, still free, returning to the earth. Dust to dust.

We camped out on top of Look Out Mountain at the northern end of the Basin. Not a soul for miles around. Only the hidden presence of the herd.

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Catch & Release

The Wild Horse Refuge is a private, non-profit 22,450 acre ranch where captured horses bought at auction are released back into the wild. Pat Craig bought the ranch in 2022 and since then has continued to buy horses rounded up by the BLM. This includes some well known horses like Michelangelo, seen below, offspring of perhaps the most famous of the known wild horses, Picasso.

These were the most magnificent wild horses we’d seen, moving freely in large groups, less divided into bands than elsewhere. Part of this was that the stallions had been gelded before leaving the BLM pens. No stallions, no battles, but also no offspring.

We watched as a herd of thirty or forty horses charged down into a valley and then up to the other side after they had seen us. Led by an “out of bounds” mare who had wandered into BLM lands before being rounded up, she was not going to be captured again. Neither were any of her herd if she could help it.

This was the Four Seasons of wild horse refuges. A hundred horses, just right for the acreage, and hay aplenty in the winter months, thanks to Pat Craig and his crew. No uncertain survival as in the BLM lands, where the winter months can wipe out much of the herd.

We drove up and down miles of dirt and two track roads, the reserve being over thirty-five square miles. The horses moved from grazing area to grazing area, only showing up at the water holes in the morning and evening. Heavy snow and rain from last winter meant a proliferation of new water sources throughout the refuge. Finding the horses was no picnic. We felt lucky to have had a glimpse of them..

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Old Stallions

There’s nothing lonelier than an old stallion who has lost his band. He was looking down toward his old herd from Pilot Butte, outside Green River, Wyoming. Below him was his old band, with two young foals. One was a dreamy dun with long blond eyelashes and deep dark eyes, probably six months old, born in the spring and a very healthy girl.

We watched as the current band stallion headed off an interloper, a young bachelor. The stallion pranced out defiantly to meet him, head held high and snorting. One day the younger one, or one like him, would take some or all of his mares away. It’s  a Darwinian process.

The old stallion was not the first we’d come across. Loners we encounter are either young bachelors who have been turned out of their band, or old stallions who have been challenged and lost their band. One of the old timers we saw in McCullough Peaks was skin and bones and probably wouldn’t survive the winter.

These are not the only loners on the prairie. We see a number of single antelope, their herd significantly thinned after last winter. They seem as curious about us as we about them. This is true of their domestic friends as well.

Finally, a note about the bear we encountered in the Pryor Mountains (see the McCullough Peaks post). It was quite possibly a black bear. They come in many colors, including this cinnamon colored one below. Looks a lot like a grizzly. We didn’t have time to interview him, so we will never know.

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McCullough Peaks

We looked for the McCullough Peaks herd for two days. We finally found them on the third day. We had come from the Pryor Mountains where the first wild mustang area had been established in 1966, after along battle with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The battle had been led by Velma Bronn Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie,” and interestingly in this case, the ranchers sided with her.

Coming across part of the big herd in McCullough Peaks was a treat. We’d driven through miles of dirt roads before finding them. At least five bands were joined together. We watched young filly Thora, first known offspring of elderly band stallion Thor (think Robert DiNero) nursing with her young mother Takoda.

While we were there, a young bachelor trotted right by us looking for romance. He was quickly challenged by the lead stallion of each band. Having acknowledged the challenge, he moved on to the next band. His name was Tate, and he was a lover, not a fighter.

Afterwards we headed to the Irma, Wild Bill Cody’s hotel in Cody. Our waiter was a young cowboy with a thin waxed mustache. He was taking time off from the rodeo after sustaining some injuries. He couldn’t wait to get back. In the meantime he was reduced to acting as a staged gunfighter in the evenings outside the hotel.

Our earlier search of the Pryor Mountains had yielded only two or three ponies, plus one grizzly that we stumbled upon in a small orchard. Since then we spend as much time looking out for grizzlies as we do for ponies.

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Grasslands

From the Badlands in South Dakota to Big Sky in Montana you drive though an infinite sea of grasslands. You are also traveling the route of the Plains Indians to their final destination and near extinction.

We visited the battleground at Little Big Horn where the hubris of the US Cavalry resulted in their massacre under the leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The soldiers lie buried where they fell, scattered along the ridge that separated their approach from the Indian encampment, which at the time represented over two thousand Lakota, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Earlier in the day we had been to the Brinton Museum in Big Horn which contains one of the most extraordinary collection of American Indian artifacts, including a scroll on muslin by Standing Bear depicting the event leading up to and including the battle itself. It is from resources such as these that histories like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee could be reconstructed.

The cattle ranches around Big Horn have now been transformed by the Big Horn Polo Club into multiple polo fields, cut as smooth as a baseball park, and irrigated from the mountains above. Long horn cattle, now strictly decorative, stroll the meadows between. Polo season brings the worlds best, mostly Argentinians, and helicopters fly the residents in and out. The ranchers are mostly gone, and as our host said, “the billionaires have driven out the millionaires.” Manifest Destiny folds in on itself.

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Sagebrush

Sometimes it seems that we’ve brought just a little less than we need. Then suddenly we find the right thing and can’t believe our luck.

We spent our first night dispersed camping on a ridge overlooking the Buffalo Gap Grasslands, just outside the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. We’d been listening to Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s endless tome about cowboys driving a herd of longhorn cattle from Texas to Montana. They could see and hear others miles away on the plain. Now we could understand.

As we stood at the edge of the ridge we could hear a coyote yipping and barking. It could have been just below us, or half a mile away to the north where the wind was coming from. We were too green to know.

After a while the barking stopped, and there was just a soft breeze and the sweet smell of the sagebrush.

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On The Road

One of the things you encounter after a trip like ours is a slight dissociation in returning to the daily routine of your previous life.  At first it’s sort of fun---long showers, popping out to the grocery store. But then time begins to slip and you find a month has gone by, then two, and then…

On the road, by contrast, every day is remembered, each one entered into the log. Being home now is like having your ship in for repairs. You sit in the pub eating and drinking yourself into oblivion. You tell long yarns about the highlights of your trip to your friends. Privately you remember the beautiful, random details of all the places you visited.

We are returning to the West again, this time by more primitive means. A rooftop tent on our Subaru wagon will be a more minimal existence. Out in the field this time, watching the wild horse herds, we’d like to just be there, in the day and in the night, feeling the rhythms of the equine desert.

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