I Rode a Horse From Mexico to Canada. 2,650 Miles, Five Months, One Horse, One Mule and No Plan B. I Was 45, Single and Everybody Said I Was Running Away

The border agent looked at my horse, then at my mule, then at me.

“You’re going where?”

“Canada.”

“On those?”

“That’s the plan.”

He shook his head and stamped something on his clipboard.

“Good luck, cowboy,” he said. “You’re gonna need all of it.”

The Pacific Crest Trail starts at a little wooden monument in the desert outside Campo, California, about fifty feet from the Mexican border wall. It ends at another little wooden monument in the forest, on the Canadian border, two thousand six hundred and fifty miles north.

Between them are the Mojave Desert, the High Sierra, the volcanoes of Oregon and the Cascades of Washington.

About five thousand hikers try it every year. About a thousand finish.

A handful do it on horseback.

I’m Tyson Rook. I’m 45. I’ve never been married. I shoe horses and train colts on a little ranch in central California, and until that spring, the farthest I’d ever ridden in one trip was about sixty miles.

My horse was Scout, a nine-year-old bay mustang I’d adopted from a federal holding pen when he was two. My mule was Pancho, a twelve-year-old jenny-sired mule with the personality of a tax auditor.

My mother said I was running away from something.

My sister said I was having a midlife crisis.

My ex-girlfriend, who’d left me two years before because I “never planned anything,” said I was proving her point.

Maybe they were all right.

On April 12th, at 6:15 a.m., I swung up into the saddle, clucked to Scout, and turned his nose north.

Pancho followed, complaining.

On day four, in a windstorm in the Laguna Mountains, Pancho broke his lead rope and disappeared over a ridge with all of our food.