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

I found him six hours later.

He was standing in a hiker’s campground, eating somebody’s tortillas, surrounded by four thru-hikers from Germany who were taking his picture.

“Is this your donkey?” one of them asked.

“He’s a mule.”

“He is very handsome.”

“Don’t tell him that.”

That was the first lesson of the trail. You will lose everything at least once. You will get it back if you’re patient and you’re nice to strangers.

I learned a lot of lessons in five months.

In the Mojave, I learned that a horse drinks fifteen gallons of water a day, and that water caches left by trail angels in the desert can save your life and your horse’s. I learned that one of those trail angels, a seventy-year-old retired nurse named Bev, would drive sixty miles of dirt road with a horse trailer full of water when she heard there was a cowboy coming through.

In the High Sierra, I learned that there are passes at thirteen thousand feet where a horse can’t go in June because of the snow. I waited ten days in a little town called Kennedy Meadows, shoeing hikers’ pack goats for free, until the snow melted enough.

I learned that I’d never really been alone before. Not like that. Days with no one but Scout and Pancho. Nights under more stars than I knew existed. Long hours of nothing but the creak of the saddle.

And I learned that I liked it.

I’d always thought I was single because nobody wanted me.

Out there, I started to understand that I was single because I wanted something I didn’t have a name for yet.

In the middle of Yosemite, on day seventy-one, at a creek crossing below Donohue Pass, Scout stepped on a rock, slipped and went down in the water.

When he got up, he couldn’t put weight on his left front leg.