The new Crocs Classic Cowboy Boots are hard to miss. They’re plastic or something close to plastic. Metallic stitching in quasi-western style decorates the boot’s faux-leather upper. The vamp is cast in a shiny black Crocskin texture meant to imitate alligator skin. And they have spurs: plastic detachable ones that fasten to the heel strap. They cost $120 and look like a caricature of a boot. I’d been wearing mine for a week when my neighbor rode over to my house. He’s in his 70s and been a horseman all his life. When he saw the boots, he crossed his hands over the front of his saddle and canted his head to one side like a dog trying to understand English.

“Those are cute, Will,” he said. “Really cute,” he said. I pulled off my left boot and went to hand it to him, but his horse shied and backed away when I approached. After the dust settled, he asked, “Are they supposed to be cool or something?”

His nine-year-old grandson knew the answer to that. The kid, who owns and cherishes a pair of camouflage Crocs, had tagged along that day to watch us work horses. I handed him the boot. He held it up and turned it in his hands like he was examining a piece of art. “Tłó±đse are very cool,” he said.

Looking cool is any self-respecting cowboy’s top priority, and the Crocs boots pull their weight, which isn’t much. They’re very lightweight—under 30 ounces for a pair. They’re so light that you’ll forget you’re wearing them until you step off your horse onto a gravel driveway or try to use a shovel. At which point the proprietary Croslite sole will betray every rock underfoot or fold like a dishrag over the shovel step.

The spur, of course, is what makes the boot a cowboy boot. Unlike a real spur, the Crocs spur does little to impress a horse. Thankfully, however, the spurs are detachable. One of the biggest risks to wearing real spurs is getting bucked off a horse and having the spur hang up on the saddle so that the rider gets rag-dolled over the prairie until the spur strap breaks or the horse stops bucking. No such danger exists with the Crocs boot.

You can do some ranch work in the Crocs cowboy boot, but you can do some ranch work barefoot. The ventilation holes in the boot’s vamp render it less of a boot and more of a sandal. A little horse manure on the sock never bothered a cowboy, but the accumulation of dirt and everything else in the footbed is tiresome. Perhaps one of my friends, who grew up on a ranch, recognized the boot’s most niche functionality: “Maybe they’d be good for irrigating a hay meadow.”

The season for irrigating hay meadows—in which the ranch hand spends many hours walking through flooded fields of tall grass—had come and gone by the time Croctober rolled around, so that evaluation will have to wait until next year. Generally, the boots can handle light to moderate ranching. On horseback the boots are serviceable as long as the riding is mild. Welding is probably not a good idea because they seem prone to melting. As another friend suggested: “Tłó±đy might work for cleaning the house.”

The only problem with cleaning the house in the Crocs cowboy boots is that cleaning the house is among a cowboy’s least favorite things on Earth. Essentially, the Crocs cowboy boots are what they appear to be: an injection-molded play by a company whose branding knows few limits. According to Crocs, fans have been calling for a cowboy boot for years. The company’s chief marketing officer, Heidi Cooley, told last month that running a limited-edition Crocs cowboy boot was, in effect, a no-brainer. Crocs announced production of the boots on October 5. When they went on sale on October 23, two things happened. First, the website crashed. Then the boots almost completely sold out. Go figure.

The post We Asked a Real Horseman to Ranch-Test the Crocs Cowboy Boots appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In May 2019, I set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, with two horses and a plan to ride 2,000 miles to Sacramento, California, along the Pony Express Trail. My book, , is the story of what I saw, who I met, and what happened. I undertook the journey as a large-scale exercise in horsemanship. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground understanding of the famed Pony Express mail service. I also wanted to make a transect of the cultural West. I wanted to meet the people and learn about their lives in all the places along the trail that I’d never been to. The adapted excerpt below is an encounter I had in the desert southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. I had been traveling for 92 days.

I watched the roan horse wallow in a mudhole a mile below me. You wouldn’t have thought that amid all that wind and sky and rock of Utah’s West Desert there’d be water enough to make a mudhole, but there in front of me on a yellow plain that seared under a high sun, the dusky horse flopped from side to side, kicking its legs in the air like a dog scratching fleas. The horse’s solitude told me it was a stallion. Four hundred wild horses, known as the Onaqui herd, summer in this valley, and the only ones that range alone are mares about to foal, old horses about to die, and stallions without harems of mares.

This horse didn’t look old and wild mares don’t foal in August, so I assumed he was a stallion. He stood from rolling, and when he walked out of the mud, he appeared a much darker horse. He hadn’t seen me and my two horses— Chicken Fry and Badger—enter the valley from the east, but I figured it was only a matter of time.

Chicken Fry and Badger showed no signs of agitation, but why would they? For the past three months, we’d been traveling west on rural roads, past farms and ranches and suburban subdivisions, and they’d seen many horses. But those horses posed no threat; they were domesticated. This one was different.

This was a wild horse, a mustang, a free-roaming member of feral equines that became part of the Western landscape after sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors brought the first horses North America had seen since the last ice age, ten thousand years ago. The Spanish, and countless others since, lost horses that stampeded to freedom in the middle of the night or wandered off in search of fresh grass or otherwise untethered themselves from their owners. Those strays gathered in herds and became known as mesteños (Spanish for “escaped livestock”). The word was later anglicized into “mustang,” and today it’s a common term for a wild horse of the American West.

Over the centuries, one enduring trait of wild horses has been they’re aptitude to harass domestic horses. The roan mustang before me posed a problem because I wanted to camp at a corral beside the mudhole that he’d just rolled in. That corral was the only safe haven for my horses for a day’s ride in any direction.

Wild stallions will kill a domestic gelding, a castrated horse, in the same way that wolves will kill a domestic dog. Chicken Fry and Badger, therefore, were vulnerable. Mares may be absorbed into a harem, but geldings are a threat. And since domestic geldings rarely mature with the sparring and fighting that establishes social hierarchy within a wild herd, Chicken Fry and Badger would likely not last long.

They’d also be wearing their saddles and carrying my gear—trappings of domestication that would hinder their survival. I was more than halfway up the Pony Express Trail—92 days and more than a thousand miles out from its eastern terminus in St. Joseph, Missouri—and I hadn’t come this far just to lose my horses in a running fight with a mustang stallion.

So I decided to take a nap. Better to do nothing and potentially avoid a wreck than walk right into one. I figured the situation might work itself out, that after an hour’s doze the stallion would be gone. As I unlashed the panniers from the packsaddle, slid the bridle off Badger, and loosened the cinches on the saddles, both horses sighed with the prospect of a reprieve. I leaned against a tree and ran the lead ropes under my legs so that I could feel any sudden movement they made.

When I lifted my hat from my eyes an hour or so later, three mustangs stood on the plain. An old white horse with a swayed back, a black horse, beyond the white, that waved in mirage like a candleflame, and, nearest to us, the roan. The area around the mudhole had become a bachelor boneyard, and I could have listed things I would rather have seen.

I asked Chicken Fry and Badger if they had any ideas about scattering the congregation, but they only yawned and stretched like soldiers waking from a halt. So I came up with one: I would throw rocks. Rocks the size of lemons or baseballs. I’d wait to throw them until I could see the whites of the stallion’s eyes.

I carried a lightweight .357 revolver in case I needed to humanely put down one of my horses due to some catastrophic injury, and I took the pistol from my saddlebag and slid it into my vest pocket. I didn’t know what I would do with the gun—maybe shoot the ground in front of the roan— but if I did that, Badger, sensitive as he was, would probably jerk the reins from my hands and take off across the desert. Which would leave me down a horse and in a world of trouble, assuming I could still hang on to Chicken Fry.

I readied my horses and hardened up the cinches on both saddles tighter than if there had been no mustangs in my future. I stepped onto Badger, and eased downhill into the furnace of an August afternoon. When I was halfway to the corral, the roan horse saw us. He jerked up his head from grazing, and I cursed him. He took a few halting steps, broke into a trot, and pretty soon headed our way at a run.

I slid from the saddle and informed Chicken Fry and Badger that we were about to have our first scrape with a mustang. The roan stallion made quick work of the distance between us, and when he was a hundred yards off, he vectored to the right, hammering over the dry plain on black hooves that looked and sounded as hard as the basalt cobbles beneath him. He arched his neck and swung his head in bold communication, and his posturing was not lost on me.

The author spent a lot of time singing to his horses on the trail. Check out this video.

He was a large horse, the color of rust, with a black mane and tail, and his head was dark and unrefined. Old scars on his back showed as gnarled lines and crescent moons—haired-over glyphs from that hierarchical herd sorting that betrayed him to be no colt, but a mature horse. The tops of his legs had the horizontal striping of ancient equine DNA, and though I knew he carried the distant pedigree of a domestic horse, he looked as raw and wild as the desert that made him.

He wheeled a full circle around us at a gallop. In one hand, I held the reins to Badger and the lead rope to Chicken Fry, and had a rock in the other as he came in front of us, some forty feet off. I missed with my first rock. The second hit him at the base of his neck, and he shied violently, leaping forward into the air and pawing at the rock that had just invaded his space. I landed another rock in his flank, and he bucked, kicked his hindquarters straight out with a snap of hooves and muscle that looked like he might kick the door off heaven, and then he took off at a flat run in the other direction.

He charged another circle around us, but this time he appeared frustrated. He stopped square in front of us, again some forty feet off, looking right at me with his head held high and his nostrils flaring, and I figured that this was my chance to put one between his eyes, but I missed. The rock flew wide to his left, and he dodged right and disengaged, quartering away from us at a walk.

Chicken Fry and Badger were unfazed, and had stood quietly behind me while I held our ground. I filled my pockets with more rocks. Once the roan was about one hundred yards away, he lowered his head to graze. But he was not disinterested; I could see the insides of his ears. His ears turned toward us told me that we held his focus as I made for the corral afoot, leading Chicken Fry and Badger so that if the stallion made another run for us, I’d be ready.

I’d known there would be wild horses in western Utah. I’d known that wild horses would be a fixture of the range between the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. But I hadn’t anticipated the acute threat they would pose to my horses. I might as well have been camped on the African savanna with lions and leopards. The mustangs felt just as dangerous.

For the past three months I’d seen the color of the West in shades of people and land and circumstance. I was passing through a continental theater where I found too little rainfall, too much of the original prairie broken up by the iron plow, too many old timers who remember heavy-snow winters like they don’t get any more. I found too many invasive species, too much irrigation draining dwindling aquifers, too many small towns ready to fall off the map.

But what I found at the mudhole three days into the desert was different, more unsettling. Wild horses represent and signify a variety of rangeland aspects, but on that August afternoon, the roan stallion at Simpson Springs conveyed to me that the undiminished wildness of the West could be dangerous—beautiful and intriguing, but dangerous—and that not everything had changed since the days of the Pony Express.

To find out what happens next, get a copy of  the author’s first book. Grant began at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű as a fact checker in 2010. Since then, he’s written numerous stories for the magazine involving horses, including a horse race across Mongolia, an expedition to find gold in Arizona, and a 400-mile ride across Wyoming. He currently lives on a farm outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his partner, Claire, five horses, three chickens, and two dogs.

The post The Day a Wild Stallion Tried to Kill My Horses on the Pony Express Trail appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

She Said
 “I Dream About Blue Seas”

In 1983, my parents decided to go into the boat business. They bought a small boatyard near our home in Stamford, Connecticut, and imported Westerly sailboats from Hampshire, England. The first to arrive was a Westerly Fulmar, a 32-foot sloop we named Lower Goose, after an island in Maine we often visited. She was quickly sold.

Twenty-eight years later, my father bought Lower Goose back. As she was being refitted, a space heater started a fire down below that smoldered for half a day. Lower Goose became an insurance write-off, but my dad couldn’t bring himself to scrap her. For the next few years, she hung neglected on a mooring in Connecticut’s Five Mile River.

I have spent some time on boats. There were the childhood boat shows, family sailing trips, and my youthful obedience to a call of the sea so loud that I dropped out of college and signed on as a hostie, a volunteer who cooks and cleans in exchange for board, on a boat bound for the Coral Sea, in the South Pacific.

Will, my boyfriend, is a writer who grew up in Colorado. He is happiest on a horse and hunting in the mountains. His calls come from the Mongolian plains and Asia’s Silk Road. But I was certain that his love of open spaces, wind patterns, and rope knots would recommend him as a sailor.

We had both lived in Santa Fe for years when we met on horseback while riding on a mutual acquaintance’s ranch. The first time we spent any length of time together was five years ago, on one of Will’s story assignments, mining for gold in Arizona. As a physician assistant, I was hired to keep the subject of his story, an aging prospector, alive while we trekked through the mountains. Will was not his usual self, and we quarreled terribly. As far as I was concerned, we still weren’t on speaking terms when, about a year later, back in New Mexico, I got a flat tire one night and reflexively called the most capable person I knew. Will promptly turned up in his truck full of tools and swapped out the tire while chatting amiably about the weather. We’ve been talking about the weather ever since.

As time went by and Will spoke about dreams of a future homestead together, I’d counter with my own, filled with endless seas. When he suggested we get goats, I said I think we should have a boat.

“W±đ±ô±ô±ô±ô,” said Will, which is what he says when he’s thinking.

It wasn’t long before we were enrolled in a week of sailing school—and I’d asked my father if we could have Lower Goose.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he responded. “Have you seen the state of the boat? Besides, you live in New Mexico.”

But Will and my father are pretty easy to capture with the idea of an adventure.

In April 2016, my dad signed over the boat to us. I started a to-do list that quickly grew to six pages. That was the summer of Tyvek suits and respirators, grinding the iron keel, and sanding, scrubbing, and painting in Connecticut’s 90-degree heat. My fingernails turned blue from scraping old paint. My mother worried that we were poisoning ourselves. Tensions ran high. For $50, we got a leaky old inflatable dinghy and named it Pato. Will bought a splicing kit, joined a Finnish knot group, and rerigged the lines on Lower Goose.

In July 2017, we rode horses across Wyoming, reconnaissance for a book Will is writing on the Pony Express trail. It was very windy, but there isn’t much sailing there.

Our goal was to have Lower Goose ready for an overnight trip by the end of summer 2018. But I got carried away one night and suggested we sail her from Connecticut to Lower Goose Island, in Maine’s Casco Bay. Will thought this was a grand idea. We mapped out a leisurely week sailing north, stopping each night at a different harbor.

He Said
 “I Thought Your Sailing Bug Would Only Last a Week”

I’m a mountain man. Always have been. My legs are pale as fresh snow, and my farmer-tanned neck is red year-round. But Claire’s idea of a vacation, at least as it emerged on a midwinter night at our home in the southwestern desert, was to take a seven-day sailing course in the Caribbean.

“You can choose the next vacation,” she said. “I think you’ll like sailing.” And so, for fear that saying no might run her off, I said yes.

On the first day of sailing school, I dropped a semi-critical piece of equipment overboard. I remember Skipper Dan, our instructor, saying at dawn on the third day that I probably wouldn’t pass the three exams by week’s end. On the fifth day, I whispered to Claire that I knew more knots than Skipper Dan and would gladly go knot for knot with him any day of the week.

“What the hell does that mean,” Claire said. “You need to chill out.”

On the sixth day, when Claire and the other couple in our class went ashore for provisions, I was left behind with Skipper Dan to fill the water tank. “You’ve found your new calling,” he said, standing over me.

This son of a bitch takes me for a common laborer, I groused. I asked him if he meant that my new calling was holding a garden hose over a hole in the side of a boat.

“No, sailing,” he said. I told him we’d see about that.

At week’s end, Skipper Dan congratulated us for passing the exams and told me that he hoped I would continue to sail. I flew home to New Mexico to resume life on dry land, while Claire flew to Connecticut to see her parents. Soon enough, she called excitedly to tell me about Lower Goose.

“This is our chance to own a boat,” she said. “And if we fix her up but don’t want to sail anymore, we can always sell her.”

In the fog of love, I failed to fully think through what exactly this would entail. I supported her. What the hell, I thought, at least we’re out from under Skipper Dan. Never mind that we lived in New Mexico and Goose was in Connecticut. That summer we headed east, rolled up our sleeves, dove in.

We were like untrained cattle dogs: eager to work but without direction. We hardly knew where to start. Fortunately for us, one of Claire’s old boyfriends ran a sailboat-maintenance business in nearby Norwalk. Max, I was told, was a professional sailor, had crewed on boats all over the world, and had under his care a carbon-fiber-hulled racing boat with its own Facebook page. “He was sponsored by Omega when we lived in his grandmother’s flat in Vienna,” Claire said.

A member of an Omega-sponsored sailing team with a flat in Vienna wouldn’t have been my first choice of someone to partner with, and being an old boyfriend of Claire’s made him pretty much my last. At times I suspected that he piled on the work to watch us suffer. I had no way of knowing whether our rudder needed as many coats of epoxy as he suggested. Was it truly necessary for us to grind every last square millimeter of old paint from the keel before repainting it? Did the undersides of the floorboards really need several layers of the most expensive varnish you can buy? But as it turned out, Max continually saved our asses.

She Said
 “Your Mind Is in Central Asia”

We planned to depart for Maine on Sep­tember 1 and needed all our free time to ensure that Goose was safe and habitable. But in July, Will was offered a place on the U.S. kok boru team participating in the World Nomad Games—in Kyrgyzstan. This meant that, during crucial pre-cruise preparations, he would be halfway around the world playing a game where men on horses fight over a headless goat. His return date was September 10, which conflicted with our departure. I was not pleased. Alone, I reviewed my checklist: Get plumbing. Get electricity. Fix bilges. Put in a head. Redo the galley.

I called Max. “Haul the boat,” he said. Goose was put back on the hard. I crossed all nonessential projects off the list. The galley was beyond repair; we would make do with a camp stove. The guys at the yard took over the more difficult tasks, like hooking up the head and the waste-holding tank, while I painted the cabin and ordered carpet to cover the soot in the V-berth. I also got wire crimpers and a book on volts and ohms before it struck me as irresponsible to electrocute myself prior to the journey. So I hired Bogdan, a marine electrician, to rewire the boat.

Will had ordered 15 pounds of New England nautical charts before setting off for Kyrgyzstan, and once I got back to Santa Fe, I spread them out, each as large as a couch cushion, on our kitchen table. There were lots of symbols. I added “study navigation” to my list. But I was also confident that Will could navigate us out of a black hole if it came to that. My father is in general impressed by Will, but after I sent him a photo of our paper charts, he made an urgent call to suggest that we get ourselves a digital chart plotter.

Right, I replied. My dad asked for Bogdan’s phone number, and between the two of them they equipped Goose with a Garmin chart plotter and radar combo, a VHF radio, a distress beacon, an anemometer capable of measuring both true and apparent wind velocity, and another instrument that could clock speed over ground and through the water. She’s a Hinckley undercover, Bogdan said, citing a much fancier boat. Still, I plotted a tentative course to Maine that would keep us mostly within cellular range.

On September 10, after 48 hours of travel, Will arrived home—sick. For the first time since I have known him, he was unable to get out of bed to feed the horses. He claimed to have been peeing blood in Kyrgyzstan, after a hard fall playing kok boru. He was certainly coughing up the stuff. “You’re ruining the pillowcases,” I scolded, perched on the edge of the bed trying to show him my new apps, Navionics and PredictWind. He made noises like a dying seal. I laid his sailing clothes next to the bed. “Winter will not wait for us!” I shouted in his sweaty ear.

Five days later, with Will still ­looking rather pallid, we flew east in the wake of ­Hurricane Florence. We waited out the worst of the storm and chose Sunday, September 23, for our new departure date. In preparation, I started reading the .

He Said
 “I Showed Up Despite Being Wrecked”

Thick clouds hung low over the steel gray water of Long Island Sound as Claire’s parents and her younger brother, James, and his family showed up at the dock to see us off. We sprayed champagne over the anchor, everyone in good spirits despite unseasonably cold weather. Claire’s dad pointed out that our anchor setup lacked a swivel shackle and chain. Yep, I told him, got that chain and swivel right here in the starboard locker.

“We should be in Maine in a week’s time,” I said as we cast off our dock lines and cranked the old Volvo Penta diesel motor to life. Lower Goose runs like a mustang when she’s in front of a breeze; under motor power, she lumbers along like a team of draft horses hitched to an ice cart. But given the tight confines of the dock and our lack of experience, we motored into the sound, passing dangerously shallow water near the Greens Ledge lighthouse before running up our sails for an easterly wind. Claire’s family, who had followed us out in another boat, gave us the thumbs-up and swung for home, and we were finally on our own, headed for new water.

After two hours underway, we’d polished off a can of Pringles and slightly interfered with a massive trash barge. Claire was at the helm when we received a text from her brother, who was looking at photos of the launch and wondered: “Is your outhaul connected? Maybe tighten it up a little bit?”

Claire and I looked at each other. The outhaul? We knew that we had an outhaul—the line that keeps the outer corner of the mainsail tight—and we thought that it was indeed tight. But we’d certainly never adjusted it.

“Hmmmm,” I texted back. “Talking about outhaul. Just finished a can of Pringles.”

Our learning curve was steep, but morale was high. Claire, whose three summers of effort had now resulted in us making a crisp five knots on a starboard tack, glowed with an earned sense of accomplishment.

That night we docked at the Milford Yacht Club and enjoyed a mediocre dinner in front of a mediocre Frank Sinatra tribute band. The next morning, I checked the forecast using a series of apps on my phone. The National Weather Service had issued a small-craft advisory: wind speeds of 25 to 33 knots, seas five feet or more.

“Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller vessels,” the official warning said, as if targeting us directly, “should avoid navigating in these conditions.”

Claire prefers to start her day slowly, taking a half-hour or so to gather her thoughts. It’s generally unwise for me to read her news headlines or talk about the day’s itinerary before the kettle has boiled a second time. But I told her anyway: small-craft advisory for the sound today.

From beneath the piled sleeping bags and blankets in our berth came no response. So I checked the fuel, oil, and coolant levels, boiled the kettle a second time, and made for the churning sea.

As it turned out, small-craft advisories were issued on more than half the days we sailed. Claire, however, later informed me that she had no idea of this until after the journey. (“You know that you can’t tell me anything until after I’ve finished my tea,” she said.)

For the next three days of passage along the coast—to Old Saybrook, Stonington, Point Judith—the weather worsened. We were behind schedule, and it frustrated me. I asked Claire if she thought we’d get to Maine in time for Thanksgiving. “We have to start out earlier every day,” I told her.

“That’s your opinion,” she said.

“Everyone knows that when you’re traveling you need to make use of daylight,” I said.

“That’s how you feel about it,” she replied. “But not everyone feels that way.”

Two days of near silence ensued. We limited communication to what was necessary to sail the boat. I longed for our horses and dog back in New Mexico and figured that they were enjoying a sunny autumn in the mountains while we slowly froze to death on a boat in New England.

She Said
 “A Bird Nearly Got Us Killed”

On the sixth afternoon, the sun came out and we were back to chattering away like forest animals. Will sang, “Makes me want to move my dancing feet,” his own lyrics to a Bob Marley song. It was uplifting to see other boats with their sails up. We hit seven knots.

It’s remarkable, the effect that sunshine and conviviality have on confidence. We set a course for Cuttyhunk Island, off Massachusetts, where after we picked up a mooring in the bay, some entrepreneurially minded kids on a small boat delivered salty sea-cold oysters and hot creamy chowder for dinner. Then I reorganized our books. Lower Goose might not have hot water—or even running water—but she has an extensive library, thanks to a yacht-club sale Will and I attended. We bought every book available, each for a dollar, including a first edition of the Joshua Slocum classic .

The next morning, we zipped across Buzzards Bay to New Bedford so Will could visit the Clifford Ashley knot exhibit, something he’d been droning on about for almost a year. Then we raced into Marion, screeching and beaming as we hauled the sails in closer and closer, trying to overtake the boat in front of us, until I shouted to Will, “We’re going to hit it!” He turned Goose to wind in the narrow channel, and we doused our sails.

A day later, we timed our cruise through the Cape Cod Canal to start with the early flood tide and eventually entered the Atlantic Ocean proper. When a sudden squall hit, Will caved to my insistence that we duck into Plymouth Harbor. We somehow missed the famous rock but read inscriptions about those who came across the Atlantic on boats. I was humbled by the brave souls who went to sea without chart plotters or Pringles, not for a laugh but for new lives.

Boston’s is a busy working harbor, so to avoid the traffic we sailed straight out to sea. A soggy purple finch plopped on deck, had a look down below, then took a nap, head under wing, nestled against Will’s foot. We were grateful for the radar, as heavy fog meant we couldn’t see much beyond łÒŽÇŽÇČő±đ’s bow. But, preoccupied with making sure our guest had enough crackers, we forgot the number one rule of sailing (always keep a lookout) and the number one rule of radar (remember to zoom out after you zoom in).

“Oh, there’s a tug,” I said to Will.

“Shit,” was his reply.

A second boat loomed out of the fog behind the tug. “It’s towing a barge—they’re moving toward us,” Will said. He was alarmed. “Tack. ±·ŽÇ·É!” he yelled. I swung Goose around, and we sailed back the direction we had come. The wind and waves were picking up. It was raining sideways.

Entering unfamiliar harbors can be dodgy; enter in the dark during a storm and it’s downright scary. But cold and tired, we beat doggedly toward Gloucester. We couldn’t see Norman’s Woe, the fabled site of many shipwrecks to the southwest of the harbor, but there was a faint blinking light warning us to steer clear. We could barely make out the lobster pots until we were almost on top of them. There were hundreds, their malevolent little lines ready to wrap around any propeller that came too close. Our new spotlight didn’t work. We rounded the break wall and picked up the first mooring we came across. I tried to hail the yacht club it belonged to on the radio, but there was no answer. Closed for winter. We cooked two boxes of macaroni and cheese, devoured it in heaping, steaming spoonfuls, and went to bed. It was a night of rolling and bucking, and not between the sheets. Like two corpses we lay, straining our ears to make sure that Goose was still tied to the mooring. The wind mocked us all.

He Said
 “OK, I’ll Go to Sea Once More”

Heading north from Gloucester, most sail­boats pass through the Blynman Canal to save time and avoid rounding the shipwrecked waters off Cape Ann. Unsure about our clearance under a bridge, we opted for the cape and endured cold rain, massive North Atlantic swells—and, for me, seasickness. Claire somehow managed without nausea, but the only time I didn’t think I was about to vomit was at the helm, my eyes trained on the horizon.

We made Newburyport that afternoon and tied up at the town dock. Claire bought us a pair of wool hats, and we had a pizza delivered to the boat. We were about 90 nautical miles, or three days’ sail, from Lower Goose Island. A heavy gale was forecast to hit in 48 hours and would require us to lay over in Kittery, Maine, for a day. That put us into Casco Bay, where we planned to dock the boat for the winter and fly home, on October 7. That last day, just about nightfall, we would pass Lower Goose Island, four miles to starboard.

As planned, we stayed in Kittery, shed our foul-weather gear, and let the gale blow through. On the morning of October 6, we began the last leg of our journey. But before tacking north, we decided to follow the advice of a man in the next slip over and go look for whales beyond a rocky archipelago known as the Isles of Shoals. We were about six miles offshore. Broad swells like soft prairie hills rolled by in wide sets, but a faint wind hardly marred the ocean’s surface. Under a cloudless sky, we glassed the blue horizon fruitlessly for water spouts, humped backs, and flukes. Finally, we gave up, but as we turned north for Kennebunkport, our last night’s destination, we glimpsed a large kettle of seabirds circling low over the water.

Gannets, cormorants, and gulls were diving for baitfish that scattered in nervous schools. A pod of porpoises, apparently leaving the feeding frenzy, passed as we cut the motor, hoisted the sails, and very slowly drifted into the mass of activity. We’re bound to see a whale here, I said as the porpoises disappeared to the south. But rather than a whale, Claire noticed a lobster boat bearing down from a mile away. Its pointed hull showed as two symmetrical triangles, meaning that it was headed directly for us.

Claire raised both her arms, waving and cursing vigorously. “What are they thinking?” she asked. With every passing second, it became clear that the boat was not changing course, even as Claire yelled and flagged her arms with increasing agitation.

Finally, she cranked the motor, I jammed it into gear, and Lower Goose lurched forward with a cough of black smoke. The lobster boat roared by us with no one at the helm. The two men on board, both working aft while underway, briefly lifted their heads to notice the sailboat they’d nearly halved abeam on the open ocean.

“Those irresponsible fuckers,” Claire said as the lobster boat faded toward shore. “Time to go to Kennebunkport,” I said, and we set a course a few degrees east of north for our final port of call.

By now, Claire and I had our routine dialed. No other aspect of our life together required the communication or cooperation of managing the boat. Claire was the captain, I the mate. We worked together. We solved our problems—not the kind that send flat-footed couples to therapy, but the kind that require someone on deck and someone aloft, someone to tie in the reef lines and someone to steer the boat head to wind. We relied on each other. I wasn’t ready to sell the horses and buy our dog a life jacket, but the experience further convinced us that we could spend our lives together—on land and sea.

She Said
 “We’ll Sail Around the World”

We’d planned to hoist our Jolly Roger when we got close to Casco Bay, but things didn’t go as planned.

As we left Kennebunkport, the wind was again from the north, and with 35 nautical miles to go we turned on the engine. But Goose kept decelerating. Will went below to assess the situation and reappeared on deck followed by a puff of smoke. The old engine had suffered from years of disuse. The sails slumped, we had no headway, and the swells rocked us like a pendulum. We can sail out of this, we said. Then, as we drifted toward the restricted presidential waters of the Bush compound, we weren’t able to sail out of it. I called Boat U.S., a tow company. For two hours, we clung by a dock line to a lobster pot and were sad.

A chipper little tow boat and John, her deaf-in-one-ear captain, showed up for the rescue and dragged us for the next seven hours. There was a lot of time to reflect. I felt gratitude to those who had helped make this voyage happen—Will, my parents, Max, and so many others. I realized that while Goose might not be the most comfortable boat, she sure was comforting. I understood why, all those years ago, my parents chose boats: for the freedom.

Will and I were both on deck entering Casco Bay. I told him the names of the passing islands: Chebeague, Bustins, the Goslings, Upper Goose, Lower Goose. And then, there on the dock at Strouts Point in South Freeport, having left Connecticut five hours earlier by car, were my parents and my brother. I handed the bow line to my father. Mum patted Goose, as one relieved mother would greet another, and we all ate fried shrimp at Harraseeket Lunch and Lobster. Will and I chose to spend the night on the boat. James joined us. “Does she always smell this bad?” he asked from his bunk.

The next few days were spent getting Goose ready for winter. I wanted nothing to do with society. My thoughts strayed to our next project: the house we’re planning to build. A few days after Will got back from Kyrgyzstan, we had purchased a plot of raw land in Santa Fe. While folding sails, I imagined our bedroom, small and cozy like a ship’s berth, and decided we should have an office each, at opposite ends of the house.

Will interrupted my reverie: “I think we should keep sailing north next summer.”

“Yep,” I said.

He continued: “We should definitely go to Canada.”

Wait, what? I’d just spent two weeks shivering, damp, and cold. “What happened to the more southern climes?” I replied.

Will was moving around Goose with the same ease he moves around a horse. He said, “We’ll get there eventually.”

Claire Antoszewski was an ­intern at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in 2002; she now works as a physician assistant in ­emergency medicine. Will Grant () is ­writing a book based on his ­October 2017 story about the Pony Express trail.

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At the west end of the canyon country formerly designated as Bears Ears National Monument, a 1,000-foot sandstone spire known as stands over the desert floor like a pistol pointed at the sky. The Chair, red as a raw steak and buttressed on one side by a mesa that is the formation’s namesake, sits in what geologists call the White Canyon uranium district. It’s big slickrock land dominated by sun and wind, where miles of scrubby desert separate flat-topped mesas.

A few miles south of Jacob’s Chair, a primitive two-track dirt road cuts an arrow-straight line from the graded Bureau of Land Management road to the base of a mesa overlooking Cheesebox Canyon. At the top of the mesa, where a portion of the ragged cliff was missing, my map showed an old adit, or mineshaft. At one end of the scar, an apron of purple and gray talus spilled down the slope.

“Every mine has a dump, because the rock you want is almost always covered by rock you don’t want,” said Jason Price, a geologist friend who’d come to southern Utah to help me find uranium. “You bulldoze the rock you don’t want, and you can often see those dumps.”

From the base of the mesa, the access road to the mine angled up through the layer-cake stratigraphy that characterizes much of the Colorado Plateau, the roughly 240,000 square miles of high desert surrounding the Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The sedimentary rocks found there hold some of the richest uranium deposits in the United States—about 90 percent of the uranium mined for the federal government during the country’s Cold War weapons buildup came from the that sat at the top of the old mining road in front of us.

We’d come to the area to see if the rock therein contained enough uranium to warrant the national dialogue that had ensued after President Trump reduced the monument size by 85 percent in 2017. Media headlines rang out news that the area was to uranium companies. Most of the reporting pointed to Trump finally . I wanted to see if bulldozers were crawling through the desert, if claim stakes with orange flagging tape topped every hill, and if what had been a quiet corner of desert roughly the size of Rhode Island had come under the industrial knife. And since any U.S. citizen can stake a claim on public land, a right granted by the , I decided to stake my own claim, if only to protect a slice of land that I considered worth preserving.

So I rang up my geologist pal, Jason Price, who had just earned his doctorate in hard-rock geology from California Technical Institute, and told him the plan: We would stake a claim in an area that had value as a recreational destination, provided some kind of significant habitat for wildlife, and held the potential—if not outright evidence—of archeological value. Ideally, it would also be open to grazing, fuel-wood cutting, mining, and whatever else people used land for in southern Utah. We’ll climb a mesa, I told him, and find a 20-acre slice of land that incorporates as many uses and interests as possible. The preeminent requirement, though, was that between the surface of that 20 acres and the molten center of the earth, there had to be some uranium.

As Jason and I leaned on the hood of the truck and looked at the mine dump above Cheesebox Canyon, we reckoned no one would blast a road up the side of a mesa and bulldoze a quarter-mile of cliffline without believing the rock had enough uranium to make the cost and effort worthwhile. There’s a mantra in field geology: The best way to know about a rock is from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. So we climbed the old road, past radiant fractures in the rock left by crude dynamite, past a striped whipsnake that was more curious about us than afraid, and past a veritable tree trunk of petrified wood that looked like it had been spray-painted orange.

“Tłó±đ woody debris is commonly radioactive,” Jason said. He’d been saying that for the past two days, but the scintillometer, a device that detects radiation, hadn’t obliged him. As we climbed toward the mine, we began to get chirps from the dense, phone book–sized gamma ray scintillometer that had quickly become my least favorite piece of gear to carry. (Geiger counters, though more widely known, are “way old-school,” according to one geologist, so Jason borrowed a “scinto” instead.) It crossed my mind that radioactive rocks were a hell of a thing to go looking for, but Jason, fully decked out in his geological kit—the pockets of his field vest bulging with who knows what, his spiked hammer swinging at his side, and his pants tucked into gaiters covering his heavy leather boots—led the way toward “better readings.”

Like every other heavy metal on earth—including gold, silver, and platinum—all uranium on the planet was created billions of years ago when distant stars collided. Uranium, the heaviest of all metals, is radioactive. It emits gamma radiation as its molecular composition changes. That change is called decay, and it happens continually in all naturally occurring uranium.

“A gamma ray is a punch of energy,” Jason said. “It’ll go right through this scintillometer, right through you, right through your truck.”

Harnessing that energy into a weapon became a priority during World War II. In 1942, a team of scientists at the University of Chicago initiated the first controlled nuclear chain reaction as part of the Manhattan Project. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team developed the bomb’s trigger, which would initiate the reaction inside the bomb, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the first atomic weapon was detonated at the Trinity Site, also in New Mexico. Three weeks after that, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped “Little Boy,” a uranium-based bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, it dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium-based bomb on Nagasaki, ending the war and killing more than 100,000 people.

From then until the late 1970s, the Cold War drove the demand for uranium. At the same time, nuclear power plants began to come online. The Soviet Union built the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant in 1954; the United States built its first in 1957. As the the modern environmental movement took off in the 1960s, nuclear power gained favor as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil-fuel energy. That momentum stalled out in 1979, when the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania had a malfunction with its cooling system and a partial nuclear meltdown ensued. The uranium market crashed. The price of the commodity U3O8—or yellowcake, a form of concentrated uranium that’s undergone initial processing at a mill—fell from about $100 per pound to $27.50.

“Three Mile Island was like a guillotine to the industry,” Jason said. We were sitting around a fire at camp, trying to connect the dots between the small mine sites that we’d been seeing in the Bears Ears area and the market that drove the mining. “And then came Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Those have been major setbacks to the industry.”

Jason nearly took a job with a uranium company in 2005, during uranium’s latest price increase, but decided the industry was too fickle. ln 2007, the price of U3O8 reached a high of nearly $140 per pound; in 2008, it fell to almost $40. The BLM database for mining claims in the Jacob’s Chair area reflects the peaks and valleys of the market.

“It’s a boom-and-bust industry. It’s the same with all mining,” he said.

The current spot price of uranium is roughly $26 per pound of U3O8. As it happens, the U.S.’s only operating conventional uranium mill, where uranium is extracted from the ore once above ground, sits just east of the current boundary of Bears Ears National Monument: the White Mesa Mill, owned and operated by Energy Fuels Resources.

Like 60 percent of all mining companies in the world, Energy Fuels is based in Canada—which is considered to be a friendly regulatory environment for mining companies—but its offices are outside Denver, and most of its operations are in the Southwest. On the other side of Bears Ears from the , the company owns , which has sat dormant since 2010 due to the low price of the ore. When President Obama created Bears Ears National Monument, in 2016, he drew the monument boundaries around both the mine and the mill.

“We woke up one morning, and the road to our mine, Radium King Road, was suddenly going to be inside a national monument. We didn’t want that,” said Curtis Moore, vice president of marketing for Energy Fuels. The company also asked for a buffer of land between its mill and the monument’s east boundary. “We have environmental sensors around the mill that we wanted a mile or two from the boundary.” So Energy Fuels and got what it wanted. (The outdoor industry spent millions on ads but still lost.)

The current low price of uranium is a result of a global oversupply of the commodity. But there are signs that the price could rebound in the foreseeable future. In May, the White House released a U.S. Geological Survey report identifying 35 minerals critical to national security, and uranium made the list. China currently has 15 nuclear power plants under construction. An increase in the price of U3O8 could potentially restart operations at the Daneros mine, but the old mines inside the area formerly designated as Bears Ears would almost certainly remain quiet.

“Tłó±đ thing about the Bears Ears area, there are a few uranium deposits there, but they’re not that good,” Moore said. “All those little mines you see out there are from the days of the mom-and-pop miner, and those days are over. Bigger companies are the only ones today who can comply with all the health and environmental rules and regulations and do it at a large enough scale for it to make economic sense.”

Calling the mine we hiked to above Cheesebox Canyon a mom-and-pop operation implies that Mom and Pop were pretty handy with a bulldozer. A quarter-mile of cliffline was missing. Berms of rock had been pushed into lines. Pads big enough to land a helicopter on had been graded flat. The apron of gray and purple talus that we’d seen from the road ran for 100 yards down the side of the mesa like a rock glacier.

The site was typical of most mid-20th-century mines: dangerous to investigate, littered with colorfully mineralized rock, and made partially safer for the public by federal dynamite. An old cabin with a caved-in roof leaned downwind. A spilled bucket of tar, which had hardened soon after being knocked over 50 years or so ago, was eroding out of the sand beneath it, not dissimilarly from the balanced boulders and columnar hoodoos found all over the Colorado Plateau. A five-foot hole in the slope behind the old cabin was the only access to the mine that hadn’t been blasted closed.

Investigating abandoned mines is best left to bats and insects, but the climb down into the shaft looked doable. I was at the mouth of a vent, a vertical shaft blasted for air circulation. The air inside was cool and still. I asked Jason if we ought to check it out.

“Nah, that dust is bad news,” he said. It was his umpteenth comment about the potential health risks of what we were doing. I asked him if the public should be more concerned about mining within the perimeters of the former national monument or the health of past and current uranium miners. He was looking at a map, only half paying attention.

“Well, either way, that’s Cheesebox Canyon Wilderness Study Area right in front of us, and it’d be a nightmare to put in a project here,” he said. “Mining companies don’t want to work in the U.S. because of things like this.”

A National Geographic Trails Illustrated map of the area around the former Bears Ears monument shows at least 13 different land designations. Wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, instant study areas, BLM-managed land, Forest Service–managed land, a national park, a national recreation area, a national monument, a state park, two Indian reservations, urban land, private land, and square-mile parcels of state trust land, called school sections, owned by the state of Utah and almost always shaded blue on maps. To a mining company, this is a difficult landscape to work in.

One reason the Bears Ears area is unlikely to see future development is the low quality of the deposits. “Tłó±đ rock’s just not that rich,” Jason said one afternoon, after days of testing thousands of rocks with the scinto. The other reason is that mining in the vicinity of Natural Bridges National Monument, Dark Canyon Wilderness Area, and other parcels of protected land comes with a lot of what a geologist would call red tape.

Individuals and corporations have come into the area in waves over the years, but since President Trump reduced the monument, the majority of people in the area claiming mineral rights have been who wanted to get some dirt under their fingernails and a who wanted to stage an act of protest.

It’s been done before. In 2008, climate activist Tim DeChristopher bid $1.8 million on oil and gas leases at a BLM auction and spent two years in federal prison because he couldn’t pay the bill. Then, in 2016, Terry Tempest Williams of BLM land in Utah, though the BLM stripped it from her after she about planning to leave the resources in the ground.

Before our trip, I talked about our plan with Salt Lake City–based attorney Pat Shea, who represented DeChristopher and briefly advised Williams. I wasn’t interested in performing an act of civil disobedience—even if my editor, who was probably enjoying kale milkshakes while I was out prospecting, wanted me to be. But I did want to stake a claim without being crosswise of the feds. I told Shea that we’d be carrying a gamma ray scintillometer to ensure that we had what the Mining Law of 1872 calls “proof of discovery,” or evidence of a valuable resource.

“I don’t think that’s necessary, but I think it’s prudent,” Shea said. “It’s sort of a belt-and-suspenders approach.”

I worried about our legitimacy because I had no intention of getting into the mining business. Jason is a geologist, I told him, but I am not a legitimate miner.

“No, no,” Shea said. “Under the 1872 law, you’re a legitimate miner. The law doesn’t say what’s legitimate and what’s not legitimate.”

Shea left me assured that I was totally legal in staking a claim, even if the act had been used as a flat-footed act of defiance by environmentalists. If you can satisfy the requirements of the Mining Law of 1872 and precisely lay out your claim, Shea told me, your biggest worries will probably be sunbathing rattlesnakes and ornery locals.

A necessary part of staking a claim is knowing exactly where it’s located. The first place we stopped to get maps of the Jacob’s Chair area was a custom map shop run out of a modest one-story house in Monticello, Utah. After knocking on the front door, I noticed a camera above the entryway. The welcome mat at my feet read, “Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.” A nice woman answered the door and told us that the mapmaker, her husband, was currently in Idaho visiting friends. But she called him on the phone and soon enough fired up the four-foot-wide printer to sell us a large-scale map for $10 cash.

To get the most recent map of the monument boundaries, we stopped at the BLM Kane Gulch field office. On a Sunday at 8:30 a.m., the place swarmed with people. Some were getting backcountry permits; some were buying maps and guidebooks; some were reading the archeological interpretive displays. Most were dressed in quick-dry clothing. The BLM volunteers manning the post looked stressed. I’d heard that they were understaffed and overwhelmed, and I asked the gray-haired man behind the desk if the office was always so crowded.

“Coupla hundred people a day through here,” he said, shaking his head. I told him I was writing a story about uranium in Bears Ears.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t write any more about this place.”

We left without telling him that we were claiming the mineral rights to 20 acres north of his field office. But after nearly a week in camp, we still didn’t know which 20 acres. I had originally wanted to find a uranium deposit in a place that was undoubtedly used in multiple ways or had values to multiple parties, and Jacob’s Chair seemed to fit the bill. Rock climbers have been to the top of the red spire. Native Americans consider the area sacred, and an archeological survey of the area had found and documented 13 prehistoric sites on the mesa below the chair. Along the valley floor, a few skinny cattle grazed on what little scrub they could find.

On our first night in camp, we passed a group of 30 or so sunburned women who had clearly been living out of their backpacks in the desert. Later that night, a dozen ATVs passed us, headlights casting cones of light in the dust. For three days, a pair of vans from Colorado Mountain College was parked at a nearby trailhead. What we hadn’t found was a uranium deposit worth claiming.

“My impression is that the issue of uranium mining in this area is overblown,” Jason said. “Even if you were to bulldoze this whole mesa, it wouldn’t be worth it.”

That was part of what troubled me: Where was the pay dirt that would satisfy the Mining Law’s “prudent man rule?” The rule is the BLM’s way to define a valuable resource, and it says that a reasonable man would invest time and money into the site. I could only guess at what the feds considered a reasonable person, but I understood the rule to be a requirement for any claim. When Jason proposed that we stake our claim over camp, I countered that, for better or worse, we had no evidence of radioactive material here at camp. We need proof, I told him.

“No you don’t,” he yelled. “All you need is an idea.”

For all anyone knew, Jason argued, there could be a massive breccia pipe under the sand that could potentially hold way more uranium than any mom-and-pop mine we’d so far looked at—even if it was too deep for our scinto to pick up. The pipes are collapsed vertical caves that fill with a matrix of boulders and sediment. They’re shaped like carrots, can be more than 3,000 feet from top to bottom, and hold the richest uranium deposits in the United States.

Our camp at the base of Jacob’s Chair straddled a shallow arroyo, with a large sand dune partially anchored by juniper and sagebrush on one side and a natural amphitheater of red cliffs on the other. Ravens wheeled in the clear skies above us every day, and every night a small bat flicked over camp in the evening light. I asked Jason if other geologists would call us nuts for thinking a breccia pipe might be under it all.

“Nope. No one can say anything until you test the rock.”

So, the next morning, we staked our a 20-acre rectangle laid out on an east–west axis and marked at the four corners by hip-high monuments of stacked rock. At the center of the claim, near the sandstone shelving that served as our kitchen, I sank an old juniper fence post to mark the spot. It hardly looked different from the snags and withered trunks surrounding it.

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The view from in Cape Town, South Africa, goes well with a cappuccino and ham-and-cheese omelet. The second-story restaurant overlooks the cold Atlantic where it rolls into Camps Bay Beach. This tony suburb of the so-called Mother City looks and feels like Southern California. Boutique hotels and restaurants serving organic food face the ocean. Evenly spaced palm trees line the beach. But surrounding the trees, what is typically a parklike expanse of green grass is brown, dry dirt.

“Yeah, they can’t water the grass anymore,” said Frank Solomon, a local surfer I met for breakfast on March 5. “Who cares, right? We don’t really need grass.” He pointed across the bay to a bald headland jutting into the ocean. Half a dozen surfers bobbed in the mist at the corner of the bay. The high school he attended sits about 500 feet from the shore. “We could watch the surf from school. Usually that whole hillside is green grass.”

Frank was born and raised in the nearby suburb of Hout Bay. Mantra CafĂ© was his choice for breakfast partly because these upscale neighborhoods are at the center of Cape Town’s water issues. Eighty-six percent of the city’s water is consumed in the city center and the suburbs, places like Camps Bay and Llandudno Beach, where I’d met Frank the day before, at the Rolling Retro competition, where a pack of dogs ripped up and down the beach, the local Striped Horse lager was cheap and cold, and the opinions as to why Cape Town is out of water were easy to come by.

One man, who said he was born and raised in Cape Town, claimed that it boiled down to years of government corruption and inaction. The drought has been bad, he said, but bureaucracy is to blame. “This is Africa,” he said.

Another man, also born here, said that as a kid he learned that the surrounding desert encroached on the city a half-mile per year. We live in a very dry place, he said. Then he leaned closer and whispered that, if I really wanted to know, the current water shortage could be blamed on the recent influx of newcomers to town. He gestured toward the crowd in front of us. “But no one here wants to hear that,” he said with a shrug.

Regardless of who is to blame, everyone is dealing with the consequences. Since February 1, Cape Town residents have been told to use less than 13.2 gallons of water per day, turn off the taps while brushing their teeth, and flush toilets with gray water collected in buckets from their showers.

Cape Town’s water shortage began in 2015, when winter (May to August) rains failed to fill the six reservoirs that, until this year, supplied 100 percent of the city’s water. The winters of 2016 and 2017 were equally grim, and by February of this year, the bottom of the trough was in sight—the reservoirs were at 25 percent capacity. The city announced its and at the same time forecast a Day Zero—the point at which the city would have to shut off its taps. It was initially set for April 22, then bumped forward to April 12 when reservoir levels dropped worryingly low. But the code-red messages from the city were heard, people saved water, and the city pushed Day Zero to July 15. It’s now postponed until next year, thanks in large part to individuals conserving water.

“Tłó±đ short-term response has been a historic cut in water consumption—by 57 percent in three years,” said Tim Harris, CEO of , a government agency promoting tourism, development, and investment in Cape Town and the Western Cape province. For most of 2018, Harris has been putting out fires lit by media reports that Cape Town will be the world’s first major city to run out of water. He wasn’t sure that would happen.

I talked to Harris on March 7, two days before the the city postponed Day Zero until 2019, and even then he didn’t think Cape Town would run out of water. Harris echoed what I would hear from several people during my week in the Cape: that the unified response by residents to accept and mitigate the situation was instrumental in avoiding Day Zero.

“Ordinary Capetonians made this happen,” Harris said. “It wasn’t looking to the leaders and saying, ‘You solve this for us.’ It was everybody making individual decisions that got us through this.”

After breakfast at Mantra CafĂ©, Frank and I jumped in my small white rental car that hadn’t been washed—washing cars is absolutely forbidden in Cape Town, punishable by a $248 fine—and drove to Hout Bay, his hometown. On the way, I told him that I’d read about people queuing up for water at collection points in low-income neighborhoods. He looked at me sideways.

“Those neighborhoods have never had any plumbing,” he said.

In Hout Bay, Frank turned left at the Nutmeg Farmstall coffee shop and drove from the first world into the developing world. We entered a neighborhood known as the Imizamo Yethu township. Like ghettoes or favelas, townships in South Africa are underdeveloped segregated urban areas, most of them in existence since apartheid. The Imizamo Yethu township, set up in 1991 for black squatters who couldn’t legally own land, has wanted for adequate plumbing and sewer systems since it was established.

Most of the houses were shacks, built into and on top of each other and roofed with corrugated tin held down with heavy objects like rocks or car parts. Women cooked on open fires in front of houses. A few kids wandered down the center of the road. Grown men sat on stairs or leaned in doorways, decamped from life in various angles of repose.

“You think these people are worried about Day Zero?” Frank asked. I pointed out a hand-painted sign that read in whitewash letters “CAR WSH.” An arrow pointed up the hill. “Tłó±đ police tell them they can’t wash cars, but the people washing the cars say they’re going to keep doing it because it’s the only thing they can do.”

The townships in the Cape Town area and the informal developments, or shantytowns, on the outskirts of the city, though expansive and densely populated, use comparatively little water. Farming and agriculture currently consume about 5 percent of the water, and the industry has managed to survive restrictions, reduced water allocations, and dismal productivity. But the vast majority of the water is going to the suburbs, the tourist areas, the centers of development and money that earned Cape Town its reputation as Africa’s land of opportunity.

“People are moving to Cape Town because there’s work here,” Frank said. “I talked to one guy who said he’d walked here from the Congo.”

Business in Cape Town appeared to be running unabated by the water shortage. The Hout Bay waterfront has supported a fishing industry since the mid-19th century, and on a Monday afternoon last month, the waterfront hummed with activity. We drove past one dock that was fenced off with razor wire and guarded by an armed man wearing a helmet. Large fish the size of young pigs hung on a rack beside a boat. “Yellowfin tuna headed to Japan,” Frank said.

At the unfenced docks on the other side of the bay, near the Fish 4 Africa seafood wholesaler, the fishing boat Aquilla was unloading its catch under a loud kettle of circling gulls. Dark men wearing ski caps and rubber pants with suspenders passed crates of fish up an assembly line to the dock, where a woman stood with a clipboard. Half a dozen crates of fish heads slid onto the cement in front of us. Everything was packed in granular ice. Dozens of crates came up the line and were carried into a cement building. A man with a push broom swept drifts of spilled ice into a shallow gutter.

The cement building was full of movement and chatter. Women wearing plastic aprons and gloves used long knives to process the catch on cement tables. One woman washed a stack of filets with a hose. Another woman edged past me, dragging a running garden hose. Water ran everywhere—over the floor and the tables and the crates of fish. The cleaned meat was again packed in granular ice and slid outside, where it glared like perishable snow under the African sun. The gutter full of fish parts and melting ice ran off the end of the dock, where a dozen Cape fur seals in a food coma floated like far-gone opium addicts.

“Looks like business as usual around here,” Frank said as we walked away.

In the previous week, I’d heard plenty of rumors about the water crisis—don’t eat fruits or vegetables, because no one’s washing produce; the city smells like a sewer; construction projects had been halted because cement needs water—but not much of what I’d heard was true. Construction had continued. The fruit and vegetables were fine. The only place that smelled like urine was the airport bathroom, where the toilets weren’t flushing, a man mopped the floor with bottled water, and hand sanitizer had replaced soap and running water.

Frank had just returned from a six-week trip to Hawaii and California when I met him. “I didn’t know what to expect when I came home,” he said. “But it made me think while I was in San Clemente, in California, that people there waste a lot of water. This isn’t just something Cape Town should be thinking about. We should all be conserving water.”

The new normal is what people are calling it here. Cape Town is in a dry place that appears to be getting drier—much like other major cities, including Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Melbourne, Australia. It’s a water-scarce environment, and everyone—people who live here, people doing business here, those who visit—must be conscious of conserving water. The message Harris has been trying to get across is that if individuals are willing to make changes, they can have a real impact.

“Tłó±đ good news is that we’ve learned that it’s possible to inspire residents into action,” he said. “But the more relevant question is: How does a city in the developing world become a model for resiliency to climate change?”

The short answer is through diversification of the city’s water sources. In the next few months, Cape Town hopes to get half its water from new sources: three desalination plants that are being fast-tracked into service, a wastewater-recycling facility, and three aquifers that the city has never tapped for the municipal water supply. Those aquifers—which in some places are less than a few meters from the surface and directly under the city—are widely seen as the lowest-hanging fruit and could produce about one-third (or roughly 40 million gallons) of the city’s current daily consumption. The temporary water-recycling facility and the desalination plants, which are the most costly and energy demanding of the three augmentation schemes, are scheduled to come online throughout 2018.

The current restrictions limiting people to roughly 13 gallons per day aren’t likely to be lifted until May, and while the city waits for winter rains, the conservation rhetoric remains strong. The Airbnb I stayed at was full of water-conservation cards and pamphlets distributed by the city. The upscale Hippo Hotel in the Garden District had a red plastic bucket in the shower and instructions to take stop-start showers and turn off the taps while brushing. The World Wildlife Fund had a water-conservation display at Cape Town’s tourist hub, called the V&A Waterfront, also the site of a desalination plant. Driving around the city and its suburbs, the most obvious signs of people’s commitment to conserving water, and to having garden plants and green lawns, are : large green cisterns for collecting rainwater.

“My girlfriend has two of them,” Frank said. “I think Mr. JoJo may have something to do with this drought.”

Before I dropped Frank at his house, we stopped at a grocery store so he could buy some food and bottled water, which the city has subsidized to ensure that it sells for roughly what it did a year ago, before the crisis. Frank lives on a steep hillside overlooking the beach. The Cape Fold Mountains stand directly over the city, isolating it from any significant river drainage.

As we drove down the switchbacks to Frank’s house, I noticed a swimming pool full of water. “You can buy water,” he said. “Farmers will bring it to you in a truck. There’s no water shortage an hour east of the city.”

The post On the Ground During Cape Town’s Water Crisis appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Wild horses in the West are not free to roam where they please. A 1971 law that protects the animals also limits their range to where they existed at that time. Given the horses’ reproductive ability—a herd doubles in size every four years—and the confines of the law, the animals have overpopulated their range by more than twofold of what scientists say the land can support. Opinions on what to do about overpopulation vary from making dog food with their meat to expanding the animal’s rangeland, but nearly everyone agrees that doing nothing comes with serious environmental risks.

The question is: How do we control the population in a humane, sustainable way? David Philipps, whose book Wild Horse Country ($28; ) hit shelves last week, may have found a partial solution. The New York Times reporter claims that a contentious network of government agencies, advocacy groups, and livestock producers has turned the issue from a simple biological debate to a full-blown modern environmental fight with no single answer.

Wild Horse Country is Philipps’ second book and covers much of his previous tracks, painting a thorough canvas of the history, prehistory, myth, policy, people, and current circumstance of wild horses in the West. He camps with a paleontologist unearthing fossilized horses in Wyoming. He watches a Bureau of Land Management–contracted helicopter round up horses in Nevada. He drinks coffee with ranchers and visits a federal horse-holding facility with the head of the BLM wild horse program. Philipps’ reporting frames an uncertain future for wild horses in the West, and some of the most insightful moments in the book come near the end, when, as a partial solution to controlling mustangs, he posits a wild answer: mountain lions.

The final chapter defrays the oft-quipped belief that wild horses have no natural predator. Lions eat a significant though difficult-to-measure percentage of young mustangs, he argues, and in places where lions can and do exist, they should be left alone to stalk water holes and bottleneck passes. A third of wild horse range is also home to mountain lions. If the BLM had fewer horses to worry about in those areas, it would be a step in the right direction, Philipps says.

“I’m not saying lions are the answer, but I’m saying they’re an answer,” he told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “Tłó±đy’re a big answer, and so far they’ve been ignored.”

Philipps won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for his coverage of returning veterans in the Colorado Springs Gazette, but he has also covered the wild horse battle for years. In 2012, he tracked down a southern Colorado man buying up mustangs and selling them for slaughter in Mexico, to be later served as steaks in Europe. He discovered that the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that manages wild horses, was turning a blind eye to the obvious, unsavory practice. After broke—and after Interior Secretary Ken Salazar threatened to for his meddling—the BLM limited the number of horses an individual could buy.

Philipps’ voice is, for the most part, a welcome, even-handed contribution to the conversation. He doesn’t own horses or ride horses. His distance from domestic horses prevents any digression under saddle or otherwise, sparing us warm-and-fuzzy moments in the barn or astraddle a purebred. But that’s not to say he doesn’t occasionally ride off into a rosy sunset.

“Tłó±đ mustang
embodies the core ideals of America,” Philipps writes in Wild Horse Country. “It is not pedigreed. It has no stature. Instead, it derives its nobility from the simple toughness of its upbringing in a free and open land. It is beholden to no one. It will not be subjugated. It is superior to its domestic brethren because it has the one thing Americans say they yearn for most: freedom. It is the hoofed version of Jeffersonian democracy.”

That’s laying it on pretty thick, but it reflects a very real aspect of the wild horse conversation: Some people view the horses as icons of freedom or democracy or the vanishing West. Philipps spends plenty of time in the advocacy camps, supporting his opinions with experts and experience, and he seems to approach the people and discussions with an open mind. Mountain lions as a way control horse populations has yet to garner much support, but the idea is a welcome alternative to the prodigal hashing out of whether to euthanize wild horses.

“Tłó±đ whole controversy has come down to kill them or not kill them, but I don’t think it’s that simple,” Philipps told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “Using more PZP [horse contraception] is probably the easiest and quickest thing to do, but it’s a lot bigger than that.”

On October 18 and 19, the citizen-staffed BLM met in Grand Junction, Colorado. The agenda for this month’s meeting was more or less the same as it’s been since its inception in 2011: help the BLM find a way out of the ever-deepening wild horse hole. The board’s nine nongovernmental members represent a spectrum of interested, informed parties, from veterinarians to equine behaviorists to Ben Masters, a writer and filmmaker who rode mustangs from Mexico to Canada and who is quoted in Philipps’ book.

“We passed a law that protected the myth of wild horses but didn’t address the biology,” Philipps said when asked what impression five years’ worth of reporting had left him with. “That’s what we’re facing now.”

The post What Should We Do About Wild Horses? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It took us 60 miles and two days on the to lose our horses. That morning, the four of us had hauled out of Granger, Wyoming, near the Utah state line, with a tailwind blowing scarves of dust before our cavvy of nine horses. We were rich in horseflesh but shy on ex­perience, and we took our horses’ quiet demeanor as evidence that all nine had set­tled into the ride. We were mistaken.

That night’s camp lay on the east bank of the Green River. We rode in from the west, with the setting sun at our backs, and found the water running dark and dangerous. We crossed over the river on Highway 28, where the road narrowed to a two-lane bridge with no real shoulders and a rarely observed 70-mile-per-hour speed limit. Once across, we made ourselves at home, about a mile from the road in an oasis of grass and mosquitoes. We failed to notice, though, that our access road didn’t have a cattle guard—a grid of pipes set into the ground to prevent livestock from venturing where they shouldn’t.

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An hour after we’d turned the horses loose to graze, I was on a low bench above camp trying to get a better view of the river. Just then, three of the horses lifted their heads from the stream where they’d been drinking and began to vector worryingly toward the highway. Two of them wore hobbles, ­leather straps connecting a horse’s front feet to restrict its movement, provided the animal doesn’t jerk free of it. Which is exactly what these two did—and then broke into an easy trot headed for the blacktop.

I quickly gave chase, thinking I could get in front of them, when I remembered something my old horse-training mentor had told me: “Tłó±đ first thing your horses will do once they’ve rested up from the day’s work is trot right back in the direction they’d come.” Losing horses in wide-open country could be the kind of problem that takes days to sort out. Or cost an unsuspecting driver their life, should they fail to see three errant horses straddling the double-yellow line. I expected to hear squealing brakes and the dull thud of vehicle on flesh at any moment.

But help was on the way. Quirt Rice, a 16-year-old kid riding with us, saw what was happening, grabbed his bridle, caught one of his horses from where it grazed, and swung up onto its back without a saddle. He wore just his red union suit, jeans, a black hat, and boots. He spurred the small horse into a gallop and took off for the highway.

Quirt is the closest thing to a cowboy prodigy I’ve ever been around. He came on lofty recommendation from the old man who mentored me in Texas. “Tłó±đ kid’s got more talent with a horse than any young man to come through my barn,” he said. Now Quirt flew past in a blur, leaning low over his gelding’s neck and pounding down the dirt road.

The three outlaws crossed the slippery cement bridge with their heads high and the percussion of their footfalls ringing out in the humid evening air. Quirt followed ­closely behind them with the determined expression of a cowboy hell-bent on doing his job.

The herd quitters peeled off the highway to the south and broke into a gallop as they passed an Oregon Trail interpretive kiosk. Quirt swung wide, his horse taking long jumps as it cleared the sagebrush, badger holes, and irrigation ditches, and then all of them disappeared from view.

I was on the shoulder of the highway, struggling to see the chase, when a white Nissan Altima came roaring toward me. At the same time, the headlights of a car appeared from the other direction, and my girlfriend, Claire, stood in the middle of the road, waving her arms for the cars to slow down. Which they did, just as Quirt brought the horses back to the highway.

With a whoop and holler he pushed them up the road, in front of the stopped cars, and headed back to camp at a trot. All four animals were covered with sweat, their nostrils flaring and veins standing out on their necks. “Well, that was exciting,” Quirt said. “I haven’t ridden bareback that much in a long time.”

There were 290 miles of trail ahead of us. It looked like we’d earn every one of them.

When the Pony Express launched on April 3, 1860, it was the most impressive mail service in the world. The top speed of a human in those days was on the back of a galloping horse, and the Pony Express did everything it could to maintain that velocity across 2,000 miles of wilderness between Missouri and California. Prior to the service’s inception, the fastest way to get a letter to the West Coast was a 21-day stagecoach journey through the deserts of Texas and what had recently become the American Southwest.

That wasn’t nearly fast enough for the 380,000 people living in California, which had become a state in 1850. People there rallied for speedier communication, hungry for news of the political turmoil between the northern and southern states. In January 1860, Congress approved the hiring of a frontier freighting company—Russell, Majors, and Waddell, based in Leavenworth, Kansas—to set up a mail relay 1,966 miles between the end of the railroad at St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento via the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake in Utah. Off the ponies flew later that spring, beating out the relays between 157 stations spaced 15 to 20 miles apart. Riders were recruited primarily from local ranches, because they were good with horses and knew the country.

From the start, the proponents of the Pony Express—including a Unionist California senator—intended it to be a testament to the viability of a central mail route, one that stayed north of Mason and Dixon’s famous survey line. The riders proved them right by cutting the previous delivery time in half, delivering messages in just ten days.

But fast travel over wild country had its challenges. Though just one mail pouch was lost in the running—some reports say two—there were plenty of mishaps. On the last section of the first westbound mail package, a horse tripped, fell, and broke its rider’s leg. When a Wells Fargo stagecoach passed on the same trail, a company stage agent volunteered to finish the ride. He blazed into Sacramento to much fanfare, though the mail was 90 minutes late.

In a separate incident, a rider galloping out of San Francisco ran into an ox sleeping in the road and was crushed by his horse in the resulting fall; he died a short time later. Another rider became lost in a snowstorm in Nebraska and froze to death. Yet another died in a river crossing. One Express horse fell and broke its neck, leaving the rider to transport the mail afoot. During the Pony’s most famous act—carrying Lincoln’s inaugural address—a rider was shot through the arm and jaw by arrows, lost several teeth, and finished out the eight-hour, 120-mile relay through the Nevada desert badly wounded.

If all that sounds a bit like frontier snake oil, it’s because most of what we know about the Pony Express is shrouded in myth and whiskey. One of its earliest documentarians, William Lightfoot Visscher, a half-drunk Chicago journalist who rubbed elbows with the likes of Buffalo Bill, wrote an early account of the mail service in his 1908 book .

Critics charge that the book wants for accuracy, footnotes, and a bibliography, but Visscher’s contribution comes mainly in the form of first-person accounts. “It is a marvel that the pony boys were not all killed,” one former rider wrote Visscher. “What I consider my most narrow escape from death was being shot at by a lot of fool emigrants, who, when I took them to task about it on my return trip, excused themselves by saying, ‘We thought you was an Indian.’ ”

In addition to trigger-happy Yankees, the riders faced stampeding bison, flooded rivers, and long hauls on exhausted horses. There were scrapes with outlaws and horse thieves. The Indians could generally be outrun by the grain-fed Express horses, but the weather could not. A spill meant plowing into the ground at up to 30 miles per hour.

One hundred and fifty-seven years ­after the Pony launched, much of the trail is still rideable, though few attempt it. Today, reenactors keep the trail warm in an annual re-ride, galloping out 15-to-20-mile legs of the route. But I didn’t want to ride 15 miles. I wanted to see the trail at a slower pace over a longer distance—eating alkali dust and dragging a string of packhorses along the way. I wanted to know what it felt like to take in the horizon through the ears of a horse. I wanted to ride in June, when the days are long and the grass is tall, and to travel across the basins of intermountain Wyoming, where the land is public and the people are few. It would be a lesson in the history of the American West—part empirical grit and rawhide, part 19th-century lore. But first I needed a good hand. Quirt fit the bill.

Quirt was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 2000. Today he stands near to six feet tall, with light red, short-cropped hair and traces of a ginger beard clinging to his chin. Like most horsemen, his brawn lies in his forearms, grip, and legs. He began riding soon after he started eating solid food. When he was seven, he had a horse drop dead underneath him while herding a cow down a dirt road. His mother was in a pickup just behind. The incident spooked him from horses, but a year later his grandfather bought him a gentle brown pony named Coco.

“At first, Grandpa just led me around the corral, like I was a little kid or something and couldn’t even ride my own horse,” he said. “Both of my grandpas and my dad really helped me.”

At eight, Quirt trained a pair of oxen to pull a wagon. At 12, he was breaking colts, peeling broncs, and riding anything with four legs that would take a saddle. He’s since worked with horse trainers in Texas and Wisconsin, been hired as a cowboy in California and Wyoming, and put together his own herd of 26 cows. When I asked if he was game for the Pony Express ride, he just nodded in the affirmative. I asked if he had any dietary restrictions.

“I don’t much like vegetables, definitely not raw tomatoes,” he said. “Meat and taters pretty much works for me.”

We’d go with a photographer, Nate Bressler, and my girlfriend, Claire Anto­szewski, a physician’s assistant in a hospital emergency room. We’d have nine horses and a support trailer—driven by a family friend of Quirt’s, Dale Deuter—that would meet us at designated camps most nights, to ensure sufficient feed and water for the horses. A handful of ranchers and landowners knew we’d be coming through and had offered us corrals, pastures, and access to the trail.

Our roughly 350-mile route along the Pony Express trail was almost entirely on Bureau of Land Management acreage. From Lyman, Wyoming, about 20 miles from the Utah line, we’d travel west to east across the Church Buttes gas field and the richest soda-ash ­deposit in the world, to the Green River. We’d skirt the dry watershed of the Great Divide Basin to the north and top out on the Continental Divide at South Pass, about 100 miles north of the Wyoming-Utah-Colorado border. From there we’d follow the Sweetwater River’s meandering valley past historic ranches and Mormon sites to the North Platte ­River. Fifty miles of near waterless trail would then bring us to Poison Spider Creek outside Casper, the end of our trail.

“That’s a hell of a long haul across there,” said Shawn McCoy, who bought and sold cattle before he opened the burger joint where we dined two nights before we hit the trail. “Tłó±đre’s basically nothing out there but rattlesnakes.”

It wasn’t the rattlesnakes that worried me: it was traveling overland with a herd of horses that would break for home when turned loose, come up with sore feet after a day on the rocks, and sink themselves in mudholes while carrying a pack. Dialing in our routines and caring for the horses pushed aside all other concerns. We’d ride four while the other five carried our supplies. Every one of them we rode came into the trip physically fit, able to handle a string of 30-mile days over rough country—but that didn’t mean they knew how to travel.

Ensuring our horses’ welfare and minimizing their workload were the priorities. “We want to avoid wrecks,” Quirt said. “We need our horses sound.”

Our most dreaded hours were the hot ones in the late afternoon, when the sun sapped the animals’ energy and the miles felt long. To avoid that, we started early. “Get up. We’re burning daylight,” Quirt said practically every morning.

At 4:30 A.M., we boiled water for coffee and oatmeal. Quirt needed eggs and meat for breakfast, so he and Nate ate while Claire packed the food that she would eat an hour down the trail. By first light, we’d loaded the panniers and saddlebags. Quirt would wrangle the herd—each night we kept at least two horses tied up in camp and turned the others loose to graze, two with bells around their necks to help us find them in the morning—and then we’d hit the trail.

On the first day, Nate asked, “When do we stop for lunch?”

“We don’t,” Quirt said, without turning around in his saddle.

“I was thinking we might have a picnic in the shade of some trees,” said Claire.

“We don’t stop. Can’t when you have packhorses,” Quirt said. “And there ain’t no trees out here anyway.”

The tallest features of the landscape for most of our journey were fence posts and pronghorn antelope. The sage and grass hills rolled by like slow midocean waves. The horizon hung below our stirrups, and snowy mountains sat low and purple in the distance. Our progress ticked off in half-mile segments, measured along much of the trail by concrete pylons standing four feet high, marked for the trails that ran there, usually the Oregon, California, Mormon Pioneer, and Pony Express routes.

The thoroughfares, which are a few miles wide in places, saw their first surge of emigrants in the 1830s, when settlers headed for Oregon came through walking beside their teams of oxen. Three hundred thousand gold seekers bound for California, along with Mormon settlers from the late 1840s into the 1850s, shared the same ruts. But of all the 19th-century traffic, the fastest men on the trail were the riders of the Pony Express.

Eighty men rode for the company, each carrying the mail for an average of 100 miles. Over that distance, a rider changed horses six or seven times, swapping his tired mount for a fresh one at each station. Sam Jobe, an Express rider in Wyoming, was quoted saying he could cover 21 miles in an hour. I mentioned that to Quirt as we tugged on the packhorses at a rate of three miles an hour. All he said was, “That’d be nice.”

One reason Quirt would have been a good rider for the Pony Express—other than that he’s skinny as a rail and rides like a Comanche—is that he’s always in a hurry. Stopping to smell the roses is fine by him, just make it quick. “When he was nine, Quirt made a very detailed list of what he wanted in life,” his mom told me when she showed up two-thirds of the way through the trip to drop off his guitar, the one piece of equipment he’d forgotten at home. His wish list included a pickup truck, a welder, and cows, among other western essentials. “He’s pretty much got it all by this point.”

He also has a weakness for sweets. He’s never had a Coca-Cola—he doesn’t like carbonated drinks—but he loves cookies. For all our generous provisioning of meat and potatoes, we hadn’t brought enough of them to satisfy demand. Scottish shortbread or gluten-free, it didn’t matter to Quirt—he’d eat a handful and then shove a few in his pocket (or under his hat) for later. The morning we left the Green River, Quirt reminded us that there was an ice cream shop in Farson, 28 miles ahead. “Let’s go get some ice cream,” he said, and whipped his horse over its hindquarters with his bridle reins.

We rode from camp at an easy gallop under a low ceiling of clouds. Halfway to Farson, the cavvy needed a drink, so we dropped into the valley of the Big Sandy River. The runoff from record snowfall in the Wind River Mountains had blown out every river and creek in the watershed. For two weeks prior to the trip, the National ­Weather Service issued flood warnings for the area nearly every day.

As a result, there was no shortage of water along our route, but it wasn’t always easy to get to. Mudholes and quicksand were everywhere. Cutbanks ran dark, smooth, and deep. On the edge of the 50-foot-wide Big Sandy, we scouted for a firm approach to the stream. Quirt didn’t like what he saw—the river had flooded its banks and ran over the sod, tall grass waving in the current—so he stood back. Nate, meanwhile, edged his horse up to the water while we watched his test.

Nate’s horse, Brushy, was big—probably 900 pounds. When he lowered his head to drink, the submerged bank collapsed beneath him, and the horse slowly slid into the river. As the pair went down, Nate lifted his camera bag off his chest and scrambled for the bank. He crawled out, swearing like a Navy chief. Brushy plunged and splashed and came out wet. Nate’s cameras were fine, but his ­lower half was soaked through, and he had to ­empty his boots of river water.

“We gotta get a photo of this,” he said, giving his camera to Claire. He balanced one arm on my shoulder and poured a disappointingly small amount of water from his boot. Twenty miles of riding in wet jeans, though, left an impression on his butt and inner thighs: Nate’s saddle sores would only barely heal by journey’s end.

More than halfway into the trip, we arrived at the biggest town along our route: Jeffrey City, Wyoming, population 58. A family friend of Quirt’s, Molly Meyer, had secured an old roping arena where we could take a layover day. It would be our only time off, the idea being that the horses could fatten up and relax—though we’d been told to expect insects.

“Town isn’t much, just an intersection,” Molly had told me before we started. “Tłó±đ bar may or may not have food. Depends on who’s cooking. Also, I’m warning you, the mosquitoes can be bad. The place is kind of famous for them.”

She wasn’t lying. The bugs there would be enough to incite panic in an Alaskan caribou. Riding in, I ran a hand down my horse’s neck and pulled away a bloody fistful of insects. To the people who live there, the mosquitoes are hardly worth talking about. To the uninitiated or unprotected, they are maddening.

We’d made about 250 miles in seven days of travel. Other than a few mishaps, everyone was in good shape. Except we were hungry. The would be the only restaurant we’d encounter on the trail, so we left the horses to swish their tails while we went for cold beers and the possibility of chicken-fried steak. The bar had several big-game heads on the walls, as well as a few bovine skulls, at least two of which still had decomposing flesh on them. The jukebox ate several dollars’ worth of quarters but never quite seemed to play the chosen songs. Halfway through dinner, a very tired-looking man in a plaid shirt walked out of an unlit recess that contained a pool table as though he’d been sleeping back there. Which, we later learned, he was.

Of all the unforeseen circumstances we encountered, the compatibility of our group was the most welcome. Through stress and near disaster, we were amiable. Despite the navigational issues and discord over organizing the kitchen, we tightened into a familial bunch. As the days and miles passed, Nate came to think of Quirt as a younger brother.

“I’m coming to South Dakota to work for you, Quirt,” he said as we bent elbows at the Split Rock. “You can be the boss. I’ll park my camper in your yard, and I can do the whole ranch-hand thing.”

Thirty-six hours in Jeffrey City just about dried up our supply of Deet, and we figured our horses had let enough blood to the damn mosquitoes. At dawn we left our dust hanging in the air and headed east for Mormon territory, passing a landscape of discarded alcohol containers and bottles of urine fermenting in the sun along the shoulder of Highway 287. We knew that the ranchers, who I had contacted before the trip, would welcome us and our horses. The Mormons we weren’t so sure about.

In 1856, two parties of Mormon emigrants, both from Europe, left Iowa City with all they possessed loaded into handcarts. Too poor to afford livestock, the 1,100 pioneers resorted to pulling oversize wheelbarrows made of uncured wood. The carts fell apart, and early-winter storms found the Mormons stuck along the Sweetwater River at Devil’s Gate. By the time they reached Salt Lake, more than 200 of them had died of exposure and starvation.

Today the church maintains an extensive interpretive site along the trail. We rode through the front gate of the Sun Ranch visitor center just after 3 P.M. and were ushered into the old ranch house by Sister Judy, the missionary who would give us a tour. In one room of the house, she pointed to an Evans rifle over the fireplace. Buffalo Bill Cody had ­given it to the ranch’s owner, who, Sister Judy said, taught the famous westerner the frontier skills he would later popularize in his Wild West Show.

Buffalo Bill had little fear of exaggerating. He liked to say that he’d made the longest relay of any Pony rider—384 miles—when he was 14. It never happened. Though he lied about that experience, he did a lasting service to the Pony Express by including a depiction of it in his show.

Believe everything you read about the Pony and you might think that the riders straddled winged Pegasus himself, that they carried the very flag of Manifest Destiny as they galloped over the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. Anyone who came close to the route or its riders seemed to fall under its romantic spell.

Though the Pony played a high-profile role in history—even the papers in Europe noted that it carried the news of Lincoln’s election in record time—it was a short-lived enterprise. Eighteen months into its tenure, the telegraph connected Missouri to California and the Pony was finished, having operated at a loss from its inception to the day it folded in October 1861.

“It did not involve more than 150 round trips,” wrote William Banning, who in 1928 published the superb Six Horses, about stagecoaching, freighting, and passenger conveyance in the developing West. “It did not cover a full nineteen months. Like a belated fragment of a storm it came and was gone. Yet the fact remains: a more glamorous contribution to our historic West than that of this ephemeral Pony would be difficult to name.”

“Hold your horses,” Quirt yelled on the shoulder of the highway. I wheeled my horse to see him pointing his .22 autoloader pistol at a buzzing rattlesnake in a cattle guard. For all the times that his gun came out, I never saw him draw it; I’d just turn and he’d be ready to shoot something. He never fired a round during the trip, but it’s a necessary part of any overland kit: a way to humanely put down injured livestock. To me it was yet another example of Quirt’s preparedness and my reliance on him and his gear.

He nearly always rode at the front of our column. As a pathfinder, Quirt was invaluable. He could see a gate in a fence several miles away that I could barely make out with binoculars. A whistle would stop him, and we’d look at the map or unpack a sandwich. As we rode, we talked about other adventures we had in mind. We’d round up a herd of mustangs, Quirt said, spend a week or two gentling them, and then drive the bunch right through downtown Rapid City, South Dakota, to the sale barn. We’d walk away with some easy money.

Like a lot of what Quirt does, the mustang scheme was a moneymaking idea. He knows the value of a dollar better than most adults, and he isn’t the type to let a nickel pass without at least swinging his rope at it.

“Last winter I raised four bottle calves on five goats,” he said, explaining how a gallon of milk per day from each of the goats was sufficient to raise the calves. “A mother cow can cost $4,000 per head, but I got five goats for $1,000, and they give better milk.”

Quirt had no shortage of knowledge about the hardscrabble business of ranching: Never buy a cow with pink udders, he said, because the sun reflecting off the snow will burn her skin and you’ll spend all spring rubbing oil on her. Narrow-shouldered bulls are the best. Through his business, Bar S Livestock, he sells calves and horses—including some of these in our string.

“Tłó±đ e sets the futures board for almost everyone in the cattle business, so we’re all dealing with the same market,” Quirt said, turning in his saddle. “But I got a guy in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, treats me good, gives me four or five cents back on the pound.”

To reach our final camp at Willow Spring, we covered 28 miles of unbroken sagebrush flats. We’d come about 325 miles in ten days. For the past two, one of Quirt’s horses, called Lunch­box, had been unwell. Named for the fact that he could be trusted to carry the food on pack trips, Lunchbox was 15 years old and the best-trained horse in our cavvy. Though we’d given the horse a break from carrying a rider or supplies for two days, we decided to shuttle him to Willow Spring in the trailer, to allow him an additional day of rest. Quirt was anxious to see him at camp.

That night, Lunchbox drank a little water and grazed but was lackluster and lethargic. At 1:30 A.M., Claire and I woke to the sound of the horse breathing heavily just outside our tent. He strained to draw a breath, grunting and moaning with the labor of his lungs. Claire woke up Quirt, and he gave the horse some painkillers and led him outside camp. At 2:15, I heard Lunchbox stumble through the tall grass toward our tent. He was moaning loudly. Then, in a violent fall of resignation, he threw himself down in the center of camp.

Quirt jumped out of his bedroll and held the horse’s head in his lap. Lunchbox had a quick seizure, kicked his legs a few times, and then lay still in the arms of the cowboy who loved him. Quirt sobbed quietly a few times. Claire sat beside him with her arm on his shoulder. I sat in my tent looking out at Quirt, Claire, and the dark form of Lunchbox. Sleep came that night only by the mercy of fatigue.

We don’t know why Lunchbox died. He had rested the three days before the night at Willow Spring, and his vital signs checked out normal. We don’t think he was overworked; the trail had been mostly level, and our pace had been steady and deliberate. After the trip, I called G. Marvin Beeman, an 84-year-old veterinarian in Littleton, Colorado, who has practiced large-animal medicine for 60 years.

Beeman agreed that the horse didn’t show signs of being overworked. Instead, there was likely some underlying condition that reared up doing our trip. “A horse is a wonderful biol­ogical machine,” he said, “but sometimes odd things kill them.”

People like Quirt rely on their horses for a day’s work, and it’s a relationship that’s deepened by its rarity. Which is why I still clench my jaw when I look at photographs of Lunchbox.

The next morning we had a quick breakfast over Lunchbox, whose body still lay in the center of camp. Quirt gathered the horses, and we fed them in the rope corral for the last time. “You guys ride on, and I’ll catch up in a few hours,” Quirt said.

Claire, Nate, and I rode out of Willow Spring to leave Quirt and our driver to deal with the carcass. On ranches, dead horses are usually interred via backhoe, while dead cows or sheep are placed on open land to be consumed by ravens, coyotes, and detrivores. A local rancher helped drag Lunchbox to a similar fate.

Quirt, like most people concerned with animal husbandry, confronts the passing of life on a regular basis. As we rode our final miles, he talked about Lunchbox and other horses he’d owned. In five strokes of bad luck, he’d had five horses die on him. The kid’s entitled to his own way of grieving, I thought. He also had his way of keeping Lunchbox in his life: he’d taken the horse’s tail to make a shoo fly that would hang from his saddle, and he’d skinned the horse to make rawhide.

“I’ll make buttons from the hide,” Quirt said. “Tłó±đre’s two ways things come back to life: by God and by rawhide.”

We loped our horses into Poison Spider Creek to finish our trail miles, waving our arms and yelling. Save for the loss of Lunchbox, the horses came through in good shape. With a day of rest, all would have been fit to carry on. As for me, I didn’t want the trip to end. I didn’t want a hot shower or clean clothes; I just wanted more of the windswept prairies from the back of my horse.

But after 12 days on the move, we pulled our saddles and sweaty blankets from the animals and let them roll in the tall grass of a hay meadow. We made cocktails and laid about camp all day without ambition, and the next morning we went our own ways.

When I called Quirt three weeks after the trip, he was in high spirits and had hardly been out of the saddle since returning home. He was rolling out of bed at 3 A.M., he said, to beat the heat and save his horses from working under the sun. His five pregnant mares were heavy with babies that would hit the ground any day now. I asked him if he’d ever saddle up for another long trip.

“Tłó±đ thing is, back in the days of the Pony Express, their horses were already trail ­horses. They already knew about being corralled in the ropes in the morning and all that,” he said. “By the time we finished, we were just getting the hang of everything.”

Will Grant () is a correspondent for the magazine. He wrote about searching for gold in Arizona in the March 2015 issue.  is an °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đÌęcontributing artist.

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Fred Roberts’s sheep lead cold, hard lives. The herd of some 500 Rambouillet-Columbia ewes spend the winter on the prairies of southwestern Wyoming, where the wind can strip the paint off a Ford pickup. In the spring, they walk 300 miles north to their summer range in the mountains near Jackson, which can see snowfall just about any day of the year.  

But there’s an upside to the harsh American West: the sunny, arid climate spurs the ­animals to produce small-diameter wool ­fibers that can make a merino-grade garment. “American wool is loftier,” says Rita Samuelson, marketing director of the American Wool Council. “It tends to be spongy, due to a combination of ­genetics, ­nutrition, and environmental conditions.”

Recently, outdoor brands have started pay­ing top dollar to include American wool in their goods, revitalizing what was once a dying industry. uses U.S. wool in its socks, which you can find in nearly 800 stores, including Cabela’s and REI. So does Bozeman, Montana, apparel maker , which owns a flock of more than 10,000 sheep and controls every stage of its U.S.-based manufacturing process. , a Colorado company, combines wool produced in the Rocky Mountains with synthetics to engineer fabrics that the company says perform better than wool alone. And , which took a PR hit last year when , has revamped its supply chain and is now sourcing American wool for many of its socks.

This is a major change from a decade ago. In 2007, the reported that 71 percent of U.S. wool was exported. Today only half is. 

The shift has come about for a few reasons. First, U.S. wool used to be sent overseas to factories that made it washable via a process called shrink treating, in which the surface scales on the fibers are removed to prevent felting. But in 2010, a plant opened in South Carolina that can do that work, allowing manufacturers to keep their wool on U.S. soil throughout production. Second, out­door companies bet on a strong ­market for domes­tically produced goods. And third, those brands started paying more for high-grade, American-made wool. 

“When people first saw us at the Outdoor Retailer trade show in 2013, their initial reaction was, ‘Not another sock company,’ ” says Dave Petri, vice president of marketing for Farm to Feet. “But when they heard about what we were trying to do with a domestically manufactured product, there was a lot of interest.”

Other ­manufacturers saw an opportunity to tout their goods as Ameri­can made. Consumers responded. Last year, for example, Farm to Feet produced more than 320,000 pairs of socks, a 63 percent increase over 2014. And Duckworth doubled its sales from 2014 to 2015.

As demand has grown, ranchers like Roberts have taken steps to breed their sheep to produce even better wool. That, in turn, brings a higher price from performance-­apparel makers than, say, the coarse wool used in things like carpet and mattress pads. For Roberts and other producers, the new market comes with another key change: they can now point to a brand or product line and rest assured that it contains wool from the sheep they raise.

“Six years ago, we didn’t know much about where our wool went. All we knew was that a lot of it was exported to China,” Roberts says. “Now, if the quality is high enough, it has a good chance of staying here.”

After attending Outdoor Retailer for the past several years as a member of the American Wool Council, a Colorado trade group, Roberts changed his outlook on his family oper­ation. Previously, he figured he might be the last Roberts to run the third-generation ranch. His son, Kyle, had left for school in Salt Lake City rather than stay and go bankrupt running sheep. But with wool markets looking better than they have in years, there’s money in it again. Last fall, Kyle returned home to help run the family business.

“Buying and using a domestic product has become a lot more important to people,” Roberts says. “And that’s a huge boon to wool producers. It’s supply and demand—if that’s what they want, that’s what we’ll deliver.”

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My border collie, Danny, charges hard. So hard that he tears cracks in his paw pads. I own two horses, and every morning and evening during chores, Danny sprints laps around the barn with decided ferocity. I’ll hear gravel bouncing off the walls as he cranks around the corners with the kind of intensity that can be unsettling to folks who’ve never witnessed a border collie at full throttle. 

But I never knew just how hard Danny got after it until recently. In the past few years, a handful of trackers designed specifically for dogs have hit the gadget market. While all of them record activity levels, some (like FitBark) are essentially Fitbit for canines, while others (like PetPace and Voyce) are about helping you or your vet get a better understanding of your dog’s health. With Danny, I discovered that he has a maximum heart rate of 158 and runs more than a mile each time we do chores—enough to make him more active than 98 percent of all dogs using FitBark. Here’s what you can learn from each device.

Whistle GPS

In addition to logging activity, the alerts you when your dog leaves an established zone and tracks his location as long as he’s in cell range. $80, plus monthly plan from $7 

PetPace

The collar tracks biometrics like respiration, pulse, temperature, and calories burned. The app is a little buggy, but the reports can help identify problems early. $150, plus $15 monthly plan

FitBark

The clips to any collar and weighs less than the other devices here. Dogs go head-to-head on BarkPoints, a murky metric similar to steps, in FitBark’s active social-media community. $70

Voyce Health Monitor

Tracks your dog’s vitals and records distance—the only one here to do so. Bummer: there’s no app, so you have to view the data on ’s website. $199, plus $9.50 monthly plan

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Maybe you heard the news: supplies of blue agave, the stuff tequila is made from, are drying up. The plant can take as long as a decade to mature, and about ten years ago the price dropped. So farmers planted crops like corn instead. As a result, stores have fallen an estimated 42 percent since 2014. 

Don’t worry too much, though. Mexico has several endemic spirits. The easiest to find are mezcal, which primarily comes from Oaxaca and is made from agave (not the blue variety), and sotol, a Chihuahuan specialty distilled from a plant called desert spoon, a cousin of agave. (A third, bacanora, is made in Sonora, but it’s pricey and tough to find in the U.S.) Unlike the tequila of your youth, these are made for sipping, not shooting, and many think they’re better than a lot of tequilas.

“Agave is such a great vehicle for terroir. There are about 30 varieties, and the spirits from each one taste different, depending on where it’s grown,” says Chantal Martineau, who wrote after five years spent sipping mezcal in the bars of Oaxaca City. “Some of my favorites come from really small producers in the most rustic places you’ve ever seen. No electricity, no walls, just a clay pot on a stove under a desert structure.”

Drink sotol, which tastes like a crisp, grassy tequila, and you’re in the mountains of Durango, wrapped in a wool serape. Drink a smoky mezcal and you’re kicking back under a ceiling fan in an airy saloon, listening to a Oaxacan brass band. From where we’re sitting, the music sounds pretty good.

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