Why Four Cowboys Rode Wild Horses 3,000 Miles Across America (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live

They asked me to, um, start off this speech with a kick. He keeps getting them in and getting them. I mean, J, you cannot eat this stuff! You know what the best thing to do, if you can get in there, just pull it out like a comb. Oh, all right, man, God.

Also, for all of you guys who laughed at that, it really wasn't that funny. It was a pretty serious incident. As you can see, he broke his sunglasses, and when you're on a big journey like that, it's not like you can just replace your sunglasses anywhere. So, it's a pretty, pretty unfortunate deal.

Um, so this was about two weeks into a five-and-a-half-month long trip. We were in Southern Arizona, and by this point in time, we had lost our horses. Once, our director had taken a brutal kick to the femur and was, uh, mia. It was just this really, uh, interesting time when our horses were covered in cactus. We're like, how the hell are we going to get through this? But we managed to pull it off.

But before we get to how we were there and then where we went from after Ben got punched in the head, um, how did it all get started? "Unbranded" for me started whenever I was a kid. Um, I grew up in a wonderful family in Emera, Texas. Emera is a place that is almost entirely private land, and it's really flat. If you've ever been through Amarillo, you probably have an appreciation for mountains.

That is my beautiful sister, who’s also right there. Thanks for coming. Um, and, um, whenever I was 14, I took my first real trip to the mountains. We went to Colorado, and, uh, we went into this wilderness area, and it just blew my mind that there was that much land that didn't have roads and fences and highways and power lines and vehicles and all of these things that I had just, you know, associated with life.

Like, we didn't really have a big wilderness area or a lot of public lands where I grew up, and I thought, man, this is incredible. We did like a 10-mile hiking trip, and it just completely changed my perspective of what a watershed is and what a landscape is.

So, I ended up going back to the same spot with my brother and my sister and we got rained on for like four days. They were like, man, we're not doing that again, and I loved it! It was awesome, um, because you know when it rains and the sun comes out, it’s awesome.

So I left that, and then I went to Texas A&M University. Nice! I was hoping we get a few of those. Um, and after my freshman year at college, I, um, got a job in Colorado, working for a guy in Rocky Mountain National Park and had just the most amazing four months. I got to take people on rides. We did two-hour rides, and we did, uh, two-day trips, and we would take people to see different parts of the park and learn about different natural history of the area.

And that's really where my love for horses, uh, developed. I didn't really have a lot of riding experience before that, uh, and still, I'm learning a lot. But that was where it all got started. One day, we were just hanging out, and I had this map of Colorado, and we're looking at it. There was this trail that went all the way through the state, the Continental Divide Trail. So, I was sitting there with my buddy Mike, and I was like, dude, we should do that trail.

Um, he's like, yeah, well we should, but let's go ahead and add on Montana and Wyoming and New Mexico too. I thought that was a pretty good idea, so we started planning for that. I had to go back to school, where I decided to drop out of the business school, and I entered into the wildlife program instead. Because after a summer like this, like honestly, who wants to study accounting?

Um, and I'll never forget my counselor. She was like, "Now, Ben, do you understand how prestigious the maze School of Business is?" And I was like, yeah. And she told me that I was the first person to ever transfer from the business school to the wildlife school.

In one day, I went from playing with calculators in class to playing with snakes in class, and it was like the best decision possibly of my life. Um, y'all should all drop out of business school and join Wildlife School. It was amazing.

During that period of time, a guy named Parker Flannery and him and Mike Pinkney, uh, the guy from Colorado, we all put together this this idea of we're going to do the Continental Divide Trail with horses. So I called my mom. I was like, "Mom, I'm going to drop out of school and ride horses in the mountains," which went over really well.

Um, we didn't have any money, so my mom was like, "Well, I don't know about supporting that." Uh, so we started looking for horses. We had enough money to buy a few ranch horses, but we heard about this government program that had a bunch of wild Mustangs that needed homes.

So we went and we adopted some wild Mustangs used on the trip and Parker—this is Parker—he trained him. He is like a raging badass. Um, he's in Australia now training brumes. Um, so he trained some of the Mustangs and we did the journey. Uh, there's Mike Piñey. This was in the Wind River Range, but just unbelievable.

This was before I got into photography, uh, and it was just like this little point and shoot camera, but it's just an amazing journey. Um, we got to see just some sites that'll stick with you for the rest of your life.

This was kind of near the end. This was in Glacier National Park, but it was neat for me because I was the map geek on that trip. It was really cool to buy these maps and pick her out, and then you kind of get a vision for what it might look like, and then you watch it unfold in real life. It gave me a lot of appreciation for how much public lands we have in the American West.

I mean, it blows my mind that today, in the year 2017, there is still a quarter of public lands that you can go from Mexico to Canada through an almost entirely backcountry route that any average shmo can go on. That, to me, is just like, what an amazing gift!

Um, and it's something that I don't think a lot of people understand. Everybody's like, "Oh, public land!" It's like, yeah, we got Yellowstone, Pis, and thumbs up. But, uh, there's so much more to that. I also felt like the Mustangs that we had adopted that did so well on this trip, you know, they never got hurt, they never got tired.

Uh, they finished as fat as can be. Didn't have any hoof problems at all. Um, you know, I was just so impressed by the wild horses. And whenever that journey finished, I looked at those guys and I was like, "Fellas, we should do this again, but this time we should take cameras and we should film it and make a movie."

Y'all in? They were like, "Hell no, I'm cold and I'm tired. You're on your own, man." Um, so we—or I guess I at that point in time—started brainstorming and wanted to do another one. A big reason for me of wanting to do it was I started researching the wild horse and burro issue, which is a tricky one.

And fast forward, like five years, I ended up making a film about wild horses and burros, and I took out two minutes to show you guys a video that kind of explains what the, uh, current conundrum is in the American West regarding horses. Horses reproduce quickly, and if they get overpopulated, they can destroy rangeland habitat that wildlife depends on.

So the BLM rounds up excess horses to prevent overgrazing and offers them up for adoption, but there aren't enough adopters, and they've begun to stockpile. There are nearly 50,000 wild horses and burros in government holding pens, costing taxpayers about 50 million annually.

Wild horse numbers have continued to rise, and right now there are over two and a half times the number of horses that is the appropriate management level. It's ignited a range war between wild horse advocates who think that the appropriate management level is too low, between ranchers who want more livestock, and wildlife organizations that want priority to be put on native species.

The horses don't have a place to go; there's not enough adopters. They virtually have no predators, and overgrazing is real. Overgrazing leads to desertification; it allows invasive species and weeds to take over, and in severe cases, they could starve.

All right, so that's a big, big issue in two minutes. But to boil it down, there're tens of thousands of horses in these holding pens. And I had just gotten done with this journey, and I was like, man, a lot of these are amazing horses.

Um, you know, can we do the journey again, and can we try to shed some light on this situation to get some of these horses adopted? Um, so I went to Texas, which is a good environment to find people crazy enough to ride for 3,000 miles. Always count on them!

And, um, I met these three guys. This is Ben Themer; he's from Amarillo, Texas, a fellow Amarillo. And this is Thomas Glover; he's from Houston. And, um, this is Johnny Fitz Simmons from San Antonio. We all had a bunch of stuff in common at A&M and we decided to embark on this 3,000-mile journey after graduation from Mexico to Canada and to document it and make a film about it and, uh, try to have a conservation message in it and a wild horse adoption message in it.

It's kind of ambitious maybe looking back on it, especially the whole filming part, because none of us had ever made a movie before, and I was like, "Had any money?" 'Cause we just graduated, and we're like, well, we should do a Kickstarter.

Um, do I have any Kickstarter donors in here by chance? Do I? I don't. I don't have any! Y'all are all terrible people! Um, so we put together a four-minute video that said, all right, we just graduated. Our goal is to make a film to inspire wild horse adoptions by doing this ride. You give us money.

And in 45 days, that video spread like madness, and we had over a thousand people donate over $200,000 to make a film on "Unbranded," which is just amazing to me. Like, um, there's a lot of good human beings on this planet, and you know I'm eternally grateful for all those people that put us there.

So we met a director named Phil Barou, and we went and we rode from Mexico to Canada, and we made a movie. Before I dive into it, I want to show you all the trailer so you know what I'm talking about.

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment, and sometimes that bad judgment can be pretty horrific." [Music]

"I'm not ready to buy a house and get married and have kids yet. You know, I want to have fun and do some crazy adventure like this while I can."

"Give them H trip of self-discoveries."

"We recently adopted less than 3,000. What do we do with the excess wild horses that we have to remove? Do these horses have a right to be here?"

"Yeah, absolutely they do. To prove the worth of these Mustangs, we're going to adopt, train, and ride them 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada through the wildest terrain in the American West."

"Oh, God, send me now! Things are going to go wrong!"

"Guys are planning on bringing him out when I have a down day."

"Do whatever the hell I want!"

"That was so much fun!"

"That goal of reaching the Canadian line had as powerful an impact as going through this land has made on me."

"Don't get below that horse!"

"Well, you can do a lot of things, but you can't do this. And this is for crazy people, really."

"Yeah, that was fun! You guys should all ride from Mexico to Canada, by the way!"

Um, so I guess I hit the button, but where it all started was in prison. We went to an inmate training facility where they have about 800 horses in Hutchinson Kansas. They have a program where inmates can train these horses, and then they take these saddle-ready horses and pass them out.

So if you're going to go to jail, you know, training horses would be a good way to spend your time, at least in my opinion. Um, so we went there, and they had all these horses. We just started through them. We looked for confirmation; it was a big one. You know, we wanted horses that were big enough to do the journey.

We wanted horses that, um, you know, were large enough. A lot of the Mustangs are pretty small. We looked for bigger horses, we looked for a variety of physical traits, and we also looked for disposition. You know, we didn't want the horses that were the most dominant animals, and we also didn't want the ones that were at the bottom of the pecking order.

We kind of wanted those in the middle, hoping to have the assumption that they would be, um, chill because we had a bunch—that's a lot of horses to train. So we adopted these horses with the help of two professional trainers, Jerry Jones and Lanny Leech, who are professionals, and they knew exactly what to look for.

And, uh, definitely want to give them some credit. And we took them to Hutchinson, Kansas. I'm sorry, uh, to near Weatherford, Texas, where we began the training process. If you guys have never trained a horse, y'all are really missing out because it's one of the most, uh, satisfying and like accomplishing kind of feeling things that I've ever done in my life.

To watch an animal that was a prey species and is scared of you, and I watch it over time develop trust and become a team and to learn new things and to do different things, and you know I think a good horseman is just a beautiful piece of art to watch.

As we were training these horses, there was this one horse in particular named Sea Star, and I felt like I was really developing a bond with Sea Star. One day, he was out there in the pen and I, um, I walked up to him. We’ve had him for like two or three days. I walked up to him, and I kind of put my arm out. I gently walked up and kind of put my eyes down, you know? Very not dominant, not a predator type of feeling.

And he reached out and he sniffed my hand, and I was like, I'm connecting with this horse right now! And he just rears up and just clocks me like sends me sprawling. I was like, oh, maybe next week! Um, and, but we did— we successfully got the horses trained.

Uh, there were three of them that we did not get to the point where we felt comfortable taking them on the trip, um, and they're living our pasture now, living a good life.

But, um, we started the journey. Um, oh, this is Gry, a horse. He kicks everybody, which is really inconsiderate. Um, you know, he kicks like a horse. Uh, but we got them all trained, and we gave it a lot of time, and we spent probably four or five months preparing the horses to become physically fit for us to become physically fit because we were asking a lot out of them.

We wanted to make sure that we could take as good care of them as we possibly could while we were doing the training. We chose our route, uh, through Arizona. We mainly did the Arizona Trail. Through Utah, we mainly did the Great Western Trail.

Um, we just went through Idaho, and then we went into Wyoming and kind of got along the Continental Divide Trail and took a lot of that through Montana. To give you a perspective of the different kinds of agencies or jurisdictions that we went through, you know, the different colors are different land management agencies.

So we went through a variety of National Forests, National Parks, wilderness areas, private land, um, and you can see that a lot of it is out in the west where the majority of our public lands in the lower 48 is located.