Why Four Cowboys Rode Wild Horses 3,000 Miles Across America (Part 2) | Nat Geo Live

April first, we began our journey that is at the border of Arizona and Mexico, and I promise you we did not plant that flag there. We just rolled up in real life; it's kind of photogenic. We'll take a picture next flag.

So we started our journey, and we had a few hiccups. Kind of day two, our was to charge the maps, and I didn't get lost; I always knew where I was, but the landscape wasn't exactly what I had intended it to be like. So we were planning on like a 22-mile day, and it ended up being 40. We finally got into camp at like 3 o'clock in the morning. That guy was grumpy; that's understandable.

This is some of the training that we were going through; it's just absolutely beautiful. We were coming down a hill. This is all night, day number four. This is the director; this is Phil Baraboo. This guy's an amazing cameraman. If you ever need to do a film project, he is your dude. But Phil's not a horseman; in fact, he'd only ridden a horse like once prior to the journey. He's pretty handy now, but on day number four, he was tired, which is understandable.

He stood like a 40-mile forced march, and he's gone downhill. No horse is in front of him, and he's not paying attention. He just walks into this horse, and the horse just reaches back and just tags him right in the thigh. I mean, it was like he took a sack of potatoes and just dropped it. But it actually didn't sound like that at all; um, but it sounded bad, and we thought that his leg was broken because of the sounds that he made. How I wish I had that audio!

But I ran up there and, you know, took his pants off. He had this massive bruise that was in the perfect shape of a horseshoe. I mean, it was really notable; he was a size one shoe, which was cool because for the rest of the journey, we watched this big blood bubble go all the way down his leg and out his toe. It was really cool; we should have a time-lapse on it. That'd be amazing!

Then my father-in-law, who's a doctor, gave us all these drugs before we left, like, "If you get in a bind, you know, use this for this and this for that." And we're in a hurry and we're in a bind, so I'm just like, "Phil, take that!" And I think we ended up accidentally giving him some muscle relaxers. We put him back on the horse, and he's like "Sure!" the next three hours, and we limped out of there. He rode, but he was in bad shape; he had to go to the hospital, but he was fine.

Ah, but it was tough because then whenever the cameramen weren't there, we had to be the cameramen, and sometimes our stuff wasn’t as in focus. There's this guy I love so much; his name is Val Geisler. He stopped everything that he was doing in life; he's 74 and said, "I'm gonna take two months and go help you boys on this road crew."

Arizona and an old-time horse trainer has adopted dozens of mustangs and helped us start the journey and parted all of this cowboy wisdom. He's just a dying breed, an amazing human being. Then Thamer got dysentery after he got kicked in the head by a horse. He got over that too.

Moving on, we got to the Grand Canyon. We went down the South Rim, crossed over the bridge, down at the bottom. The horses were like, "I don't know about this." She had to go through a cave and then onto a bridge, then on this little tiny goat path, but they did fantastic! These horses, after about the first couple weeks, were excellent, excellent ponies.

Maybe that's possibly the reason why Thamer thought it was a good idea to get a donkey. But I think another thing is, you know, people think of the wild horse issue as like a wild horse issue, but you know the burros are really important and he wanted a burro. So happy finally a little fun! When I dropped off the three horses a couple weeks ago, Thamer asked me about the burros and if I had a burro to bring him, and I just happened to have one.

"Oh, that's perfect! Take that back, Brandon!" What a donkey! Whisper the donkey definitely adds a little flavor to our outfit. A little some of the burro flavor; that's pretty good. Then, yes, you have no idea what she just got herself into.

Now, I like donkeys, but aliens going to do fleet disastrous. I just don't think a donkey can do 20 miles a day, you know, the rough terrain keeping up with full-size horses. He's just big enough. I give the donkey a couple weeks, maybe he’ll just follow along peacefully; maybe he’ll be mad as a donkey!

And the donkey proceeded to follow us all the way to Canada! Yeah, I wish I was Jeb Broader. I love that donkey! It's kind of funny; I keep—she stays at Tom Weber's house in Texas, right? I have my horses right now. We have these seven Mustangs and this donkey, and everywhere the donkey goes, there's like seven pig Mustangs that follow her around in a single-file line. It's like Queen Leader; she was nice to have around.

You know horses, they kind of do their own little horse neighing, but donkeys—they really like people. There were a lot of times we would just be hanging out, and the donkey would just come in and like give us her—she loved you to hear, scratch her ass too. You'd just be standing there, like, also, there’s a donkey butt in your face!

But there were some downfalls of having a donkey—she would eat all of our stuff. Like if you kept a granola bar or something in your pocket, she would like go and find it. She would eat it! And we kept losing our spoons. We met this family, and they're professional spoon makers; they make wooden spoons. They gave us some of these wooden spoons, and you know whenever you're in the backcountry and something goes missing, there are like four people, and you're certain that it wasn't you. You're like, "Somebody has my stuff!" Or like, "It's not my fault; somebody else did it." Like, "Who has taken my spoon?"

One day, there’s like animosity in the group, and we’re like wondering where the spoons are at; we're like eating with our hands. So we got down to one spoon, and I looked over at the donkey one day, and she has this spoon in her mouth just going all—looked like Bugs Bunny! The spoon's just getting smaller and smaller, like splinters flying everywhere. It's really incredible—she ate our spoon! But we forgave her; I love that donkey.

We tried not to take ourselves too seriously. I'm a big, fake fan of Harry Potter, but unlike most people, I wouldn't really consider myself a Gryffindor. My no more mother—give you something: I think if I had special powers, that would be—to Crowley speak Parseltongue. He was figured that would be good opportunity to scare masters.

Oh, getting back one day—um, but yeah, it was incredible; it was just an amazing thing to do. Not throwing snakes on each other, but like the journey as a whole. And it was neat because whenever you do a big expedition like that, it becomes kind of a lifestyle. Like whenever you go on a backpacking trip or a weekend vacation or something, which, you know, I'm all for; I love doing that.

But it's different because you're leaving this lifestyle and doing a vacation that fits for like a week or two weeks or three days or whatever, then you come back. But whenever you're out there for five months, it stops becoming a vacation, and it becomes this lifestyle. It was really neat to kind of compare that lifestyle to what it was beforehand and then what it is now.

Some of the things that I really, really enjoyed about that trip, you know, beyond the scenery and beyond all that, was the camaraderie. You know, whenever you don't have the ability to look at your email or your Instagram or your cell phone or anything, and you're forced to sit and talk with other people for hours—that's something that I don't really have happen a lot. You know, since this trip, I really enjoyed that sense of friendship and of closeness and of disconnection.

I also really enjoyed just like the very physical nature of the decisions. You know, it wasn't, "Am I going to do this digital project or that digital project or try to push this product or whatever?" It was, "Am I going to go split wood, or am I gonna clean dishes? Are we going to go left or are we going to go right?"

It was a very physical, existential kind of lifestyle that I really enjoyed, and it's an experience that I'm really glad that I have. So I always encourage people to ride horses from Mexico to Canada. I mean, just some of the country that we saw—this photo here was taken by Cory Richards, who's an SEO photographer—absolutely awesome guy, amazing photographer.

Just kind of a piece of public land. This is the Lost Plateau. This isn't a wilderness; it's not a national monument; it's not a national park; it's not like this iconic place that people think of going to, but it's incredible. I mean, it's stunning; it's aspen trees for as far as you can look, vistas that are, you know, world-class, and it's ours! It's public land, and we have an amazing amount of it.

We're so fortunate to have it. I don't know if I'm ever gonna look cooler in my life than I do right there! So it takes a NatGeo photographer to make me look cool. And this was in Yellowstone. That's great—horse and frisky at semi, and that is Stubles, and that's Dinosaur off to the right—kind of looks like a dinosaur.

This is Glacier National Park; definitely one of the finest views of the entire journey. And this was crossing the Gallatin River in Montana—it’s kind of a hairy spot. But by point time, our ponies were rockstars! And one more in Glacier—but it is impossible to not be just completely overwhelmed by the landscapes that we went to and went through.

Alright, here's just a piece of some of the stuff that was all you…

The American West is pretty amazing. I wasn't very profound. I tried to think of something really profound to say right there; I left the video to speak for itself.

But man, I would turn yet I really kind of want to do it again. And then on September 6 of 2013, we got to the Canadian border, and we completed our trip at Glacier National Park. It's kind of to give you guys a sense of what it takes to create a massive production like this. You know, our producer, a production assistant, assistant editor Paul Quigley, some of the students from Montana State University filled in the hat, and then Corey were the two cinematographers.

You know, it takes a big team to put a production like this together, and the two cinematographers are kind of the humble ones in the trip. You know, they did the entire journey, and they filmed it all, and, you know, they weren't in it, but it wouldn't have happened without them.

Just amazing, amazing guys. They were, you know, as much part of the team as anybody else. There’s surprise in the movie; you can have to watch the movie to find out about the ending. But we finished the trip, it was—it was weird because like it was time to end, but at the same time, we kind of wanted it to continue.

But, you know, it was becoming fall; it was about to get winter. It was time to finish. But the horses, they just did such a good job! Whenever we finished, I decided to try to think of a way to kind of give back to the horses because, you know, they took us all the way from Mexico to Canada, and I didn't really know how.

Then I learned about this event that they do in Fort Worth with the Mustang Heritage Foundation where they have these training competitions with the purpose of getting these wild horses adopted and finding homes for them.

Our trip probably would have been possible without Del Fuste here to build it. So I gave away—I gave away my Mustang Luke. He's here with my fishing horse! Like, you don't just give away your fishing horse.

Somebody asked me today, "What's my favorite fly-fishing fly?" I told them, "A horsefly!" But anyways, we gave Luke away, and with that money, what they do is they pay horse trainers to train these horses to make them more adoptable to other people.

Then they launched a veterans program with it, and then a few months after I auctioned him off, a guy bought him—a guy named Tom O'Brien, Tulsa, Oklahoma. He called me out of the blue and said, "You know, Ben, I bought that horse because I wanted to make a donation to the Mustang Heritage Foundation, and we're not riding him, and I'd like for you to have him back. Will you take this horse back?"

Because, you know, I'd done a lot with him, and he didn't really want to give him up. I was kind of having regrets about giving him away, so whenever you offered that, I was like, "You know, are you sure?"

Number one, that’s huge! It’s like one of the kind of things anybody has ever done for me. Whenever you say yes, it’s like, "Yeah, of course I want my horse back. He’s an awesome horse! My fishing buddy!"

And I'm pretty certain—I don't know this, but I have put on the spot—but I think that my wife said yes because of my horse, and I really don't blame her! So we got married not too long after I'm branded, and she put up with that. I was gonna put a ringer on her, and this is our family, da!

Yeah, pretty proud of my family: that tough Luke, Violet, and a dinosaur! Ah, they're my boys! Natali got a read—that's the book that I wrote. It's horse-grade reading level; he really likes the pictures!

One of the biggest honors that I had—well, yes, with Unbranded, it did really well. The movie turned out a lot better than we had expected it to, which is a testament to the filmmaking team.

We ended up taking it to different film festivals, and it got picked up. We got put on Netflix, so a lot of people got to see it, and we were able to do a theatrical run—probably showed like 500 theaters in the U.S. Like, it did really well; it got a lot of eyeballs on the film.

And to know that these horses were there for adoption, we had a lot of horses adopted, which I'm very proud of. One of the biggest honors is after the release of Unbranded, I was nominated to sit on a volunteer panel, the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, which is a group of volunteers that meet to advise the BLM on how to manage their wild horse populations.

The role that I was nominated to sit on was wildlife management, which is a dream come true because, as a wildlife biologist, you know, I was now able to represent the interests of wildlife on 31.2 million acres of public lands in the American West, which is really nice—but it's also a difficult subject.

Because there’s a lot of horses; it's a political topic that involves horses and wildlife and ecology and the ranching industry and public-private land mixture. But this is kind of where the wild horses exist in the West; these are actually herd areas, they're actually a little bit smaller than herd management areas where they actually exist.

You can see them mainly in ten western states, and they're still rounding up horses, and they're still putting them in pens. It's just a completely broken system that everybody will agree with you that the wild horse and burro situation is a complete wreck.

You know, there are three times the amount of horses on the range that’s the target population, which is controversial to itself. Then, you know, almost 50,000 of them are sitting in feedlots and sitting on lease pasture. It's insanely expensive, and it's just ignited this huge controversy in the West.

As we were touring Unbranded, we showed it at Telluride mount film, and I met this amazing woman named TJ Holmes who decided to do something about it in the area that she could. I mean, she told me about it, and I was like, "I want to make a movie on this!"

Dinging—that was the cue for the movie—I missed it!

Alright, but before I do show that film—sorry, before I show that film, I do want to talk about one thing, which is we have over a million livestock on public lands in the American West. We have 75 thousand wild horses and burros, and bison—the undeniably native large herbivore—is virtually non-existent on our public lands, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park and like two or three other places.

I always thought, like, that is crazy! You know, we've exterminated the bison; their populations are now a lot higher than they were 120 years ago. But I think it would be pretty cool to see some bison reintroductions into our public lands!

Let’s see what happens! But this is a picture of me, and all that grass that you see is all cheatgrass. It's an invasive annual, and it is not native and has taken over somewhere around 50 million acres of the American West. To put that into perspective, that's about 20 Yellowstone National Parks—it’s a massive, massive issue!

It can be caused by overgrazing of cattle, horses, and wildlife, and it just kind of shows the importance of management on, you know, in this area. There’s like federal or state; there’s private—and it kind of shows the importance of different agencies working together to try to prevent massive invasive species monocultures from popping up because it threatens biodiversity, threatens teeny species. It's just not a good situation.

And now here's the film that I was talking about...

I’m TJ, and I documented Mustangs at Spring Creek Basin; I’ve been doing that for about nine years now. I volunteer for BLM, Eidart, with the PZP fertility control vaccine to try to slow the population growth in Spring Creek Basin. But I’ll stop it so we can at least lengthen the interval between roundups.

That's an amazing thing—that little thing right there is gonna prevent her from having a foal for a year, which will potentially prevent a horse from growing up, being rounded up, going to a holding pen. There’s that shove of the rifle, and then that merde jobs—it’s like a school of fish.

The whole band is tuned into each other, so when she darts, they all go! Like, you could see with these guys, they didn’t go very far. Spring Creek Basin is almost 22,000 acres, but it wouldn’t matter if we were 220,000 acres.

Make all the theory behind it is still the same! You know, you’ve got to have the resource to enable the horses and the other wildlife to live here, and if you don’t have that, you don’t have a healthy wild horse herd, you don’t have a healthy elk herd; you don’t have a healthy deer herd, a pronghorn herd.

It's the same type of conservation philosophy. For us to make the PZP program work here, we couldn’t do it without volunteers like TJ. It's a smaller herd area; we have a smaller number of horses. What works here for us does not necessarily work exactly the same from her area to her area.

Can it be used everywhere? Maybe not; key word, maybe! I don't know. Does the BLM know my goal? Really, it is to manage on the range, manage them where they’re found in the wild. In an ideal situation, I’d like to see BLM adopt more partnership models, use volunteers to help document, help dart with PZP to lower the birth rate of the horses on their ranges to the point where we can equal the horses coming off the range with the adoption demand.

I’m making sure that every mare has the chance to contribute for genetics. Here, our 2016, we haven’t had a roundup. We won’t need one for at least another couple of years because of the success of PZP in Spring Creek Basin.

That has been my life in a nutshell! But it's a pretty good thing because you can look back on these last nine years and say, you know what? I made a difference. Isn't that heard of my heart? That's why I do what I do!

That's pretty cool what she's doing, and what she says at the end I think, you know, just really strikes home. It's like, if we can get—if we can use fertility control so the population grows to where the amount that do need to be removed equals the adoption demand, then we can stop putting them in feedlots, which everybody wants.

In my opinion, and some people don’t like me because of this, I don’t believe that we’re going to get to that situation without some type of lethal culling. I hope I’m proven wrong, but it’s a serious topic. You know, you'll definitely see it next—in the next few years popping up because it's only a growing issue...