In the beginning
Duncan and I first met riding across Mongolia. When I say riding across, we rode the length and breadth of Mongolia, 3,600km over 3 months, with the Blue Wolf Totem crew, raising money for the Veloo Foundation and the Children of the Peak Sanctuary Kindergarten. You learn a lot about a place, and a lot about a person, when you share a journey of that duration and magnitude. There were many challenges on the BWT expedition, but it wasn’t quite the adventure that I craved, and coming to terms with that was the main challenge early in the trip.
So when Duncan asked if I fancied the Gaucho Derby, I was up for it. It is billed as the hardest adventure horse race in the world. I have always been fascinated by Patagonia, first as a teenager, inspired by Richard Llewellyn and his fabulous saga series about the hardship in the Welsh mining valleys, the subsequent emigration of whole communities from Wales to Patagonia and their triumphal return to North Wales as wool millionaires. Further inspiration came from climbing, the Cerro Torre must be the best-looking mountains in the world, and I yearned to see them in the flesh.
The Gaucho Derby “Race” as such was never a particularly sharp goal for me. Not enough to train for, anyway. Work and the winter got in the way of most of the prep I had planned but I wasn’t too worried about that. I wasn’t worried about the hardships of the race; I have slept in a tent for months on end, gone weeks without a shower, excelled in suffering, walking, and climbing and crawling up cliffs and hills at altitude in all sorts of weather with every piece of gear I might need on my own back. I know that I can just keep putting one foot in front of the other, breath after breath, day after day. I have ridden thousands of miles and hundreds of horses in my life, and even made a few from scratch. The Gaucho horses are working farm horses, so all should have a basic education. I just wanted to ride nice horses in the wilds of Patagonia and after the amazing, nurturing but constrained logistics of BWT, I liked the idea of us being self-sufficient, out in a tent, carrying just what we needed, following the most suitable route from point to point.
The people
The people on these trips are always the fascination. I am a watcher and a listener, and a bat-like eavesdropper and intrinsic motivation is one of my favourite topics. I thought I knew all about horse people, but it turns out even the most open minded of us still live in our own echo chambers! I thought the fact we all had horses in common would make us all best friends. What I had forgotten is that many people keep and ride horses to win, in races, in competition or just simply in life. While many people I know sink all their effort passion, emotion, effort, time and money into a horse, many others sink all their energy into what the horse can bring back to them. It is still a form of love, albeit on a transactional level that is often far below the surface. A few of the other guys on the trip were simpler souls, they live in worlds where horses still work, and are still judged and prized for their work, like racing and ranching, where the horses value is directly related to his usefulness.
Everyone on the trip was a pretty experienced rider. Some were more elegant than others, some had obviously ridden more Western than English style, and weren’t as neat and tidy as I am used to, but they were all effective if not quiet or subtle. A couple of the famous horse trainers on the trip have been patronising about the riding abilities of the group as a whole, but hey they have egos to nourish and businesses to protect! They might well have been talking about me with those comments; all I can say is never judge a book by its cover. They never saw the Rockstar buck!! I might look like a stiff, middle-aged woman and I’m not the best or the quickest at getting on from the ground (even after a few months eschewing the luxury of the mounting block) and I certainly wasn’t fighting fit, but I knew once I had my leg over the side, I was fine up there.
What I had not accounted for was the level of challenge that the “hardest adventure horse race in the world” would bring out in people. I know very well the level of obsession that people are capable of but was surprised at the degree of importance that other race contestants had attached to this particular goal. They had a glint to their eyes that I recognised. I know these people, I know that look all too well, it lives on the face of climbers, and mountaineers and ultra-runners and successful surgeons. These have all been my people; in different times and different lives, I used to find that glint attractive. There is something compelling and magnetically beautiful about a human completely consumed by an obsession or a goal.
But horses don’t work like that. For me that glint has never been associated with horses. Horses in fact have been my antidote and my refuge and possibly even my escape route from that world. And the closer that I get to looking at the world from a horse’s point of view, especially with the last few years’ focus being on communication and cooperation rather than training and the close communion that can occur during the Equine Touch myofascial work, then the less I think and feel like that sort of human.
Some of the 40 contestants on this race had been dieting/ training / practising for years, they had been building up to the event to the nth degree; every aspect of the last two years of their life had been about getting ready for The Gaucho Derby, had been re-framed in the context of the GD. Some had been told that they had to attend the Gaucho Academy prep camp, to learn all the navigation and camping skills needed for the race. Others had to buy all the camping gear, and then had to learn how to use that kit. One of the English gals had never even slept in a tent before!
I’m struggling to explain myself. For some of the contestants, THE RACE had taken on a life of its own. It wasn’t a holiday, or a nice trip, or an adventure, it was going to be a life changing personal challenge by which they would literally judge and define themselves for many years to come. Honestly!
I guess I hadn’t factored in that some of the people who would sign up for an adventure horse race haven’t fought their way through a 12-hour operation or suffered their way up some big hills in their life…my bad.
The horses
I was really looking forwards to riding the Argentinian horses. Some of the absolute favourite horses I have known in my life were the team of nimble, fast and spicy chestnut mares that that Guille bred for Roger Whewell’s Innerwick polo team when I was his UK head girl. These Patagonian cattle working horses would also have some of the fabulous Criollo blood that made our polo ponies so special. The GD horses are all working ranch horses, hired from local families for a substantial financial reward, so I also expected that they would be a bit more trained than the sometimes-variable Mongolian horses.
The truth, of course, is that they were a mixed bag. Other people’s horses always are. I have been very lucky, or very choosy in my life and the horses that I have trained, helped with, bought, or been paid to ride have all been classy. They eat horsemeat in Argentina, and ship out horsemeat to other countries for consumption, so they breed and then they do cull. The horses we met were all well-made, with nice wide chests, strong shoulders, and a good strong arse. They are also pretty herd bound. There are a lot of Percheron crosses; the wild country was colonised with wagons back in the day so the draught influence in the ranch horse is strong. There were some mixed with Arabian blood, others with Criollo, but many of the horses had more draught than I personally would choose for a 50km leg across rough mountain country.
There were also some issues with the standardisation that had been imposed for the race. The gauchos all neck rein, with very little bit pressure, but all the bridles we were issued with had a Tom Thumb Pelham with a curb chain. There was quite a lot of rearing from the various horses; my theory is that this was separation anxiety and nappiness compounded by a careless catch in the mouth from an unexpectedly severe bit. My second horse was one of these; he spun and danced, and went sideways, and pogoed a bit, but luckily we were riding in a three, so we just thought forwards and got going, I basically chewed on liver chestnut ears for about 15kms and 500m of ascent and then he eventually relaxed into forward motion where all was lovely as long as I didn’t actually touch his mouth with the reins.
The horses are all barefoot normally and apparently manage the super tough terrain perfectly fine like that but for some obscure welfare concern they had been shod especially for the race. They were supposed to be newly shod but some of the shoeing jobs were not quite so fresh. The resulting issue is that horses that are normally used to complete shock absorption from bare hooves must suddenly deal with the concussive forces from steel horseshoes. Shod hooves have much reduced proprioception, as well as the increased concussive forces, so the horses couldn’t protect themselves as well as they would have been able to barefoot. All the horses that I rode ended up footsore on their last leg, obviously choosing the soft ground over the hard and slowing substantially on the downhills; they all felt like they had sore feet and shoulders, and I can’t help but wonder if that would have been the same had they had been left barefoot as they are used to working.
The horses are mainly used to working, moving sheep and cattle. I think they didn’t quite see the point of setting off into the hills with no animals to follow and with no discernible purpose to the journey. Especially with our uncertain navigation, which led to a constant question at the back of my mind about whether we were going the right way, I found it hard to inspire them with a positive sense of where we were going, let alone why. The first pair we rode were from the home estancia, where they run the start camp and the Gaucho Academy, and they were quite good at leaving home and heading off into the distance. Horse number two, the liver chestnut, settled into his role and turned out to be a good keen worker, albeit with not much direction and no brakes, until we had an unfortunate topple.
The topple was genuinely unfortunate. We were doing well on day 3, we had made good navigational choices, we could see the horse station and we were on time to get there at 550pm, just before riding hours finished. The liver chestnut was quite slight for me and with the added weight of the packs, I could feel he was getting a bit tired. I was doing my best to nurse him along in a pony trot until we got a bit closer to the station and I could walk the last couple of kilometres. Then he just stepped off a massive pampas grass tussock a bit awkwardly. He almost overbalanced, I flopped a bit over his narrow shoulder and the saddle slipped sideways. There was no saving the situation, he almost went over with me as I slithered to the side and then once I landed on the ground and the saddle settled around his belly he panicked and bucked and bucked and bucked until the saddle bags were completely detached from the saddle and himself, and debris lay scattered around the pampas. Then instead of running for the horse station he came straight back to me to be rescued! The saddle was trashed, so we had to lash it all together and walk in on foot, sending the other two riders ahead so that only Duncan and I got the inevitable time penalty. That was the turning point for us, the split-second moment at which our race ended. We had to wait out a 3-hour penalty, there was a substantial race hold the next day due to bad weather, and Duncan and I then drew two very difficult to catch horses. To slow us down even more, I had been issued a replacement saddle with girths made out of literal seat belt canvas with holes burned in the Kevlar and clever leather knots to adjust the length; I couldn’t work out how to do them up without Gaucho help! All this faffing meant we were very late leaving on day 4 and we just never caught up that time.
Horse number 3 was the best, a fabulous, fast looking palomino with a great work ethic. He was great in the woods, refusing to step into the bogs, careful abut going between trees and very clever with his feet but unfortunately, he had no belly to hold the dodgy seat belt girth in place so literally every time we pointed up a hill or incline the saddle slipped back and needed re-adjusting. Every time. And his lovely smooth ground covering canter was wasted in the mountainous woods.
The horses that finally finished us were the daft draughts, Bob the Cob and Larry Lasagne. They were a terrible pair together, neither wanted to go in front of the other and riding abreast, they reached a pact that averaged 2km an hour. Trot was literally more effort than it was worth and canter unthinkable. We walked on our own two feet a lot because it was quicker and less effort to drag them than to kick and cajole. I must have walked 50km over those two days. I do think they would have been better with a herd of cows to move but they literally saw no point in our forced walk over the mountain. I just couldn’t find a way to raise my energy and encourage them on any faster. All the horses I have ridden in my life have been blood horses, or mostly blood. Even Cal here at home, with his half-draught body, has more of a thoroughbred brain than those two. A blood horse will always go, until they really can’t. These two really wouldn’t go, even when they could. Duncan said it best- “why would you breed this?”
One of the Aussie girls apparently was so desperate she even took her belt off and tried to use that as a ‘motivator’ – the horse just stopped dead and looked at her. Turns out it’s not just the polo ponies that are tough- you really can’t bully an Argie horse!
Larry and Bob broke us. After two days of dragging them over the hills, I just didn’t have another reluctant horse in me. And as we had already been carried forwards, completion was out of the window, the finish line was just an esoteric concept on the map, there was a soft option available, we could and did choose not to draw at the final horse station and not to ride the last two legs.
The place
The terrain in Patagonia is quite simply brutal. And the maps truly don’t do it justice; with 50m contours and 4km to a square, the maps were based on historical surveys, more like vague sketches in a tour guide than navigational assistance. We had the GPS for the direction of travel, but it simply took me ages to tune into the landscape. The flat, luscious, green grassy flat bits hid horse swallowing bogs, you would try to follow a contour around the bog to find enormous ravines that didn’t figure on the map and either needed circumventing or crossing, the roads were ephemeral in their reality and the hills complex and rocky. There seemed to be no easy routes across country. I thought I was good at following the faintest path of where others had been before, but it turns out that in Europe, quite a few others must have been there before compared to the foot traffic in Patagonia!
It’s also country where climate change is happening starkly in front of your eyes. The hanging glacier on Fitzroy is much smaller now than the pictures I have memorised from the cover of Summit 42, a magazine I have kept since 2008 because they kindly published one of my articles. Richard Llewellyn described seas of lush green grass; the Welsh pioneers thought they had arrived in paradise. The sheep may have made them their fortunes but they trashed the land. Overgrazing damage and resulting desertification was obvious wherever you looked. Another Duncan quote- “it’s just clapped-out sheep country”. The wind in Patagonia is biblical, and one day it blew up a proper dust storm, that we rode through covered up like Bedouin in the desert.
Many of the mapped lakes were dry, as were the creeks and rivers, all fed by glacial melt water that no longer reached that spot and there were ghost estancias, remains of houses and farms, abandoned when the river moved, or the dust blew in, or the grass simply ran out.
There were a couple of places where we rode alongside a fence marking a private estancia on one side and National Park on the other; on the National Park side of the fence, you couldn’t see a scrap of bare ground while on the ranch side there were patches and tussocks of pampas grass and thorn bushes with scraped bare earth in between.
The fences are incredible. Wood is not scarce in Patagonia and the estancias are marked out by mile upon mile of high-tensile wire fence, with only the occasional wire gate. This added to the navigational challenge; the fences aren’t marked on the map so you would be tootling along nicely with a fabulous plan, to be foiled by a fence line that you then had to ride up and down until you found the gate…often on the road that had seemed a long way around but turned out to be the easiest passage through the complex terrain.
The challenge
Although described as the world’s hardest adventure horse race, this was still a carefully curated experience rather than a pure adventure. You pay your money; you land at the hotel and everything else from that moment is taken care of for you. You will get horses, you will get the gear you need, the route is set, you will be kept safe, and you will be scooped up and rescued if required. The logistics for this race were awesome and crazy and outrageous and even outlandish. We had our own GD helicopter on standby for medical emergencies. One of the ghost estancias was 25km over the hill to the next horse station by an old wagon road yet 150km detour via the main dirt road that was suitable for the back-up vehicles. Imagine the challenge of getting enough horses for 40 contestants and the crew to each horse station via mostly dirt roads. In Argentina when people give you the estimated time of arrival to an estancia, they give you a time it takes to get to the turn off from the main road- the driveway is then about 20km long!
The route had been chosen for us. It was deliberately chosen to take us through difficult country, and there were some sections of the route that I felt there was dubious ethical justification to take the horses over. For example the rock bogs on the plateau of death looked horrific. We got lifted over that bit due to timing out after our slow, long day in the woods, but the videos I have seen were of people who were right on the breadcrumb GPS route and the horses were still getting badly bogged. Rock bogs are a peculiar sort of hell. Imagine a lovely shale, scree stone surface that looks safe to walk on until the horse sinks in clay up to its chest and as it is fighting for its feet, there are rocks and boulders flying. There were other sections where the route had been carefully chosen to test people but testing people here also involved testing the horses. The horses didn’t sign up to satisfy some random human egotistical goal. It was almost like the route setters had asked themselves the question – how outlandish an area can we put these people in? There was generally a simple logical route, but if you ‘chose’ another route, where could you end up? And the simple logical route was often not particularly obvious, the marked roads ephemeral in the dust, or lost to recent change, the lakes often dry, the glacial melt streams on the map historical notes rather than accurate representation of the current topography. Erik, the organiser, asked an Aussie girl why she came straight down the mountain on the last leg instead of using the path? The answer was “if I had found the f-ing path of course I would have f-ing used it…”
Other authors have given the organisers some flak but personally I think the logistics were incredible and the basics that were promised us were tremendously well fulfilled. The curated adventure was delivered safely and with humour and grace. The crew were friendly and just helpful enough, and they certainly seemed to have their own fun. In fact, they had quite a few wild party nights! HQ were always there, watching the tracker dots for our safety; it wasn’t their job to reassure distant partners or explain strange dot location aberrations to the outside world. This is an adventure race, with way more safety mechanisms built in already than I have been used to on any other expedition. A medic team, a team chopper FFS, HQ monitoring our positions using the In-Reach beacons to make sure All OK, as well as keeping the race field together so the crew could safely cover any eventuality.
I found the idea of HQ watching the dots both reassuring and inhibiting- even the basic comms requirement of ‘All OK’ when we stopped for the night felt like seeking permission or approval from a benevolent big brother with eyes in the sky. Obviously, the route finding, the horses and the terrain were the daily challenge but in terms of safety I felt very well watched over and protected. I’ve been more worried trying to get back to a mate’s house for dinner after a lonesome winter day out in the Welsh hills when the snow and the fog have merged completely and there is no phone signal, and no one really knows quite where you are.
The clearing
It has taken me a few weeks to work out what the GD meant to me. It certainly wasn’t life changing for me, nor the scariest thing I have ever done, nor is it the most dangerous thing I have ever done. It has given me some good, fresh stories to add to the repertoire! It is the toughest thing that I have done involving horses, and I have an ongoing personal dilemma about the ethics of that.
It taught me that I am no good at pushing myself when there is a get-out clause. The ongoing fascination of intrinsic motivation. When the only way out is up and over, or down, when everything relies on me and my mates getting ourselves out of a sticky situation, then I have proved I can be that machine. However, on the GD, once we had been vehicle lifted across one leg due to missing a cut-off deadline, then we could not have completed the route and the drive to suffer just vanished. I became a tourist on holiday then, and riding over the finish line would have been a form of cheating. Had there been no lift, no cut offs, no adventure category, just ride as far as you can in the time allowed, then I would have ground it out to the bitter end, like I have done everything else in my life, but when there are options offered then grinding it out is an exercise in ego not necessity.
I learned that I don’t really like using horses just for conveyance anymore. I get my thrills from playing and training with beautiful horses and riding and working with them in a way that makes everyday horses blossom into magnificence. The days when horses are a tool for my ambition are gone for me. The Gaucho horses did show us what incredible athleticism and wisdom these animals are capable of, picking their way up and down steep scree slopes, working their way cleverly through the dense boggy forest, sure-footed over tricky rocky terrain…horses really are the best means of transport in tough country. Even if we did walk beside them for huge chunks of the hard stuff, they still carried all our gear. The Patagonian terrain was brutal, the distances some of the horses did quite long, especially with the extra miles spent getting lost or diverting around obstacles, and motivating spent, footsore horses to move along for my personal achievement doesn’t sit easy with me. A fellow participant said to me that the Gauchos will be using horses in this crazy country for the next 200 years and that is probably true, but using horses to move your precious livestock down to the winter grazing before the snow sets in is a completely different matter to a group of tourists swooping in and using horses to win some arbitrary adrenaline challenge.
I learned that I have found my soul mate. Duncan and I made a good team, working well together, with no cross words and we were completely congruent in our aims and our principles. We aimed to be slick and efficient and see how things went! Had the ‘race’ not gone awry early on we may have made different choices, but we were in complete accord with our decisions once everything changed. In dealing with horses, we learn early on in life that anything can change in a heartbeat, that one moment of inattention changes the day, and once the liver chestnut trashed the saddle and the gear, our trajectory was set. And we were fine with that. Everyone showed their true nature on this trip, the good the bad and the ugly. Not all of it was pretty, but some of it was pretty amusing. And we pair came home safe, sound, with bones and principles intact. We didn’t lose the plot, we didn’t bawl anyone out, or behave badly, we looked after our horses, looked after ourselves and each other, and got to ride some nice enough horses in spectacular country.
Most of all, I learned that big travelling circuses are not my bag. It’s different when I can go as trip medic for the circus- that brings its own purpose and its own challenges outwith the arbitrary adventure. I like camping out, and I don’t mind eating dried pasta, and getting grubbier by the day despite flannel washing like a Victorian. But what I really like is the dreaming and the planning stage, and I also like the uncertainty of never knowing exactly how a big do will turn out. I would like to go back to Patagonia, although other wild places in the world are also available, but I would like to go with a small select group of like-minded friends, treading lightly in the world, self-contained, self-sufficient, sneaking under the radar, learning the feel of the land by travelling through like a whisper of wind.
All GD photos by the fabulous Kathy Gabriel
