Cowboy riding 6,000 miles on horseback to highlight mustang plight stops at Culver

 

Culver Academies equestrian students met with an old-fashioned cowboy riding horseback across America who also is a modern-day social influencer seeking to promote the adoption of wild horses.

Jake Harvath and his two mustangs, 13-year-old Eddy and 7-year-old Denver, have traveled 4,100 miles on America’s backroads over the past 11 months, traveling from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. They still have nearly 2,000 miles to go before they get back to his hometown of Heber City, Utah, hopefully in mid-November.

He has a YouTube channel with 13,000 followers, an Instagram account with 75,000 followers, a Facebook page with 19,000 followers, a TikTok account with 12,400 followers and a GoFundMe page that has raised $37,005, nearly double his $20,000 goal. He also has a mustang following him nearly everywhere he goes.

“The horses are doing a phenomenal job. It’s been an incredible experience,” he said.

He embarked on the quest to raise attention to the plight of too many mustangs being held in captivity by the federal Bureau of Land Management because there are too many wild horses on public lands in western states.

“It’s unfortunate that they’re rounded up and live the rest of their lives in a pen with zero purpose. And our federal government spends millions and millions of our tax dollars every year to feed those horses,” he said.

He’s branded the trip “The Year of the Mustang,” which he describes as a better-branded business that he compares to a startup company.

The 24-year-old horse trainer made a stop Tuesday at Culver Academies where he told students at the Indiana boarding school about his ride, which he started on Sept. 25, 2023.

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Capt. Sean “Skip” Nicholls, Culver Academies’ director of horsemanship, said he was happy to have Harvath talk with students.

“To me it’s an inspirational story,” Nicholls said. “Coming from the United Kingdom, we have native horses ourselves and there’s the same plight. I like to see that Jake is raising awareness of this option of getting a horse for not much money.”

It only costs $150 to adopt a mustang, while a domesticated horse is going to cost at least a couple thousand dollars. The challenge, though, is now you have a horse that needs to be trained.

“You have to either invest in someone to train them or have the ability yourself to train them,” Harvath said.

Harvath told a dozen freshmen and sophomore students gathered in the stalls at Culver that adopting a mustang is like taking in a wild deer, saying they see people as predators to be feared.

“It’s quite a training process. It a whole ’nother element to getting the animal to trust you,” Harvath said.

Harvath said the reason for his ride is to spread the word that these mustangs are up for adoption. He said he’s met a lot of people who have expressed an interest.

“That’s my favorite part of that is when people say they’ve gone and adopted their first wild horse or that they’re going to go get their first wild horse,” he said.

Nicholls said he is interested in seeing if Culver could adopt a mustang.

Nicholls said he also wanted the students to see that Harvath is “old-fashioned, frontiersman lifestyle that this country was founded on.”

Harvath has endured temperatures ranging from 9 below in eastern Oklahoma on Jan. 16 to nearly 100 degrees in Culver on Tuesday. He started the trip with three mustangs, but he had to send his favorite – 18-year-old Belle – back home a quarter of the way into the odyssey because she was slowing down and losing weight.

A cadet asked him if he had fallen off during his ride. He said he hadn’t, but he did have to jump off twice.

 

 

He had to jump off when he was riding along a narrow Tennessee highway with two others on horseback when a semitrailer got a little too close. He had the horse step in what looked like a grassy ditch. The horse sank shoulder deep into a bog. Harvath helped pull him out.

He had to jump off another time when his horse slipped on ice in Arkansas.

When authorities at the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge that connects Pennsylvania to New Jersey wouldn’t let him cross on the pedestrian part of the bridge, he rode as the mustangs swam across the Delaware River near where George Washington made his famous crossing in 1776.

He said it was a scary crossing.

“It’s a big river, about 200 yards wide in total. A lot can go wrong in that amount of time. We had about 50 yards of it where you’re not touching the bottom. You’re full-on swimming and the horses’ heads are above the water and I’m up to here,” he said, holding his hand up to the bottom of his sternum. “The current does drift you a little bit. But the horses did a good job. They kept it straight. We caught the rocks on the other side.”

So many people were upset when they saw what had happened that they called the bridge authorities to complain. The officials at the bridge reached out to Harvath to see how they could help him on his return trek.

The Culver students asked Harvath questions such as where he keeps his clothes, where he keeps food for himself and his mustangs and how he charges his cellphone.

He told the students that he keeps his clothes rolled up in his bedroll, which is carried along with his other belongings by whichever mustang he’s not riding that day. He packs military-style Meals-Ready-to-Eat food for days when he’s in remote areas (he went three days in New Mexico without seeing a person), but usually someone along the ride offers him a meal. His horses are used to being in the wild so they can usually find their own meals. And he keeps a pack of batteries that can keep his phone going for up to five days when there isn’t an outlet available to charge his phone.

The original plan was to go to the Pacific Ocean, but Harvath said he decided to cut the trip short. He left Utah clean shaven and will return with a long scruffy beard and long hair and a much better knowledge of his horses.

“Day in and day out you learn little things about your horses that you never would otherwise. Little characteristics from living with them 24/7 that are hard to find any other way because you are riding them all day long for weeks on end,” he said.

Harvath said at the start of the trip he was averaging 16 miles riding nine hours a day and they are now averaging 20 miles a day, using GPS to chart his course.

“The route is heavily dependent on where we find places to stay,” he said.

When in remote areas, Harvath and the mustangs sleep in the woods.

Harvath said it was just his good fortune to be able to take a rest day at Culver Academies, home of the Black Horse Troop, grab lunch at the Lay Dining Center, and meet with students on a hot, humid day. He said he’s enjoyed talking with students and church groups across the country.

“It’s helping me spread the word about wild horses,” he said.