The way Ben Thamer sees it, he’s been preparing for a trip like this since he was 6 years old straddling the arm of the family couch and watching “Lonesome Dove.”
“To ride in the shadows of American heroes and mountain men and see so much of the country the average person never gets to see is the biggest adventure I can think of,” he said.
It will be like rolling back the calendar 120 years for Amarillo’s Thamer and Ben Masters, along with Jonny Fitzsimmons and Thomas Glover. The recent Texas A&M graduates are going on a bit of an adventurous horseback ride in two months.
In mid-March, the four will take recently broken mustang horses to the Mexican border town of Nogales, AZ. They will proceed north the width of the country, covering 3,000 miles of rough and dangerous terrain and will arrive at the Canadian border in six months.
And if they get enough financial backing, there will be a documentary film to record the equine odyssey.
“I could say we don’t want to get real jobs,” said Masters, 24, “but the reason really is because it’s still there. There’s almost an uninterrupted route all the way from Mexico to Canada of wild lands, and that’s pretty neat. Before the West gets more chopped up and developed, we want to see it the way it is.”
