A girl and a mule with 'no quit'

After her friend ran away with a cowboy, she's still in the saddle for her fund-raiser

It was a fundraising journey made in heaven, until Dana ran off with a cowboy.

April Nabholz and her friend Dana were 600 miles into a horseback trip across the West to raise $7,500 for Heifer International, a nonprofit charity dedicated to relieving global hunger and poverty. But during their last night of camping in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Dana told Nabholz over a campfire that she'd fallen in love with "Cowboy John," a rancher she'd met along the way in Central Montana. She would be returning with him to Grass Range once they emerged from the wilderness.

And she'd be taking the three horses, too.

When Dana and her love-at-first-sight cowboy left Nabholz at the rodeo grounds in Augusta on a moonlit night a few weeks ago, the stranded traveler had $40 to her name and a halter-broke pack mule named Honeychild.

"I had 20 hours to decide what to do," Nabholz, 24, said during an interview at the Columbia Falls area home of Russ and Maxine Barnett, where she's been staying for the past two weeks. "To continue alone would've required different gear. They offered to take the mule back, but what it came down to was I made a commitment to the fundraiser and to the mule. I felt my goals weren't finished."

Nabholz, as resourceful as she is adventurous, made arrangements with three different haulers to transport her mule to the Barnetts, who own and operate the Outfitters Supply tack shop in Columbia Falls. She and Dana had purchased most of their pack gear from the Barnetts, so she knew how to get in touch with them.

She's now lining up trailer rides to get to Corvallis, Ore., where she'll work in exchange for Honeychild's keep at a mule-training facility. Once she gets to the coast, she intends to complete the final 400-mile leg of the 1,000 miles she and Dana set out to ride, leading her mule in a pack saddle along the Oregon Coast Trail.

Nabholz figures she'll spend the winter in Oregon and even may attempt to ride Honeychild cross-country to her native Pennsylvania next summer.

"We'll find some creative way to get home," she said.

NABHOLZ CAN laugh now about being abandoned by her love-struck friend. She's even chatted with her once on the phone. But on that dark night in August, when she realized she was truly on her own, it was a little scary. She wrote about the experience in her online blog, at www.communequest.blogspot.com

"I'd been fantasizing about the Oregon coast for months," she blogged. "I'd been preparing for this trip for over a year … I wasn't ready for an ending yet. Furthermore, part of our mission statement talked about exercising faith in humanity and experiencing vulnerability at its hands. 'This is my test,' I told myself."

Nabholz grew up in York, Penn. - Amish country - where she was homeschooled through high school, an experience she calls "a spontaneous and mostly joyous dance with the wild tangle of life and learning."

She was introduced to Heifer International as a child, when her "honorary grandmother" would routinely buy goats in Nabholz's name to benefit the organization. By the time Nabholz was in her late teens, she was organizing fundraisers of her own to help the Heifer project and was named Youth Volunteer of the Year for Heifer International a few years ago.

Nabholz first met Dana "over a bed of lettuce" while they both worked at an organic seed farm in Vermont. They shared an interest in horses and kept in contact every few months. It was five growing seasons before they met up again, this time at a midwinter bonfire in Vermont. Seeds for the trip were planted.

After Nabholz returned from a trip to Tibet, where she'd been reminded repeatedly of how much she had compared to that country's poorest residents, the experience solidified the idea of a cross-country trek.

"I realized how much I did have," she said. "The idea of traveling with few belongings and being vulnerable" became an appealing quest.

The women decided to begin their trip from the Little Missouri National Grasslands in Western North Dakota, to give their horses a chance to get into the packing routine before they reached the rugged Rocky Mountains. They left North Dakota on June 5.

Along the way, they set up presentations, mostly at local churches, to talk about Heifer International and raise money and awareness.

They set out with just $500 between them, after some unexpected veterinary bills depleted their starting stash. Oats for the horses, groceries and gas to haul the mule Nabholz bought from Cowboy John's neighbor took most of their money.

"A lot of people have offered me money and I try not to accept it," she said. "Honestly, the more I am in need, the harder it is to take people's money. I have a lot of pride."

The women had some tough times on the trail, battling the elements with severe sunburn at one point, and severe thirst another time when their water filter broke. They harvested wild edibles along the way, sprinkling store-bought salad dressing on handpicked greens to make a meal.

And they got by on the kindness of others, time and time again. People along the way gave them a place to stay sometimes, and offered pastures where their horses could graze.

As they rode through the tiny town of Ingomar, a fellow told them about the re-enactment of Custer's Last Stand at the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Cowboy John was part of the chuckwagon crew at the re-enactment.

Dana was smitten with the cowboy.

"They're both farriers and horse trainers," Nabholz said. "It was love at first sight."

When the women reached Helena, they decided after-the-fact to get the mule John had told them about, so he picked them up, drove them back to the ranch and they spent a couple of weeks helping out at the ranch.

Cowboy John accompanied them to the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the rest, as they say, is history.

NABHOLZ HAS a degree in creative writing, but what she really wants to do is save, or at least improve the world, by building compost piles. She and her father recently converted her 1983 Mercedes Benz to run on used vegetable oil, which she says she finds "terribly, terribly liberating."

She loves to travel, yet has a strong urge to settle into an agricultural lifestyle that includes owning a dairy cow.

She dreams of opening the first-ever "pay as you can" local foods dining venue, "complete with a wood-fired bread oven and resident chickens, dairy goat and draft mule."

All of her notes for the project have been piling up in a journal, under the heading "My Ideas for This Place."

When her dream restaurant materializes, she'll have plenty of stories to serve up as well.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com