Horseman making 2,500-mile trek

BOISE – Outside Owyhee, Nev., a mountain lion stalked Phil Dawson and his horse-and-mule team for a couple of days before losing interest. Near John Day, Ore., the 58-year-old horse trainer from Hagerman in Southern Idaho used his single-action U.S. Army Colt Peacemaker on a cheeky timber rattler that slithered boldly into camp.

But Dawson, who started his roughly 2,500-mile trek across the high deserts and pine forests of the Rocky Mountain West on May 1 with an Appaloosa mare named Apache Gold Chip and a pack mule that goes by Copper Penny, says the region’s natural dangers sometimes pale to manmade obstacles in his way.

Six weeks ago, for instance, while crossing a rural road in Oregon, his mare injured her hind leg in a cattle crossing.

And just this week, Dawson’s replacement horse gashed its leg on the brick foundation of a business sign near downtown Lewiston, requiring him to use his silk handkerchief as a tourniquet to stem bleeding before a veterinarian arrived with a needle and stitches.

“We’ve been in all kinds of things, from deep in the woods to deep in the city,” Dawson said in a telephone interview from Lewiston. “Traveling rural America, I see how difficult it was for the early settlers to travel without a road, or without a trail sometimes, going cross country, through the trees.”

Since his horse’s latest mishap, he’s been staying in the recreational vehicle of a couple he met on his journey. They offered to put him up until Apache Gold Chip – now healed from her cattle-crossing mishap in mid-June – is driven north so he can continue riding.

Up next: A journey from Lewiston to Missoula along roughly the course that explorers Lewis and Clark took in 1805 and 1806 as they negotiated the Bitterroot Mountains on their way to and from the Pacific Ocean.

Dawson, who hopes his trip will serve as a fundraising springboard for a foundation to help children in need of organ donations, raised about $20,000 on a similar 2008 journey he took with his wife, Patty, from Hagerman to Richmond, Va.

Dawson said his solo journey has been more difficult than he’d imagined.

In addition to the mountain lion and occasional rattlesnake – “he’ll be a hat band for a friend,” Dawson says with a gravelly chuckle of his encounter in Oregon – he ran out of water for two days in the northern Nevada desert. On his way over the Oregon border, his mare sank to her belly three times on a patch of swampy ground. More recently, the blazing summer heat has prompted him to cut daily travel to just 10 miles, down from 15 at the start of his journey.

Come Tuesday, Dawson plans to resume his overland trek, first along back roads to the Idaho logging town of Kamiah. From there, the Bitterroots loom, with a possible route over Lost Trail Pass where Lewis and Clark encountered steep, harrowing terrain while trying to reach the Columbia River 205 years ago.

Like Lewis and Clark, who relied on help from Idaho’s Nez Perce Indians to survive, Dawson says he’ll take advice from the region’s modern-day residents to select his final course. If all goes as planned, he’ll be back in Hagerman via the Idaho towns of Salmon and Sun Valley by mid- to late-September.