The Border By Horse

Some time ago I told my dentist about my idea for the Borderlands Project. His family is from a borderlands area in southeastern Idaho near Montpelier, where I used to own a small community weekly newspaper.

My dad would love to do this, he told me. So I got his dad's email address and eventually sent him an invitation. I heard back from him last Thursday.

"Yes," he answered. "I'd be interested in participating. I've never been out in the area near the UT/ID/WY border, so that would be interesting."

Then he added, "Any chance that I could ride a horse? I have a knee that has been acting up which may limit the distance that I could walk." So, we are now in the process of working out how to do some border stretches on horseback. This will add a different set of challenges than walking or boating the borderline but horses are about as eco-friendly a means of transport as you can get.

It also turns out that my riding companion is an electrical engineer with a Ph.D. who has years of experience in academia, nuclear power, and the space industry. He even knows who the Cassinis were! And better still, he is currently designing landing systems for aircraft that make use of GPS satellites so I'm hoping he can help me more accurately orient my handheld GPS unit more accurately to the border line.

This is shaping up to be a good traverse. I have a little experience aboard a horse, which you can read about in Summer Stretch, at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. It is a little story I did about the cowboy days of my youth.