On a stretch of lonely road somewhere west of Hartney, Man., Kimber Sider takes a call on her cell phone. She’s on horseback, moving slowly under the wide expanse of a prairie sky.
“So far, so good. We’re kind of doing one day at a time,” she said, with the unmistakable sound of her horse’s hoofs clip-clopping on the gravel road.
“We’re trucking along.”
The former head wrangler at Stump Lake Ranch in Kamloops, B.C., and her seven-year-old Percheron-Hackney cross mount are attempting to ride across Canada and started from Trenton, N.S., in April.
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Averaging eight to 10 hours in the saddle per day, Sider’s best day so far was a backside-punishing 106 kilometres.
Her horse Kat, short for Katrina, is a stocky-legged former police horse trainee originally bred for pulling buggies in Ontario’s Mennonite country. Sometimes cranky and opinionated, the mare is shod with tungsten carbide horseshoes and rubber overshoes to prevent hoof damage from gravel and pavement.
A two-week break in Ontario helped heal aching muscles and bones, she said, as they worked out a plan to negotiate the traffic-heavy, two-lane meat grinder known as the Trans-Canada Highway through northwestern Ontario.
They alternated between hitchhiked trailer rides and safe stretches of road to get through the chokepoint in early August, before hitting the back roads of Manitoba’s flatlands.
With no support team packing the accoutrements of RV living behind her, Sider has chosen to stay off the beaten path mainly for safety reasons.
By travelling side roads, she has encountered less traffic, and the trip is quieter, more relaxed and scenic, with interesting people to meet along the way.
It also fits in with the goal of her journey: proving that Canadians are still every bit as generous and hospitable as they were in 1949, when 20-year-old Barbara Kingscote set out for British Columbia from Quebec on a horse named Zazy with the goal of returning it to its owners.
Inspired by Kingscote’s account of her 16-month journey, reprinted in 2006, entitled Ride the Rising Wind: One Woman’s Journey Across Canada, Sider set out this spring to discover “the generous heart” of the country.
Her travels are documented in photos and a web log at www.ridecanadawest.com, as well as video clips posted on YouTube.
The 25-year-old, who has degrees in film and theatre from York University, is planning to make a documentary of her trip entitled Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History with the camera she’s carrying in a backpack and the help of cinematographers willing to shoot regional segments along the way.
Apart from the inevitable aches and pains, Kat’s mare moments, an annoying newspaper reporter in Kenora, Ont., and motorists who pass at frightening speeds, Sider said her experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
“The idea of our ride is to see if we can make it across Canada on Canadian kindness. We’ve only camped out one night and the rest of the time people have taken us in,” she said, adding that so far her horse has never lacked generous country hosts willing to offer oats, hay, a stall or pasture for the night.
The grueling routine of riding through all kinds of weather, from the broiling sun to pouring rain, and now lately hordes of mosquitoes, has started to take its toll.
Exhaustion is a “perpetual state of being,” and the pair still has three more provinces to cross before arriving at the West Coast sometime in October.
Once she gets to the Pacific Ocean, will she turn around and ride all the way back?
“No. This is a one-time-only deal,” Sider said with a laugh.
“We’ll try to hitchhike back as far as we can, then someone will come and get us from Ontario.”
Earlier this week, Sider was approaching Weyburn, Sask.
