Benny Westcott
Sweet Home residents might have been surprised to find a young woman riding a horse through town on Thursday, Sept. 21. That same woman ate an entire pizza from All Star Pizza that evening. Apparently riding a horse across the entire U.S. gives you quite an appetite.
The horse is a seven-year-old named Finley. The woman is 23-year-old Gin Szagola, originally from Pennsylvania. Both are quite the adventurers.
The duo is traveling coast to coast from New Jersey to Oregon, about 3,500 miles. They started in May of 2022, wintered in Chadron, Neb., and then set out again this spring. That’s about a 16 month trip in all, including 12 months of active traveling. Szagola hopes to finish the journey in or around Newport on Friday, Sept. 29.
Finley is a former wild mustang from a herd management area known as Palomino Butte just south of Burns. He was captured in August 2021. His herd was rounded up due to overpopulation and water shortages in the area – without intervention from local ranchers and the Bureau of Land Management, many of the horses would have died of dehydration.
Szagola adopted Finley in January 2022 at a BLM facility in Tennessee. She chose him based on a single photo she saw of him. She then worked with him for the next three and a half months. The duo left for the trip when Finley was just 120 days out of the wild.
At their start in New Jersey, Finley was still too scared to be touched by strangers, and he could not be safely ridden, so Szagola opted to lead him across the entirety of the state. By central Pennsylvania, Finley became fully comfortable around people and she began riding him solely in his rope halter. The same has been true ever since.
Szagola was actually supposed to arrive in Sweet Home a day earlier than she did, but she fell behind schedule when she lost Finley somewhere in the Cascades. Finley had broken his rope and wandered away, but Szagola was able to find him after four hours thanks to a GPS tracker she braided into his mane after Finley was lost for an entire week in South Dakota’s Wind Cave National Park in May.
Throughout the long trip, horse and human have stayed either on public lands or with a host.
One of those hosts was Tammie Atwood of Mountain Home Drive in Sweet Home, who Szagola and Finley stayed with on Thursday evening. Atwood agreed to host the pair after a close friend who had heard about the epic journey asked if she would be able to put them up for the night.
Not only was Atwood able to offer Szagola a warm bed – and an All Star Pizza pizza – but, since she has four horses of her own, she was able to provide Finley with a field, as well as seed and grain. The duo arrived at Atwood’s place in the early evening Thursday and left the next morning at 9 a.m., headed for Tangent, where they stayed the night on the Tangent City Hall grounds.
Naturally, Atwood asked Szagola why she is undergoing the journey.
“The only thing she really said to us was, ‘When I was in school, I was a person who was by myself,” Atwood recalled. “‘I didn’t have any friends, and was a very introverted kind of person.'”
She told Atwood that she just wanted to accomplish some things and that this was what she decided to do.
Atwood came away impressed with Szagola’s horsemanship.
“I think that Gin is absolutely in sync with that horse, and she put everything for him first, everything he needed,” Atwood said. “She limited how far they would go every day, she walks for part of the day, she takes a 10 minute break every hour so he can stop and graze or get water wherever they’re at.”
She said that Finley looked great. “He looked no different than any one of my totally pampered horses,” she said.
Atwood also experienced a magical moment with Finley.
“There is an old wives’ tale that wild mustangs face the sun as it rises,” Atwood said. “So I got up at the crack of dawn to go watch the sunrise to see if he actually did it. And he did.”
As unbelievable as Szagola’s journey sounds, it’s not the first epic trek she’s undergone. In 2019 she walked solo from Delaware to California, a trip that took nine months to complete. Then, in 2021, she cycled from South Carolina to California, which took 81 days. That same year, she cycled from Washington to Michigan, which took 40 days.
Szagola is a University of North Carolina student who is interested in attending veterinary school in the future. Those interested in learning more about her journeys can check out her blog at http://Ginandfaith.com.