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HAPPY TRAILS: Suhr has traveled
more than 150,000 miles on horseback.
Rod Searcey |
For many septuagenarians,
holiday travel means cruise ships and a cabana near
a beach. For Julie Suhr last December, the itinerary
involved four days and 210 miles through Death Valley.
On a horse.
It was called the Death Valley Encounter, an endurance
ride that is nothing new for Suhr, who has undertaken
scores of such journeys. She has been called the grande
dame of endurance riding, the Michael Jordan of her
sport, and, as Sports Illustrated put it in
1987, “a woman with a relentlessly sunny disposition
and a will of steel.” She will be 80 years old
in April.
Suhr has been completing long-distance trail rides
for more than 40 years and estimates that she has traveled
upwards of 150,000 miles on horseback. And she is far
from finished. She still rides four or five days a week,
enjoying her favorite view “between the ears of
a good horse.”
“I have no plans on stopping until I can no longer
pull myself into the saddle,” she says.
Suhr is best known for her performance in the Western
States (Tevis Cup) Trail Ride, a 100-mile, one-day ride
from Lake Tahoe to Auburn, Calif., along a former Pony
Express route. A three-time winner of the Haggin Cup—awarded
to the rider who finishes in the top 10 with the horse
in the best condition—Suhr stopped riding 100-milers
in 2000. This July, she will enter the Tevis Cup again.
“I have grave doubts that I can make it, but I
would rather try and fail than not try at all,”
she says.
Her legend is secure in the riding world, but Suhr
cemented it with the publication of Ten Feet Tall,
Still (Marinera Publishing, 2002), a memoir that
recounts in detail her long-trail experiences. The book
itself was a source of pride, she says. “In 1944,
I received a D in creative writing from Miss [Edith]
Mirrielees, one of Stanford’s outstanding English
professors. It took me 58 years to recover from it.”
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