15 minute read
CLEMMIE WOTHERSPOON
FEATURE
It’s the journey, not the destination
When Clemmie Wotherspoon started out on the Bicentennial National Trail with her small herd of horses, little did she know that living her dream would be full of unexpected twists and turns, writes JANE CAMENS.
As soon as I meet Clemmie Wotherspoon, it occurs to me that she’s the sort of person people are drawn to – she’s charismatic, this 29-year-old tall, blonde adventurer.
When I catch up with her Clemmie is marking time, house and horse-sitting for a friend in The Pocket, tucked into the foothills of the Byron Bay hinterland in northern New South Wales, her dream of completing the Bicentennial National Trail on hold for a few months. She’s looking after 15 horses on the property, seven of which are hers. She also works at a beach-and-bush-trail riding ranch, and, most importantly for her, seeks to bring anyone interested into a closer connection with horses.
“My vision,” she tells me, stroking Odin, one of her foster-care dogs, “is to connect people with nature and encourage them to investigate the animal-human connection.”
Clemmie started out to ride the 5,330 km Bicentennial National Trail from Healesville in Victoria in March 2018. The track follows old stock routes and brumby tracks running up the spine of the Great Dividing Range, from Healsville to Cooktown in Far North Queensland. It was opened in the early 1970s by a committee headed by the legendary RM Williams, and is possibly the longest, non-motorised multi-use trail in the world. Reports suggest that fewer than a dozen people have completed the trip on horseback. The trail links 17 national parks and over 50 state forests, crossing both private and public land.
It’s a Big Adventure, and nowhere near half over for Clemmie, who initially planned to take a couple of years to complete the journey.
The dream has been with Clemmie since she was a child, growing up in industrial Delaware. “I was raised by my American mum and my Australian dad,” she says. “I was obsessed with a book Dad gave me, Robyn Davidson’s memoir, Tracks, and the Australian landscape.” The book, which was later developed into a film, told Davidson’s remarkable story of her 1987 camel trek across the Australian desert. “I had this crazy idea to come to Australia and do something similar,” Clemmie says.
The yearning for nomadic travel grew stronger when she went off to university in Portland, Oregon, to study
Whiskey and Ari on a training trip on Mt Bogong with Clemmie’s second family and sponsors Bogong Horseback Adventures
psychology, focussing on behavioural neuroscience.
“In my spare time I started cycling,” she tells me. “I was on my bicycle with road maps and sleeping bags and cans of tuna fish, sleeping in the bush, in graveyards - anywhere.” She covered a total of about 10,000 kilometres by bike. It turned out to be good starter training for the tough life she would later choose.
On one of her cycling trips she met a man and fell in love. She moved in with him on his farm, but found he was emotionally abusive. “It destroyed me,” she says. “The relationship was addictive and I felt completely broken by him.” She found a job waitressing, earning US$6.50 an hour, which kept her just afloat but struggling financially as well as emotionally. “I felt I had nothing to live for and would break down every day in a panic or grief,” she recalls.
But at the café, in her darkest hour, there was some light when Clemmie met a woman who introduced her to natural
horsemanship. “She taught me about horses,” she says. “She slowly built up my confidence enough to leave the guy, and that’s when the dream came back.”
With the little bit of confidence she’d gained, Clemmie called Equine Assisted Learning specialist and horse trainer Darcie Litwicki of Silver Heart Ranch in Arizona. Darcie’s teaching rests on the belief that: ‘Horses carry the wisdom of healing in their hearts and offer it freely to those who open themselves to it’.
Clemmie credits Darcie for teaching her natural horsemanship from the ground up. “I was so anxious, such a mess,” she says. “I was scared of everything in life.” It turned out that Darcie, this tough cowgirl, had also suffered severe anxiety. “Every single day of my life I’m thankful to her. She gave me all this love and totally changed my life.”
Darcie taught Clemmie how to train horses using natural horsemanship methods. “Something triggered a dream to ride through Australia. It was insane. To do that, you need extensive money, skills, and knowledge,” she says, laughing at the memory. “Other people might do it, but they arrive much more prepared than I was.”
Clemmie simply googled ‘pack horse Australia’ and connected with Bogong Horseback Adventures in the High Country of Victoria. The Baird family, who run BHA, have been working with horses in the area since the 1860s. These days they run expeditions on mountain horses in some of the best mountain riding terrain in Australia.
Clemmie asked the family if she could apprentice with them for free. “With the money I’d saved from waitressing I bought a plane ticket and they picked me up. I lived with them on and off for a year. I swear to you, they’re my second family now,” she says.
The Bairds gave her the opportunity to go out with them on trails, taught her
about training green horses, and had her working with them in horsemanship clinics. But working for free has its limitations, so she said goodbye to the Bairds, and took a paid job with a trail riding company called Equathon near Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
“At that point, I was studying for medical school,” Clemmie says. “My plan was to do a year of medical studies, then do the trail for a year, and then finish medical school to become a remote physician.”
However, fate stepped in when Kate Pilcher, the energetic founder of Globetrotting, the world horse trekking travel agency, joined a one-day Equathon ride and Clemmie told her about her dream.
“Kate offered to sponsor me,” Clemmie shakes her head as if still not quite believing her luck. “She’s a dream maker.”
Kate wanted to know how soon Clemmie could start, so the plan to study medicine was postponed, with Clemmie having just three months to get herself organised, raise enough money to make the journey feasible, plan her route and, of course, secure the right horses. The horses had to have good temperaments, short stout bodies, strong legs, good hooves and healthy appetites, whilst being good doers. Through luck and persistence she raised the equivalent of $40,000, much of it ‘in-kind’ in the form of gear donated by generous sponsors. She was also selected from an impressive pool of women adventurers for the 2018 NancyBird Walton Sponsorship, worth $5,000.
Clemmie’s friends at Bogong gave her a horse, Mac. High country horsewoman Helen Packer, who has sadly since passed away, also gave her two trained brumbies, the gorgeous Zulu and her pinto, Whiskey.
“All these people really wanted to make my dream come true,” says Clemmie.
Packing for such a trip was challenging. “You need to take everything you’d take on a backpacking trip, plus an electric fence, hobbles, nose bags, vet supplies (including snake bite kit, antihistamine, eye drops, penicillin, bandages, vetwrap, colic treatment, muscle and joint gel) and farrier tools - and that’s just the start,” she says.
Main: Clemmie with her horses at The Pocket.
Above: Clemmie and Zulu
of guidebooks, topographical maps, and a compass. She had to learn how to hoof trim but she also carried boots in case her barefoot mob needed them. In addition, she carried a satellite personal locator (SPOT), and a backpack with emergency gear.
The plan was that two of the horses would be used each day as pack horses while she rode the third, she would ride for two days and then rest the horses for one day, and she expected the entire trip to take two years. Her initial aim was to reach Omeo, a small town on the edge of the Snowy Mountains by Easter, then on through Kosciuszko National Park, across the New South Wales border to Khancoban, and then on to Jagumba Station.
However, before Clemmie and her small herd started out on the trail, she met someone who wasn’t part of her plan. “I met Andrew when I was saving caterpillars from crossing the road,” she says, as if saving caterpillars is something people do every day. Andrew Beard didn’t know much about horses at the time they met, but he ended up learning quite a lot just being with Clemmie.
“With horses, if something can go wrong, it will go wrong,” Clemmie told a newspaper reporter who spoke to her near the start of her ride when she finally set off from Healsville in March 2018.
Something did go wrong, and soon. Clemmie’s first weeks alone on the track were literally a baptism of fire. The Victorian bush around her was ablaze. She and her horses were surrounded by fire, but miraculously the horses didn’t panic. “I rode through a fire barrier with fires blazing on the hillside,” she recalls. “Luckily, the winds were with us.”
One hot evening, having travelled about 30 kilometres, Clemmie had her back turned when three wild horses ran into camp and two mares, Whiskey and Zulu, took off with them. “I could see them, running with several other horses on the top of a hill,” she recalls. “I knew people say there’s no way you’ll find your horse if that happens and I thought I was screwed! Zulu was wearing a $7,000 custom-made Tony Gifford saddle, with my headlamp and thermals attached. I knew the blizzards were coming and would soon make my route impassable.”
She spent the next three days on foot looking for the horses, knowing her trip was over if she couldn’t find them. “I’d been living and sleeping with them. They were my best friends,” she says, emotion in her voice. “They had halters on and I was scared to death that they would get caught on trees and struggle to death. I had actually given up when, suddenly, out of the scrub, Whiskey and Zulu walked up to me. I fell on my knees and broke down crying with relief.” By some miracle the saddle was still intact, and the thermals and lamp were still attached.
The blizzard came but Clemmie and the horses weathered it out together. The bond between them grew, as did Clemmie’s admiration for her intelligent, sure-footed companions. At one point
Left: Arriving into Canberra with their brumbies: Five days to train the three Kosciusko brumbies, and two weeks to ride from Jagumba Station to Canberra through the blizzards of the Snowy Mountains in mid-winter.
her tent collapsed on her in the middle of the night under the weight of the snow. “I had to spend four days living in a small outdoor dunny,” she says, giving a slight shiver.
Remember that guy she met saving caterpillars? Andrew caught up with her, walking on foot beside her. “He basically followed me for months,” Clemmie recalls, smiling. He would arrive for a while, usually when she was near a town, stay a while, and then after a week or so leave her to her solo adventure. “But he was growing on me,” she says. He’d even started talking about training his own team of brumbies to accompany her.
Apart from Andrew’s yo-yo visits, her brother Thomas joined her from America for two weeks, and her parents, who had moved from the United States to Victoria a few years earlier, also arrived one night when she was a few hours drive from of their new home. “They turned up with a bale of hay and and a bottle of whisky,” Clemmie says, laughing. “In the morning, as I was all packed up to ride away, mum asked if she could join. When she was in her twenties, she walked across Guatemala and travelled the world extensively, which is surely where I get some of my sense of adventure from. She walked alongside my three horses, carrying only her water bottle and raincoat. We shared the same sleeping mat and took turns with my raincoat. She completely blew Andrew and Thomas out of the water in terms of toughness and grit!”
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Clemmie with Zulu and Andrew.
Andrew was with Clemmie in Kosciusko when two farmers asked them to do a bit of work, warning them that a blizzard was coming. “We decided to stay for three days, but in the end we stayed for three weeks to help get the crop in,” she says. “Andrew hated hiking beside me while I was riding and he’d talked about catching a couple of brumbies so he could ride along with me.”
The farmer turned out to be cattleman Barry Patton, a renowned brumby trainer, known among the Man from Snowy River folk, whose partner Kathrin Guderian is a vet. Their property, Jagumba Station, is located alongside the Tooma River inside Kosciusko National Park.
When Barry asked if they wanted some more brumbies, it was the chance for Andrew to put up or shut up about wanting his own team. Barry helped them set up a corral trap where they knew there was a mob of brumbies. After five days they caught three brumbies - Bobean, Jagumba and Tumbarumba.
“We stayed with them in the yards, from sunrise to sunset, they were terrified until the third day when they let us touch them and then we could immediately ride them bareback, saddle them, pack-saddle them and put tarps on them. On the fifth day we rode them out of Jagumba. Kathrin and Barry supervised us training those three brumbies,” says Clemmie. ‘Their kindness touched us deeply. Barry got us a new pack and did everything to help us. It was amazing. ”
Clemmie says she was impressed with Andrew when she saw him get on Jagumba bareback for the first time. ‘He was so calm and collected,” she says. “I had more experience with horses so I was more aware of how dangerous it could be. Despite his greenness, the horses responded well to him. He is a gentle and loving soul, and the horses picked up on that.”
Finally Andrew, Clemmie, and the six horses in their care, rode out of the Snowy Mountains through mid-winter blizzards together for the two-week ride into Canberra, little realizing that the trip was about to be abruptly cut short.
“In Canberra we were forced to quit and take an extended break because of the
ongoing drought,” Clemmie says. “There wasn’t enough water and grass along the track for the horses to survive, and the track was closed.” By early Autumn next year she’s hoping the rains will have renewed the tracks so she can get on with fulfilling her dream.
Abandoning the trip in Canberra was hard. As well as drought conditions ahead, Clemmie had severe stomach pains and discovered she had a benign tumour the size of a melon that had to be removed. It took her eight months to recover. “I was really exhausted and developed severe anxiety, panic attacks and depression again,” she says. “I’d worked for four years to get this trip happening, and it was disappearing in front of my eyes.”
At the same time, having found Byron Bay as a haven whilst she regroups (her precious horses trucked up from Canberra to join her), Clemmie tells me that the journey up the spine of Australia has become about more than just getting to Cooktown. It’s about her relationship with her horses and her increasing focus on the healing power of horses. While she waits for rain, she is running an equine therapy program, using her brumbies.
She also teaches horsemanship skills. “I think my studies in behavioural neuroscience have really helped with the underpinnings of my horsemanship for me,” she says. “Our peripheral nervous system is constantly getting all this sensory information and only a small percentage of it gets processed by our frontal lobes as conscious thought. So we’re constantly reacting to all this peripheral stimuli without realising it. Horses are so sensitive to those physiological changes - which is how they survive in the herd - and they’re able to scope us very quickly. When you practice horsemanship you find a sense of equanimity, patience, and the ability to respond and not react to all that sensory information. There’s also a reciprocal relationship. Horses help us develop our emotional maturity and ability to communicate. I want people always to be thinking about what’s going on for the horse, what the horse is receiving, how the horse is benefiting. I don’t think you can experience the full benefit of animal communication unless you can look at it from both sides.”
Clemmie’s equine therapy and horsemanship lessons are part of a larger long-term ambition to work with rescue brumbies in mental health rehabilitation, something that’s already happening in Australia and in the US. She hopes to make a documentary of the next leg of her trip, promoting brumby advocacy and adoption. “Riding through brumby country on originally wild horses has made me so incredibly passionate about the strengths of the breed, particularly their loyal, steady temperaments,” she says.
Back in Byron Bay: Andrew with Kosciusko brumby Jagumba’s foal Nas, who was born when they reached Canberra.
To follow Clemmie’s journey or to contact her for natural horsemanship or brumby training lessons go to either her FB page: https://www.facebook.com/ WildTracksAustralia/ or to her website:
