Read Online The Rescue of Belle and Sundance by Birgit Stutz - Free Book Online Page B

occurred to me that the seat wasn’t meant to hold two people. Matt was such an expert driver, though, that I was never worried or frightened. Instead, I enjoyed the scenery. The ride through the narrow valley, along the frozen Blackwater River, was absolutely breathtaking. The deep blue of the mountain sky, the pristine white of the snow and the gleaming silver of the ice on the branches and treetops are some of the brightest and purest colours in creation.
    “Have you never been up here before?” Matt asked. He seemed shocked when I said no.
    Matt sits a snowmobile the way I sit a horse. We each look comfortable and completely at home on our respective mounts. For Matt, a sled offers adrenalin-fuelled thrills, the chance to cover ground that would take weeks by foot or horseback, and views of peaks and valleys that photographs and video can never really capture. Seeing them with my own eyes, I understood for the first time why sledders came up here in such numbers.
    Half an hour into the ride, the valley widened and we drove through several cut blocks—large areas that have been clear-cut by
logging companies. The Rocky Mountains lay before us in all their majesty. At one point, Matt stopped and pointed toward one of the mountains. “That’s where the horses are,” he said.
    “Way up there?” I asked. He nodded. It still seemed so far away.
    About ten minutes further along, Matt guided his snowmobile off the logging road and started veering uphill. Here the horse trail led off to the left. The trail we took, to the right—the same one the horses’ owner had mistakenly taken—was known by locals to be impassable in summer due to thick downfall and bog. The ascent was quite steep at times, and I had to hang on tightly to Matt to avoid sliding off the back of the snowmobile.
    When we reached the Mount Renshaw warming hut, we briefly stopped and went inside. Leif sat alone in the cabin, munching on a sandwich. Matt steered me to the back window and pointed. “That’s where we’re headed.”
    We didn’t rest there long. I really wanted to see the horses. Beyond the cabin, the trail was no longer groomed and the terrain was wide open. The scene struck me as unforgettably beautiful, but wild and rugged, even menacing, and the depth of snow defied belief. The average winter snowfall on the Renshaw is ten feet. To traverse the mountain with a passenger and avoid getting stuck in that depth of powdery snow, a snowmobiler has to be very skilled. And Matt is that. He instructed me to slide to the front of the snowmobile while
he stood behind me, steering his sled carefully. The ride was very bumpy, and more than once my chin glanced off the handlebar. But I didn’t care. I was just so exhilarated to finally be up here.
    At the top of a steep hill, just below Mount Renshaw, Matt stopped again and aimed a gloved finger down toward the treeline at the bottom of the bowl. “That’s where they are,” he said.
    I didn’t know a snowmobile could go down such a precipitous slope as the one we now descended, with Matt once more at the front and me behind. I wasn’t frightened, thanks to Matt, but the steep drop offered a wild adrenalin rush.
    Spencer and Joey were already waiting at the spot where the horses had been found three days earlier. Matt showed me the trench that he and the other volunteers had dug so they could walk the horses down into the shelter of the trees. I could see bits and pieces of hay, remnants of the first meal the two horses had eaten in a long, long time.
    I stumbled down the narrow trench surrounded by high walls of snow. How on earth, I wondered, did they get those horses to walk through this steep passageway? My mind raced. I was impatient to see the horses but, on the other hand, worried that I would be really upset by the sight that awaited me. The track was slippery, and I practically ran downhill, almost falling on top of the horses, who looked at me curiously. Both whinnied, that