Six Weeks Gone: Search Continues for Missing Horses in Wyoming High Country

The original story by David Madison for Cowboy State Daily.

More than six weeks after they vanished in the backcountry north of Moran, two missing horses are still unaccounted for — despite plane flights, drone searches and help from outfitters and wildlife officials.

The pair slipped away from camp on Oct. 27 during a late fall riding trip, and nothing solid has turned up since.

“It was such a nice fall. We were just riding, camping out,” horse owner Ron Ostrom told Cowboy State Daily. “We looked for them for a week up there in the mountains before we decided that we had to come out.”

The Turpin Meadow area is the last confirmed location for the horses, though later reports from trail users have been scattered and inconsistent.

“Because of people riding up and down the trail, we were given mixed stories on whether they were seen,” Ostrom said. “But that Turpin Meadow area has got to be the last point.”

Ostrom hasn’t exactly given up and gone home.

He hired a pilot out of Cody and has flown over the backcountry three times, looking for any sign of tracks, bodies or movement.

“And no sign of any tracks or anything,” he said. “You’re looking for whether they’re alive or they could be dead. But just nothing at all.”

Through that pilot, Ostrom discovered he wasn’t the only one missing horses. An outfitter in the same general region also has two or three horses missing on the Cody side. The pilot has been flying for both searches, and the two parties have loosely coordinated efforts.

“We don’t really know the outfitter,” Ostrom said. “It’s the guy that was flying and said, ‘Well, last week we flew looking for these outfitter horses.'”

All told, as many as five horses could be loose somewhere in the rugged country between Moran and Cody.

“It’s the way we are in Wyoming,” Ostrom said. “It’s like, ‘Well heck, if we got a chance to help somebody, we’re always going to do that.'”

You’d think missing horses would just draw sympathy, but Ostrom says the publicity has come with some uglier reactions too.

“We’ve been getting some hate emails and phone calls,” he said. “They accuse us of being outfitters and that we torture these horses and stuff like that.”

Still, he said most of the feedback has been supportive.

“Ninety percent or higher is good,” he said. “There’s always a few oddballs somewhere.”

To widen the search net, Ostrom has also reached out to wildlife officials who conduct aerial wolf surveys, hoping pilots might spot the horses while they’re already up.

“I called them and said, ‘Hey, keep your eyes out. There’s a few horses up there,'” he said.

Ostrom also brought in drone operator Alex McElligott of Keystone Operations in Idaho after reading about his thermal-imaging work.

McElligott flew a $20,000 thermal drone around the Turpin Meadow Loop Trailhead, scanning for heat signatures that might indicate the horses were nearby. But federal rules quickly boxed him in.

“There’s a designated wilderness area to the north of it,” McElligott said. “So without any permits, there wasn’t really anywhere to look.”

He searched what he legally could for a couple of hours.

“Not really much farther into the woods I could go, legally speaking,” he said. “There was nothing there.”

Applying for permits to fly drones in designated wilderness isn’t realistic in an urgent, time-sensitive case like this, he added.

“You don’t know if you’re going to get approved in 12 days or 90 days,” McElligott said. “That’s why we didn’t apply for anything.”

Still, he understood why Ostrom wanted him there.

“He felt like he needed to exhaust all resources,” McElligott said.

With winter now fully settled into the high country, the obvious question is whether the missing horses can survive on their own.

There’s at least a chance, says Heather Schultz, chairman of the Wyoming Back Country Horsemen of America and a national board member.

“It’s not good, but I’ve heard stories,” she said. “I’ve heard some crazy stories about horses joining the elk herd or whatever. Following the elk to forage.”

Schultz says her own Arabian, Apache, has a habit of bonding with other species — not just horses.

“He’s not equine-specific with his bond,” she said. “Bison and elk and moose — I think he would join any herd.”

She recalled riding in Colorado and coming across bison for the first time with him.

“I was a little concerned because I hadn’t had him around bison,” she said. “He… wanted to stay with the bison and not go with all my friends on their horses. I was just kind of laughing. I was like, ‘Dude, just go, we’re going. We’re not staying with the bison.'”

Whether the missing horses north of Moran might latch onto an elk herd, find good forage or get trapped by deep snow is impossible to know, Schultz said.

“You just never know,” she said. “It depends on the personality of the horse, the country they’re in, how well they can move around. There’s just so many variables.”

For now, all Ostrom and the others can do is keep watching, keep flying when they can, and hope that somewhere in that vast, snowy country, a few tough horses are still standing.