With Dikohe-Horse Holders Project, the Chiricahua Apache National Foundation requested a New Mexico Outdoor Recreation Grant to provide underprivileged youth a six-day adventure during which they will learn elements of horse husbandry, equestrian skills, and land navigation and survival training. Dikohe-Horse Holders Project will culminate in a four-day guided pack trip into the Gila Wilderness. Dikohe-Horse Holders Project is a transformative six-day outdoor undertaking that enables participants to learn and demonstrate important principles of self-reliance and teamwork while experiencing therapeutic fulfillment, accomplishment, and joy throughout the exploration of the heart of the lands of the NDE, Chiricahua Apache, Nde benah.

Initially, our youth participants Dikohe-Horse Holders will learn to feed, groom, saddle, mount, and ride a horse provided by the Chiricahua Apache National Foundation. Following instruction in horse husbandry, Dikohe-Horse Holders will enter the Gila Wilderness. They will learn its history, camp in ancient traditional sites of the Chiricahua and Warms Springs Apache, visit the birthplace of Geronimo, battle sites from the Apache Wars, and take in Apache Pictographs.

Following this phase of familiarization, Dikohe-Horse Holders will discuss survival skills and the art of Apache storytelling to teach-back the lessons of their experiences. Along the way, Dikohe-Horse Holders will learn to identify indigenous plants and animal species and observe first-hand the problems of climate change, invasive species, human encroachment, and industrial overreach. Dikohe-Horse Holders will learn through teaching, observation, and direct engagement how to identify the causes and effects of climate change. Next, Dikohe-Horse Holders will learn about natural and human-involved methods of conservation and repair before creatively imagining new methods and practices to combat and prevent climate change and other anthropomorphic harms that impact the Gila Wilderness.

Around evening campfires and trail dinners, Dikohe-Horse Holders will share their thoughts on what they are experiencing, ask questions of the guides and of each other, and informally present ideas on how to steward the Gila. In essence, our Dikohe-Horse Holders will become steeped in the natural, spiritual, and historical worlds that make the Gila Wilderness such an important part of Outdoor New Mexico, and they will emerge as confident stewards of this Sacred Traditional Lands. Three trips per year, each with three to four participants of Dikohe-Horse Holders between the ages of twelve to eighteen, will run from May through October. At this stage in their personal development, participants will be sufficiently emotionally mature to complete and enjoy their experience and physically strongenough to become companions with, and ride, a horse through natural, wild terrain.

On arrival day, our Dikohe-Horse Holders will arrive at WolfHorse Outfitters with their overnight essentials. (Personal layered clothing, etc.) They will enjoy an outdoor meal and guidance and preparation for the Pack Trip from our adult supervisors. Then our Dikohe-Horse Holders will complete their rider training and prepare their horses for the Pack Trip. Dikohe-Horse Holders will spend their first two-days and two-nights in Arenas Valley, Grant County, at home base camp of WolfHorse Outfitters, an Apache owned and operated business permitted to operate in the Gila Wilderness, by Gila National Forest. There, they will receive instruction in feeding, grooming, leading, saddling, corral riding, and equestrian safety. They will be fed healthy meals and beverages during the day. Our Dikohe-Horse Holders will at all times be supervised by two adults. They will then spend the first evening at their home if not far away, or with their Guardian(s) at the very convenient KOA campground and cabins at Arenas Valley, which we will reserve and provide for. (Once all of our Dikohe-Horse Holders have been approved and ready for the Pack Trip, the group of four youth and two adult supervisors (one being Joe Saenz, owner of WolfHorse Outfitters) will head out on their “Drag the Wolf Trail” adventure into the Sacred Ndebenah Wilderness.) They will then ride into the Gila Wilderness and spend four days camping and riding. Returning to WolfHorse Outfitters Homebase on the afternoon of the sixth day.

It is our greatest hope that this six day experience will not only teach these youth about the effects of climate change on the forest and its inhabitants, educate them on ways to reverse these negative effects, and encourage them to develop ideas to preserve the landscapes, creeks, rivers, plants, birds, and larger mammals that they are now able to identify; but we hope that these six special days will live in their memory and in their hearts for a lifetime.

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