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.”
