Donna Barton Brothers: All Or Nothing, Every Day

Arguably the most famous female jockey of all time and now a renowned NBC Sports analyst and author, she’s had a voracious appetite for victory since the day she was born.

By JENNIFER B. CALDER

It’s been almost 30 years, but Donna Barton Brothers still vividly remembers watching her first Kentucky Derby in person. The emotional experience hasn’t been diminished by the years, and she can’t discuss that day, that race, that horse, without her eyes welling up. Winning Colors, the third—and MATTHEW STOCKMAN/GETTY IMAGES PHOTO last—filly in Derby history to win this prestigious race, was a massive gray horse, bigger and more athletically built than many of the colts in the 1988 field. She and jockey Gary Stevens took the lead out of the gate and held it to the wire, earning her the respect of virtually everyone involved in horse racing.

And when Brothers thinks back, calling that day’s events a pure display of “girl power,” it’s easy to see that part of what makes the memory so emotional are the parallels to her own life.

Triumphing in a sport dominated by males, Brothers holds the distinct honor of retiring as the second-winningest female jockey by money earned in history, second only to her best friend Julie Krone. Her fearlessness, moxie and self-determination earned her the respect of her peers and helped her parlay an incredibly successful riding career into an equally impressive correspondent job with NBC Sports. Viewers of the Derby, Preakness or Belmont Stakes will recognize Brothers as the inquisitive, dynamic, petite blonde navigating on horseback following each race to speak with the winning jockeys still astride their victorious mounts. She possesses an apparently natural gift for bridging the divide between those “in the know” and the average viewer.

Her love for the sport is obvious in her coverage of the races, yet nowhere is her inclusive approach more evident than in her conversational and chummy first book, Inside Track: Insider’s Guide To Horse Racing. In it, Brothers pulls back the curtain on the rarefied and often intimidating world of horse racing, leaving novices better educated on everything from what to wear on race day to how, and when, to bet.

Speaking with Brothers it quickly becomes clear why she’s achieved such a level of success—she’s focused and confident with a mischievous and quick sense of humor. The trajectories of her career paths are eclectic, but her desire to fully understand— to examine and dissect—is her intellectual fingerprint and marks all of her endeavors.

GOD, I HATE THIS

Brothers, now 50, grew up in a family of jockeys. Her mother, Patti Barton Browne, with whom she is still close, began riding in 1969 and was one of the first licensed female jockeys. Brothers’ two siblings followed suit, but she was never that horse-crazy girl who was dying to ride—she had no desire to follow in her family’s footsteps. In fact, she had every intention of not becoming a jockey.

“I think I just took the horses for granted,” Brothers admits. “It was quite easy and very mundane for me.”

Brothers’ parents divorced when she was a year old, and she was never close to her father, a farrier and rough stock rider on the rodeo circuit. She’s unsentimental as she recalls being forced to visit him one summer when she was 10. It did little to change her mind about horses or her father.

“He was an alcoholic and a horse shoer, which meant we had to go to the barn in the morning. I’m not very big now; you can imagine how I was at 10. But I would have to hold the horses for him. ‘Stand in front of that son-of-a-bitch,’ was code for, ‘I’m about to hit him up under his belly with my rasp, and he’s going to run you over,’ ” she says with a laugh. “And you wonder why I wasn’t romantic about horses? I was thinking, ‘God, I hate this.’ ”

The middle child of three, Brothers was an excellent student.

“School was really easy for me, and my brother and sister weren’t very good at school. I grew up in this house, and I felt like, ‘There are two different choices. I can maximize the potential of my brain, or I can follow my stupid brother and sister,’ ” she jokes.

Brothers decided she wanted to go to college, but the problem with being the first in your family to try something new is that there’s no one to show you the ropes. No one reminded her to take the SATs or tour college campuses. And though she was bright—she finished high school in three years, despite having attended seven schools in 11 years, as she and her siblings followed their peripatetic mother to different racetracks—Brothers soon faced the dilemma of how to make enough money to pay for college.

“Mom’s rules were pretty clear. As long as we were going to school, we could live for free, but once we stopped, we had to pay rent or move out. And by that time, Mom had married her fifth husband, and I thought, ‘I am so out of here!’ ” Brothers recalls, laughing.

It was then that Brothers decided to turn to the thing she knew best: the racetrack. She started as a groom but quickly came to understand it would never pay enough to cover the cost of college, much less provide the adequate time needed to attend.

Donna Brothers (née Barton, pictured aboard Colonial Winter after a 1996 race at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.) was a jockey for about 12 years, retiring in 1998.

So she learned to gallop horses. And her world expanded.

“Once I started galloping horses for a living, one, it was a pretty decent living, and two, it gave me the freedom to go anywhere!” she says. “Now I could travel!”

After all those years spent at the track with her mother, Brothers’ nostalgia kicked in. She wanted to ride at these venues the other jockeys talked about. So she toured the United States for more than four years, until she eventually grew tired of the travel and “longed for a career rather than a job,” she says. “I was 21. It was time to grow up.”

THE INEVITABLE LURE

Brothers wasn’t sure what this new career would look like, but she was adamant that it wouldn’t involve racing.

“An agent I knew had been trying to get me to ride races for a while, and I was like, ‘Nah, I don’t think so. It’s too easy; I want something challenging.’ That was my idea,” she says.

In an attempt to quiet him and finally eliminate jockeying as a career option, she agreed to give it a shot. And everything changed.

“I rode my first race, and I was like, ‘Holy shit! Was that ever the most exciting thing I have ever done!’ And, by the way, it’s a lot harder than I thought,” she says.

Brothers’ mother, Browne, had known her daughter was born to race all along.

“I always said, ‘As a jockey, do you know what part of my body I use the most?’ And people would answer, ‘Your arms, your back …’ No. My brain,” Browne says. “There are far more races won and lost with your head than are with a whip. And I’m inclined to believe that after Donna rode a few races, she came to realize how much of a mental game it was.”

It was this mental aspect of racing, combined with the exhilaration, that appealed to Brothers.

“It was really, really exciting. And challenging! I realized when I rode that first race that my brother and sister weren’t as

stupid as I’d thought,” she says, chuckling. Brothers soon turned to her suddenly muchwiser brother, Jerry Barton, for help in her quest to understand the mechanics of racing. She remembers hearing him and other jockeys discussing the ins and outs of a particular race and “Because I grew up in Patti Browne’s household, I didn’t feel like a pioneer by any stretch of confessing to him the imagination,” says Donna Brothers (left) of her mother Patti Barton Browne (center). Brothers, that she just didn’t Browne and sister Leah Bruin were all jockeys. understand how he could see all that at 40 miles per hour, flying through the mud on the back of precocious Thoroughbreds, with decisions needing to be made in fractions of seconds. “Jerry just said, ‘You will. After you fall, after you go down, you’ll start to notice all that stuff,’ ” Brothers says. “So I thought, ‘Wow, OK. I can figure this stuff out now, or I can wait until I fall.’ And after that I just started noticing everything. Self preservation, that’s why they do it. It’s not so you can be the person who comes back with the most dramatically detailed description of the race. It’s so you don’t go down behind the horse that breaks down on the lead.” Riding smart is as important as riding well. It also helps that Brothers has a fierce competitive spirit. “The difference between a competitive person and being competitive as a top jockey is that, in most cases [outside the racing world], it’s enough to have a competitive desire that says, ‘I want to win.’ But when you’re out there riding at the top level, you have to also be willing to say, ‘And I want you to lose. None of you are my friends once that gate opens,’ ” she says. This is what differentiated Brothers from some of the other female jockeys, including her sister, Leah Barton Bruin. “If I can’t win, I hope you do …” Brothers says, mimicking her sister in a singsong voice, then laughing. “Not me—if I can’t win, I don’t want any of you to win!” Ask Brothers what the most thrilling part of racing is (other than the obvious: winning), and a huge smile spreads across her face. “When you have the best horse in the race, and the moment you become aware of it,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re 3-5, and everyone else is a long shot in the post parade. It doesn’t matter in

PHOTO COURTESY OF DONNA BROTHERS

the starting gate, and it doesn’t matter in the first quarter mile, really, because anything can happen. But when you get to the quarter pole, and you realize that you are on the best horse in the bunch, and you just squeeze them a little bit, and they go.”

HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER

By the time Brothers started riding races in the late 1980s, attitudes towards female jockeys had evolved since her mother stood in the irons.

“Because I grew up in Patti Browne’s household, I didn’t feel like a pioneer by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, my mother was one of the first half dozen women to be licensed as a jockey in the United States. She was the leading female jockey in the United States all the years she rode, and then for four years after she retired. When she came up, she really had to fight. And I mean physical altercations were a regularity for her with the other jockeys,” Brothers says with a laugh.

“She demanded respect and made sure she received it,” she adds.

Browne often had to take matters into her own hands—literally— as cameras along the track were not as plentiful, and disagreements, as you could call them, that happened during a race were difficult for stewards to enforce.

“If a jockey came back in my mother’s day and said, ‘You did this or that,’ she would just hit them. She didn’t feel like dealing with them and would just take them out,” Brothers says and chuckles again.

But Brothers employed a different tactic.

“By the time I came around, there were more camera angles, and the stewards were able to tell what happened,” she says. “If another jockey was upset with something I did, I would just ask if they

Donna Brothers, an NBC Sports correspondent for racing and other equestrian sports, is as well known in the racing world as many of the jockeys she interviews.

ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

minded meeting me to go over the films the next day. If they were just bullying me, it stopped there, and if I had done something wrong, they were appreciative of the fact that I wanted to learn.”

In addition to on-the-track shenanigans, Browne fought other gender stereotype battles off it.

“When my mother was riding, the predominant theory was it was impossible for a woman to be as strong as a man. By the time I came along, all that had been established—women could do it. There had been some female jockeys who had already earned respect, not only from their peers, but also from trainers and some owners. It was possible for a female to be as good as a male, but you still had to prove it,” Brothers says.

MENTORS AND MINDSETS

While having her mother as an inspiring example, it was only after Brothers had been riding for half a dozen years that she came to understand how much she was missing by being a female jockey.

She was accepted and respected as an athlete, but she was also isolated from the majority of the other jockeys due to her gender, putting on and taking off her silks in a separate locker room. The post-race analysis wasn’t something Brothers knew she was missing until she shared a jock’s room with other female jockeys at Churchill Downs (Ky.).

“When I started sharing a jock’s room with people like Patti Cooksey and Julie Krone— day in and day out with other jockeys who were really, really good—I learned so much,” Brothers says. “I moved up leaps and bounds because I had somebody I could talk things over with and ask their opinions of races I rode.

“So I think there is a little bit of a disadvantage in that manner,” she admits.

As far as overt sexism, she felt it to be rare among her peers and even the trainers. Where it revealed itself was with some of the owners.

“I think, even still to this day, I think it’s hard for owners who aren’t in it day in and day out and don’t witness what one person does with a horse versus another. For a lot of owners, it’s hard for them to imagine a female could be as good as a male. But simple math will tell you otherwise because we have weight limits. When we all have to be 110 pounds or less, that kind of levels the playing field,” she says with a laugh.

“Being able to cover the Triple Crown and be there after every single one of American Pharoah’s races from the Kentucky Derby on, it was just such an honor and an experience I will never forget,” says Donna Brothers, pictured with “AP” and his jockey Victor Espinoza.

A TRIPLE CROWN YEAR TO REMEMBER

While a Triple Crown win was thrilling for every horseloving spectator in 2015, it held perhaps a bit of extra meaning for those who have made the track their home and workplace.

Donna Barton Brothers eloquently described her emotions in a New York Times piece published not long after American Pharoah was anointed with the honor following his win at Belmont Park (N.Y.).

“I went to bed at 2 a.m. and awoke at 6 a.m.,” she wrote. “When I stepped out of the shower, it hit me: the Triple Crown. It happened. Then I cried tears that had been waiting a lifetime to flow. Or at least it seemed like it.”

But even now, a few years later, the delight hasn’t diminished.

“Looking back, it’s still just as magical as it was at the time. Being able to cover the Triple Crown and be there after every single one of American Pharoah’s races from the Kentucky Derby on, it was just such an honor and an experience I will never forget and will always be grateful for,” she says.

“And because there was that 37-year gap, I don’t think any of us will ever forget how hard it is to do!” she adds.

“The jockeys get that, and the trainers get that, but the owners don’t always get it. So sometimes I felt frustration from certain owners who wouldn’t ride me because I was a girl,” she says.

This presented itself most blatantly in the 1996 Kentucky Derby. Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas wanted Brothers to ride Honour And Glory, a horse he was training in the Run for the Roses, but the owner said no. He, unequivocally, was not going to ride a female jockey.

Brothers was, and still is, philosophical about it.

“The press tried to make a big deal out of it, and I said, ‘Look, the guy spent millions of dollars on horses and horse racing. If that is his decision, that is his decision.’ I’m not going to tell the guy who has spent millions of dollars who can ride his horses, but yes it was frustrating because I knew I was every bit as good as the rider he was getting. In fact, I felt like I was better, and so did Wayne Lukas, and so did a lot of the other jockeys in the jock’s room, but there was that frustration that I would never be able to convince him of that, so it is what it is,” she says.

“But guess what?” she adds. “I think sometimes Latinos deal with that. ‘Nah, I don’t want to ride him because he doesn’t speak good English,’ or, ‘No, I don’t want to ride him because he’s black,’ or, ‘He’s 5'7", how could he possibly be strong?’ I think a lot of riders deal with some sort of discrimination, and so I never was of the mind that I would hang my hat on [the fact] that I’d been discriminated against as a woman because I knew that other people dealt with discrimination from other things.”

A 110 PERCENT KIND OF WOMAN

After nearly 12 years of race riding and more than 1,100 wins, Brothers decided to step away from the track in 1998.

“As a jockey, you have two emotions coursing through your veins at all times. The first one is that thrill, the excitement. The other one, to a much lesser extent, is the knowledge of the danger,” she says. “I rode for 11 ½ years. For 11 of those years, the thrill and the excitement of it towered over the knowledge of the danger. But for the last six months, the knowledge of the danger began to become about equal with the thrill and excitement.

“As I became more and more aware of the dangers, it became less fun, and I knew it was time to quit riding,” she continues. “Scared riders put everyone in a bad position. And I never rode scared, but I could feel the knowledge of it creeping up, and I was just done. I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

Brothers’ retirement from racing that September coincided with her marriage, two months later, to horse trainer Frank Brothers.

Donna Brothers (left) accompanied friend and former jockey Patti Cooksey, a breast cancer survivor, in leading the 2009 Kentucky Oaks Survivors Parade at Churchill Downs.

Donna Brothers (left), brother Jerry Barton and sister Leah Bruin were all jockeys, following in their mother’s footsteps.

The two had been dating for several years, but there’s an archaic rule in racing that if a jockey and trainer marry, and a trainer has a horse in a race, the jockey must ride that horse or sit the race out. Since neither Frank nor Donna was willing to put her in that position, their marriage waited until her exit from the jockey pool.

Following her retirement, feeling ready for a new challenge, Donna accepted an offer in 2000 from NBC Sports to be their racing correspondent on the ground—or on the horse, as the case may be.

Calling it “baptism by fire” she recalls, “At first I was such a fish out of water. I was lucky enough to be successful as a jockey, so I was interviewed a lot, but when you’re on the other side of that, and there’s a camera watching, the hardest part is figuring out what questions to ask of people, because I already knew the answer to them. But the questions are for the viewers, not for me.”

“I got a little bit lost with [retiring], and I am in total awe of the energy she put into recreating herself,” says friend and former jockey Krone. “I think she is flippin’ amazing. She’s phenomenal.”

In 2002, Donna finally realized her dream of attending college, where she once again found success. Majoring in psychology, she received not only the highest semester score out of her 600 fellow students in Psychology 101, but also the highest score in the history of the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Just as with racing, Donna became enthralled by her studies and was determined to wholly pursue them.

“I just loved psychology. I just absorbed it, and if I didn’t understand something, I had to sort it out to understand it, to get the answer right,” she says.

College and her gig for NBC Sports overlapped, and what started as four shows a year for NBC exploded to 20 by 2005.

“It got to the point where I couldn’t do both well. My grades were still great, my work appeared to be good, but the last Breeders’ Cup I did while going to college was at Lone Star [Park (Texas)] in 2005. I realized that it wasn’t my best show,” Donna says. “Nobody knows what I couldn’t ask because I didn’t know the follow up to it, but I knew.”

Unwilling to give less than her best to either work or school, practicality won out. She went with the one that paid.

That was 11 years ago, and her role at NBC is still expanding, increasingly into the sport horse world. She has covered the Rolex Grand Prix CHI in Geneva for several years, as well as the Rolex Central Park Horse Show (N.Y.) since its inception.

“It’s such a unique event and venue,” says Donna of Central Park. “It’s a real test of horse and rider and their communication, to get them to go at a decent speed and be accurate when they are having

“It’s not easy to get in this game. It’s something that takes a long time to earn, and I’m proud of the name I’ve made for myself,” says Donna Brothers.

to do such quick turns. In the meantime, to have the backdrop of New York City behind you is just really surreal.”

Additionally, she’s been a fixture at the Rolex Kentucky CCI**** for the past decade. While she had little knowledge of eventing to begin with, Donna dove right in, dissecting the sport.

“I really needed to understand it,” she says. “I walked the courses. I wanted to be able to speak their language.”

With her immersion came an incredible appreciation for the sport.

“I really admire the riders and horses that make it to that level,” she says. “For every rider [there], there are hundreds of riders and horses who will never make it to that level. And then for the riders who come back year after year, like Phillip Dutton and Boyd Martin, sometimes with horses we’ve seen before, sometimes new horses, it also gives me a whole new appreciation for how hard they work and how good they are at what they do to continue to develop horses.

“It is phenomenal when you know horses that you can get a horse that fit, that geared up, that at a peak of their mental and physical training, and start the event by doing dressage,” she adds. “It’s pretty remarkable.”

Donna’s desire for education into every aspect of her job surprises no one who knows her.

“Anything she [does], she becomes fully devoted,” explains Browne. “She doesn’t allow other things to sideline her. That’s Donna—she’s a 110 percent kid.”

Krone echoes that sentiment.

“I think there’s hardly anything she has been just slightly interested by,” she says. “Donna finds out about something and devours it. She has this ability to be so thorough and so complete.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF DONNA BROTHERS SHE’S EARNED IT That curiosity, combined with a passion for sharing information with others, culminated in Donna’s first book, Inside Track, published in 2011. “For so many years, I just kept thinking, ‘Somebody needs to write a book [explaining the ins and outs of horse racing],’ ” she says. “I was at the bookstore one day and saw this Girls’ Guide To NASCAR Racing, and it was written by a woman who did the television coverage and whose family was in NASCAR. And I thought, ‘Wait, that sounds strangely familiar. Maybe I would be equipped to write

“I really needed to understand it. I walked the courses. I wanted to be able to speak their language,” says Donna Brothers about stepping into her role as NBC this book.’ ” Inside Track is

Sports correspondent at the Rolex Kentucky CCI****. written in a friendly, conversational tone with each chapter covering a topic that gets more specific and detailed as you go. “I just wanted [the reader] to think, ‘Do I care about this?’ and if so, read more. If they read the first page on jockeys and think, ‘Oh, I never did care where those little people came from,’ then done!” Donna says, laughing. “Done with this! And you move on.” True to form, Donna is moving on herself. She just finished her highly personal second book, tentatively titled Inside Out, which provides a window through which the reader can view the world of racing, told by someone who lived it. “I wanted the new book to be inspirational,” Donna says. “I can’t minimize what I went through and what I overcame, and inspire other people. I have to tell the full story. It’s not an autobiography, and it’s not a memoir, but I can’t tell about my life on the track without telling the story of who I am.” She is currently meeting with publishers and hopes to have a release date soon.

In addition to that and her work with NBC, Donna is also the COO of the Starlight Racing team, handling partnership development and client relations. Her role is to bring new partners into the group and see to the needs of current members. It’s a higher level of play than most racing teams, with a limited number of investors each owning a share of all of the horses in that year’s crop.

Donna joins her husband, Frank, who serves as the group’s bloodstock agent and is in charge of purchases and consulting. Todd Pletcher is Starlight’s head trainer.

The Brotherses live in a condo in Louisville with their dog, Molly. They elected not to have children. While “delighting” in their nieces and nephews, they never felt their lifestyle was conducive to raising a family—a decision consistent with Donna’s all-or-nothing personality.

“It was something they agreed upon before they married,” says Browne. “They couldn’t be the kind of parents they would want [to be], and they didn’t want to be half-assed parents.”

Despite not having her own children, Brothers is drawn towards helping young people and recently completed her yoga teacher training to meet this end.

“I started it because of Maryhurst,” she says, referring to a facility in Louisville for girls 11-18.

The girls at Maryhurst are among the most traumatized in Kentucky, each having been through at least five failed foster homes and holding an average education level, even for the older girls, of fourth grade.

“They’ve all been abused; they’ve all been neglected,” says Donna. “Most of them have also been sexually abused and traumatized in countless ways. From the time I first heard about

Maryhurst, I wanted to find a way to be involved with the girls. “I am not a math tutor; I am not an art teacher. I do yoga, but I am not a yoga instructor, and I couldn’t find a way to regularly be a part of the programs there,” she continues. “This teacher training thing came up, and so I did it so I could teach there.” “[Donna] invests great amounts of energies into human beings,” Krone adds. “I know one thing, as her friend and as a person she loves, it is a wonderful position to be in, because she is incredibly loyal and dedicated. Spending time with her is rich, quality life time. She makes everything more colorful and more fun.” Donna Brothers (née Barton) married race horse trainer Frank Brothers shortly after Like that winning her retirement from racing in 1998. filly all those years ago at the Kentucky Derby, Donna continues to exuberantly approach each new challenge. When asked what gives her the most joy, looking back over a fascinating and varied career that’s still far from over, she pauses before answering. “I guess having the respect of my peers. It’s not easy to get in this game. It’s something that takes a long time to earn, and I’m proud of the name I’ve made for myself. And by that I mean credibility,” she says. “I never won a Kentucky Derby, and maybe if I had that would have been it. But I think most things that people are the most proud of take a long time to get—to earn.” And with one more laugh, she adds, “Some guy yelled at me one day when I was doing the handicapping on television for Churchill Downs, and he said, ‘You have an easy job!’ I said, ‘I do have an easy job, but it’s not an easy job to get!’ ”

PHOTO COURTESY OF DONNA BROTHERS Editor’s Note: A version of this article previously ran in the October 2012 issue of The Chronicle Connection.

Seeing The World WiTh “Life Between The Ears”

Contributors to the “Life Between The Ears” social media accounts transport us to the world’s most interesting and beautiful places—all viewed from the saddle. Each issue, we share a few of their images.

BROUGHTON, SCOTLAND This picturesque view is Sally Walker’s backyard in Scotland.

“The photo is taken from the hill opposite my home,” she said. “I do ride it often as long as I’m not disturbing the livestock. You can see the green track I’m on is actually part of an Iron Age fort of which there are many in our area. Home is an old farmhouse that we are renovating, located directly over Oliver’s left ear.”

Walker lives in Broughton, a small village steeped in Scottish history. Broughton was the home of John Murray, the secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart at the time of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Murray testified against Stuart, an action that forced Stuart to forfeit his lands and properties.

“The tower house that stood here was burned down, and our house and steading was built using the stone in the early 1800s,” Walker said.

Walker, 45, took some time off from riding due to joint problems, but after two hip replacements she’s back in the saddle.

“I’m mostly a happy hacker but have bought a second younger horse to start doing a bit more on,” she said. “I’ve been having some flatwork lessons and hope to have some cross-country lessons, too.”

Walker is the mother of two teenagers and spends time managing the renovations to the property where they’ve lived for 2 ½ years.

“I do a lot of the stripping down of the woodwork, painting and decorating, design, curtain-making and spending!” she said. “I do administration for my husband’s company and spend a lot of time with my two horses, two dogs and cat. I’m truly, madly deeply crackers over my ponies. My poor husband is very tolerant.”

The ears belong to Oliver, Walker’s 21-year-old Irish Sport Horse. Oliver is a retired event horse on permanent loan from his former rider.

“He used to challenge me quite a lot, but now he’s so settled and happy I feel totally safe on him,” Walker said. “He has a very quirky character; he’s the grumpiest horse on the planet but quite likes to pretend he’s more grumpy than he actually is. He gets jealous of me fussing over other horses and will grunt and paw the ground quite like a sudden colic attack until his human comes to check on him.

“I ride him bitless, as he came to me like that,” she continued. “He also has an incredible compass in his head—no matter where we go, he knows as soon as we turn towards home, and his speed increases. Oli loves pears; well, he likes food, so pears just slightly more than any other kind of food on offer or stealable. He’s quite stubborn with people he doesn’t know well or if thinks he can get away with it but is almost lamblike at times with me.”

AVENUE OF THE VOLCANOES, ECUADOR Rachel Kaufman lives in New Hope, Minn., and used to be a professional trainer, riding and competing in dressage and eventing. But she’s now left that life behind and works in the medical field.

“Though I’ve had the opportunity to ride and work with many wonderful horses, it’s been over a decade since I said goodbye to ‘my’ horse—the truly special Quarter Horse mare I had as a teen. Zoe was my best friend, my light in dark places, and I’m so lucky she was a part of my life,” she said.

“I still hop on friends’ horses for trail riding whenever possible,” Kaufman continued. “Every spare dollar is saved for travel, and I recently met my goal of solo travel on at least six continents before I turned 30. My favorite way to see the world has always been from the saddle.”

This photo was taken through the ears of a hired horse for the trek, looking down the Avenue of the Volcanoes. This 200mile section of terrain runs between two mountain ranges in the Andes that have seven peaks more than 17,000 feet high. German explorer Alexander von Humboldt gave the area its name in the early 1800s when he was climbing there.

RACHEL KAUFMAN/@MINNESOTA.JONES PHOTO

EASTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA This shot of a pair of giraffes galloping away was taken in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa by tour guide Jono Arnott.

Arnott has his own trip business, Beachcomber Horse Trails, but posted this photo in the Instagram feed for the Far And Ride riding holiday company (farandride.com). Arnott leads groups on multi-day adventures out of the coastal town Kenton-on-Sea for his own business as well as for Far And Ride. The trips take riders along the beaches and into the bush.

An experienced endurance rider, Arnott has been leading guided rides for 17 years, has extensive knowledge of the flora and fauna of the area, and also breeds many of the horses used for the rides. “To give you a bit of info on the picture, the horse’s name is Razmataz, and he is a full Arabian,” Arnott said.

“The photo was taken at Kaba Farm in the Eastern Cape, Alexandria, district in South Africa, a really amazing place,” he added. “It was taken on one of my seven-day trails.”

ALIX CRITTENDEN/@ALIXCRITT PHOTO BONDURANT, WYOMING Alix Crittenden and her husband, Sam, run Sleeping Indian Outfitters (sleepingindianoutfitters.com) out of Bondurant, Wyo. “We are nestled between the Gros Ventre and Wyoming mountain ranges, right in the heart of BridgerTeton National Forest,” Alix said. “We offer guided trail rides, overnight pack trips, fishing excursions and guided hunts for many species of wild game. In the winter we both take other jobs. I currently train and race a group of about 25 sled dogs.”

The cute chestnut ears in the photo belong to Alix’s horse, Tuff.

“He is a Haflinger cross, which is a best guess, as he’s the bastard child of an island pony mare and who knows what,” Alix said. “His mother was a guest horse on a ranch I used to work at. They bought her at auction and put her to work. That winter, while counting the herd on pasture one day in February’s icy temperatures, there was an extra little nugget. He made it, and they dubbed him Tuff, because he was.

“I broke him to ride while I worked there, and at the end of the season he was given to me as my end-of-season bonus,” Alix continued. “He is more than a horse to me. We are best pals. Every morning he helps me wrangle the rest of the herd, about 20 head, into the corrals, and we pretty much do everything together in the summer. What I love about Tuff is his super strong personality (everyone else that’s ever ridden him hates riding him—his mom’s name was Sassy, so he comes by it honestly), and his very round, squishy figure, which is perfect for bareback riding. It’s like riding a La-Z-Boy couch.”

The photo was taken in the Wind River Range mountains. Massive wildfires in the summer of 2016 ravaged the area, with more than 40,000 acres lost to the fire.

“Not only were they disturbingly close to our home, but they destroyed many of the places that we do business, out in the backcountry,” said Alix. “Luckily we were able to move the summer’s backcountry trips into the Wind River Range a little further south of us. [Tuff and I] traveled over 100 miles together the week that photo was taken, packing the camp in and out and taking the clients in and out. It was some of the roughest terrain I have ever led a string on. It was glorious country though. Its beauty was astounding— the photo doesn’t do it justice.”

SNOWSHILL, ENGLAND Jennie Hill took this photo through the ears of Mr. T, a horse in the string at Cotswolds Riding at Jill Carenza Equestrian. Hill works at the facility, which offers lessons and guided sightseeing rides around the Cotswolds.

“Mr. T is currently quite young but enjoys leading the rides,” said Hill. “I work at the yard on weekends, but during the week I am currently in my third and final year of an equine science degree. I graduate in the summer, and I plan to travel and work for a while, hopefully in America for some of it—I’d particularly love to visit Wyoming and Montana!”

The church in the photo dates to the 19th century, but the Snowshill manor house goes back the 16th century. The 2011 census listed the population of Snowshill as 164 residents. Snowshill has been used as a location for multiple period movie shoots.

FANØ, DENMARK During a visit to her father on the island of Fanø, Diana Jensen discovered a pony trekking company there (fanoridning.dk) and decided to hit the beach with them. She was assigned a pinto, Leia, and went for a ride full of mad gallops down the beach and wading in the sea.

“It really was a great experience and taught me quite a few things: 1.) Don’t overestimate what you can do on a horse. 2.) If you have overestimated, well then just go with the flow and try to hang on,” she said.

Jensen’s true equine passion is polo, however. She started riding two years ago in Bahrain, which was her base at the time for her job as a flight attendant on a private jet.

“I started at a local riding school, which mostly taught show jumping, and I flew around the world on my days off to take polo lessons in Florida, London, Dubai, Copenhagen and Spain, to name a few. And whenever I could get a chance to get on a horse— any horse, in any style—I took it. I did beach rides in the Caribbean and Bali when on work flights,” she said.

Now Jensen lives in Dubai and works as the social media and marketing executive at the new Al Habtoor Polo Resort and Club.

“I started here three months ago and did quite a bit of dressage riding, as the horses needed to get used to the place before we put clients on them,” she said. “Now I am back to stick and ball and learning polo; actually, the dressage has helped me improve a great deal. I have played a few chukkers but mostly just instructionals. I am not yet confident for actual matches. Hopefully soon though!”

Jensen blogs about her adventures at polopeopleplaces.com.

Sharing Life Between The Ears

Since 2008, Life Between The Ears founder Kristine Dahms has posted stunning photos shot by riders in all corners of the world with one hand on the reins and the other on the shutter. Dahms mines photos with the hashtag #lifebetweentheears, contacts the original poster of the image, then features the photo, complete with educational details about the place that’s portrayed. Life Between The Ears photos appear on a LBTE Facebook page, an Instagram feed, a dedicated website (lifebetweentheears.com), a Twitter feed and a Pinterest account, all under lifebetweentheears account names.

Dahms—who lives in Vashon, Wash., with her Welsh Cob, mini horse, pygmy goats, two dogs and two cats—rides dressage and takes quite a few photos herself on the picturesque Vashon-Maury Island.

Dahms has taken some of the Life Between The Ears images from cyberspace to print, creating three lines of greeting cards with selected photos from her social media pages. A portion of the proceeds from the card sales goes to the Equine Land Conservation Resource (elcr.org). Cards are available at lifebetweentheears.com/retail.