OROVILLE Darrel Williams and Steve Kartchner sit silently in their saddles on a recent August day, resting the mustangs that had just carried them up a bluff overlooking Lake Osoyoos.
Beside them and behind them, a four-strand barbed-wire fence the international border stretches off into the distance of sagebrush and bunchgrass across rocky, rolling and sometimes steep ground.
In front of them, a near-vertical cliff drops down to green orchards, pastures and yards next to the mile-wide lake. Across the water, the land climbs again through farms and dryland to the 7,800-foot Chopaka Mountain and more tall peaks in the Pasayten Wilderness beyond.
Breathtaking, yes. But Williams and Kartchner are not here to take in the view.
They are mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents, and they’re looking for signs of illegal crossings footprints or flattened grass along their 80-mile section of the 4,000-mile border with Canada.
And they are two of the first in the nation to do this work on wild mustangs adopted from the Bureau of Land Management, broken by inmates in Colorado, and still being trained by these Border Patrol wranglers in the backcountry of Okanogan County.
Project Noble Mustang, launched this summer, is designed to save money while showcasing the mustang. “To be able to put them to work protecting America just makes you grin,” says Richard Graham, agent in charge of the agency’s Oroville station.
Horses were an important part of the U.S. Border Patrol when the agency was created in 1924. Agents then were expected to have their own horse and tack, and the government paid for feed.
But as the agency started patrolling in vehicles, the use of horses declined, particularly along the “friendly” northern border with Canada.
Steven Garrett, assistant chief for the agency’s Spokane Sector, says the Border Patrol relies on sophisticated technology. The sector is about 300 miles long and runs from the North Cascade Mountains in Okanogan County to the Rockies in Montana.
They have four new boats, a helicopter, a fixed-wing airplane and several ATVs. Hidden in the woods and at crossings are cameras and sensors to detect movement, footsteps, heat and metal.
“We want everyone to think that even if a squirrel crosses, we’ll know it,” he says.
The most recent “vehicle” to rejoin the list in his sector is the horse.
Garrett says it’s difficult to compare the costs or effectiveness of horses with other modes of transportation.
“At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter, because we need the best tool for the job. In some places, there really are no other choices. We either walk or use horses,” he says.
The horses’ comeback along the Canadian border started just a few years ago, when two stations in the Spokane Sector started leasing horses to patrol areas where vehicles can’t go.
Last year, each of the sector’s seven units got $25,000 to contract for horses, which cost about $150 per horse per day, says Border Patrol spokeswoman Danielle Suarez in Spokane.
This year, the Spokane Sector adopted eight mustangs and bought two packing mules.
Four of the mustangs went to the Border Patrol station in Whitefish, Mont., which patrols Glacier National Park.
The other four, and the two mules, are stationed at Oroville.
Before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Oroville’s Border Patrol agents traveled Okanogan County, sometimes raiding fruit packing houses to catch illegal workers, Graham says.
But after the attacks, their focus shifted north, to the border, he says.
That change, plus a doubling in the number of agents stationed at Oroville, brought a dramatic increase in arrests of both drug smugglers and illegal immigrants caught crossing the border.
But it’s not the drug smugglers they’re after.
Their eyes stay fixed on the border to keep out terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, he says.
“We know they smuggle people. And they smuggle narcotics and weapons, cigarettes and booze. And if you can smuggle in people and narcotics successfully, what are your limitations? Who is this person they’re smuggling? What’s in that bag? That’s what’s given us a different perspective since 9/11. Aliens were always our game. Now, that doesn’t interest us as much,” Graham says.
When the job turned to shutting down illegal entries, Graham’s job got tougher.
Fifty of the 80 miles of border that he covers are in wilderness, where there are no roads and motorized vehicles are prohibited.
Five years ago, Graham started contracting with Frontier Ranches in Oroville, which provided ready-to-use horses on a by-the-day basis.
Now that the entire sector the only region using horses along the border with Canada is tuned in to the idea, Graham expects he’ll start to see horse patrols pop up at other northern Border Patrol units, “from Blaine to Maine.”
The advantages of patrolling on horseback are many, Garrett says. “No. 1, they’re very quiet. You can sneak up on people, and they’re not going to know you’re coming,” he says.
For the most part, Graham says, agents on horseback are gathering intelligence. They look for signs of recent crossings and look to the sky for low-flying aircraft.
Graham says his horse patrol agents have not yet caught anyone crossing illegally. But when they are out there in the right place at the right time, he has little doubt they’ll be able to run them down.
“You can’t outrun a horse. And if you’re on another horse, it’s a matter of whether you can outrun Darrel,” he says with a smile.
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