The Pony Express rides again.
To celebrate the mail service’s 165th anniversary, the National Pony Express Association has recruited branch members from across the country to participate in the commemorative ride from Sacramento, California, to St. Joseph, Missouri.
The ride starts at 2 p.m. California time today (June 11) and is scheduled to end at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 21.
The Utah leg is set to start at the Nevada border at 2 a.m. Mountain Time on Sunday, June 15, and ends at 6:30 a.m. Monday, June 16, at Evanston, Wyoming.
Two of the riders who will help carry the mail bag, known as the mochila, from Murray Park to Evanston are Park City residents Mike Luers and Greg DuPratt.
They both have ridden these annual Pony Express re-rides for the past five or six years, after participating in the yearly Bison Roundup on Antelope Island, according to DuPratt.
“When I moved here roughly 20 years ago, I saw in the paper that you could ride in the roundup, so I called to rent a horse, and they were sold out,” he said. “So, I put my name on the list for the next year. I took 100 lessons on how to ride a horse.”
DuPratt found he liked riding a horse, and he and Luers started to look for other horse-riding events.
“We found out about the Pony Express reenactment and signed up for it,” DuPratt said. “We did it, and that first one got us hooked.”
Luers, who lives in Summit Park, remembers that first ride.
“I was in the middle of Utah’s West Desert at 3 o’clock in the morning with my horse by myself,” he said. “The Milky Way was stunning. The coyotes were howling, and my horse was like, ‘What are we doing out here?’ and getting nervous.”