Rider makes trek to honor friend

Winston Hall, a local musician, grew up in Gatesville with a man he considered his best friend. He said he couldn’t remember ever not knowing his buddy Jonathan Avitia.

When Avitia was 18, he contacted Hall and told him he should come to Colorado to work at the Wind River guest ranch with him.

Then, two years ago, Jonathan got the devastating news that he had cancer. Hall said Avitia realized he wasn’t going to win the battle and gave Hall his saddle.

“As a promise to him,” Hall said, “I told him I was going to ride that saddle on a horse from their ranch in Texas all the way to Colorado, the ranch we worked.”

When Avitia died, Hall was determined to make good on his promise, or as he put it, as least try. “It was a special friendship. We were best friends, and that is hard to find in the world,” Hall said.

“We wanted to make sure that we [made the ride] safely, judiciously, and we don’t make any egregious errors. You don’t want to set off on something without any money. So we decided to put it out in the world.”

That meant creating a Kickstart page to raise the funds to help accomplish his journey. “We raised the money in less than 31 days through social media and word of mouth,” Hall said. “We had donations all the way from California to Georgia and even places around the world like Japan and Sweden, which was amazing.”

To make the journey, Hall needed a strong, dependable companion. “There are a lot of things that come into play with a horse because it’s an animal. There’s the endurance, there’s the safety, there’s the health. There’s the nutrition. There are a million things you’ve got to consider. I knew it had to be a special horse.”

Mandy Bradford works with the Mustang Heritage Foundation. She also worked at Wind River. “She read our story, and she contacted me and said, ‘I have your horse.’” Hall said he went to meet Bradford and the horse, and it was a Cinderella story about a saddle instead of a glass slipper. “The whole point of this journey,” Hall said, “was to take the ride in my friend’s saddle.” The saddle was a perfect fit on a horse named Durango Bobwire. “His nickname was Bobwire so I added the name Durango because my best friend’s dad is from Durango, Mexico,” he said.

Outfitted with the right mount and the funds to undertake the trek, Hall said he thinks he is up to the personal task. “I grew up camping, and I’ve always been an outdoorsman, and it goes hand-inhand with this kind of thing. I grew up in central Texas. We didn’t have Internet, and we only got three TV channels,” he said.

So, if all goes according to Hall’s plan, on March 13, he and Durango Bobwire will set out from Gatesville to Wind River Ranch. He’s taking a support vehicle, piloted by Donna Chance. Chance will post periodic updates and pictures of the journey for people interested in following the adventure vicariously.

Two months in the elements on horseback pales in comparison to memories of Avitia and his friend’s battle with cancer, Hall said, and he explained what motivates him about this undertaking.

“[Avitia] was a real gregarious and outgoing person, very intelligent young man,” Hall said. “People loved him. When I saw [him] go through cancer, that was the first time I really saw what cancer does to somebody’s life. If you’ve never seen it, it’s like a nuclear bomb going off. Everybody’s life that touches that person’s life is affected in some way. It’s just like a nuclear blast. The people closest to the explosion are the ones hurt most. Then, it’s just like the shockwave ripple effect going out from there.

“The way I try to look at it now is when we do find a cure to cancer, that cure will be built on the shoulders of all those people before who have died from cancer. That way none of their deaths was in vain, you know. Every time they treat somebody with cancer, they learn a little more about it. When the day comes that they finally find a cure, not a treatment but a cure, that it really will be built on all those people before that went through all the hell.”

– Joe Todaro

For more inFormation

www.kickstarter.com/projects/140715920/jonathans-journey