The Crucible of Crisis: Horse Wildfire Evacuation Plan

After Trey and Divine were settled into the ranch in Gardnerville, I thought we’d “made it.” We had gotten through the trauma of the roundup. They had learned that humans were trustworthy and even that they could be fun to be around. They were in a healthy herd dynamic where they were flourishing. From here on out, I envisioned that we were going to face the typical situations that domestic horses face. Even though they were often calmer than any domestic horse I knew, they were not and are not domestic horses. They are two living beings, once wild and part of an established family herd, whose bodies still remember what happened to them. 

I learned that deep trauma can have healing and “look” healed. Healing can present itself as fully resolved and yet still have pockets of deep fear ready to show up. I didn’t know these things at the time. I would quickly learn.

When wildfire season comes, it does not knock politely. It arrives with wind, smoke, and the kind of urgency that makes every decision feel like a countdown. You smell it before you see it. The air changes. The sky changes to strange and beautiful colors. And if you live in the west, you learn that the question is never “if,” it is “how close, how fast, and from which direction.”

The first alerts came in like background noise, the kind that put you in high alert. You might smell something in the air or the sky turns into beautiful hues, which ironically often mean a wildfire. Or, in the west, you may get emergency alerts to a fire that has started somewhere. Fire season has its own urgent language of: number of acres on fire, percentage containment, wind direction and strength, weather conditions and likelihood of rain and evacuation plans.

For every facility that has or boards horses, they have an evacuation plan. It requires the ability for all the horses to be able to be put into a trailer and it requires a sufficient number of trailers (and trucks) to move them all out quickly. 

 I had dealt with fire evacuations several times with my three domestic horses. I had not yet dealt with an evacuation situation with Trey and Divine. After their work with Micaela, which I continued to practice in Nevada, they would go into my two-horse trailer. This small trailer was good for taking them from place to place. It is not what you’d use in a large evacuation situation. However, since they’d go into it willingly, it seemed a no-brainer that they’d go into a large sized trailer meant to hold a group of horses for quick evacuation.

Our first wild fire evacuation experience was one that came without warning with fast moving flames. The fire was cresting over the Mount Rose mountains with a pathway into the valley straight through the ranch. All the horses had to be evacuated immediately. I had five horses and had a large cattle trailer that was roomy with a lot of space for all of them. We were prepared, the trailer was set up and waiting to board them. All my horses were right outside of it ready to load. Or so I/we thought. 

Mocha was loaded first since she was the steady, mare-mother to Trey and Divine. Then Divine would be loaded and, after her, Trey would be loaded. Divine resisted going in. So, we switched plans and loaded Trey first. We then turned back to Divine to load her. She wasn’t having any of it. She pulled back harder than she ever had.

When that didn’t work (and we kept trying) she started rearing, something she’d never done before. She was clearly freaked out. She was sweating, the whites of her eyes were showing and she was behaving like she never had before. We thought it was the fire that she was reacting to. Then, it hit me. We were loading her into the same type of trailer that she was loaded into when she was rounded up, taken out of the wild and ripped away from her herd. 

It didn’t matter that everyone was purposely staying calm to create a calm space around her. It didn’t matter that Mocha and her beloved Trey were already in. It didn’t matter that we were gently telling her “Come on, girl, it’s okay.”

Divine could not hear the words.

She was hearing memories.

A trailer is not a neutral object to a horse that has been gathered, trapped, hauled, and processed. The shape of it holds the whole story. The sound of a latch, the narrowness of the opening, the sense of being funneled, all of it can pull a body straight back to Cedar Mountain without any warning.

I watched Divine plant her feet, and I could feel the internal argument in her, the part that wanted to protect Trey and the part that could not cross that threshold. She swung her hindquarters away and refused. The energy in her wasn’t stubborn. It was survival.

Someone tried to increase the pressure. Not cruelly, not with bad intent, but with the common human logic of urgency. “We have to go,” they said. “She has to load.”

I felt my stomach drop, because I knew what that next step would do. If we pushed her hard enough, she would load, but we would pay for it, and not just emotionally. We would reinforce the worst lesson her body had learned, which is that when fear is high, humans force you until you break.

And then there was the other problem, the one that was not even a question for me.

I was not separating them.

If Divine would not load, and if Trey loaded without her, I would be ripping the one stable bond they had fought to rebuild. I would be choosing a clean evacuation plan for one horse and would have to leave the other behind. I would be asking two traumatized foals to face another violent separation, and I would be doing it at the exact moment the world already felt like danger.

I remember saying it out loud, even though it made the decision heavier.

“We’re not separating them.”

Someone looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Jenn, the fire,” they said. “We can get at least one of them out.”

“I know,” I answered. “But we’re not separating them.”

That was the moment the crisis became a crucible. It stopped being a straightforward emergency and became an ethical test. What does stewardship look like when there are no perfect options, when every choice has a cost, and when the land itself is forcing your hand?

We shifted from evacuation mode to protection mode. We did what people do in rural places when the choices narrow. We looked at the terrain. We looked at the wind direction. We looked at fuel, dry grass, and the places fire likes to run. We considered the safest areas on the property, and we made a plan to create a buffer.

One of the measures we took was to flood a strategic area of the pasture.

It sounds strange if you have never lived through a fire season, but water is one of the few things that changes the equation. We used sprinklers and irrigation to soak and puddle the ground and to reduce the chance of a fast-moving flame front taking everything. The goal was not to pretend we could control a wildfire. The goal was to buffer it and defer it away from a very very wet and wide space of land. Essentially, it would move around this space with Trey and Divine (hopefully) safe within it. We also ensured that, while it was fenced, the fencing was tenuous and could break if pushed hard by either horse. 

At one point I stood near the fence and said softly, “You’re okay. I’m here.” “You have each other. I’m keeping my promise and I hope I’m making the right choice for you both.” I don’t know if the words mattered. What mattered was that I did not become another force trying to push them through something their bodies and hearts couldn’t bear. 

The fire did not end up taking that property, and I am grateful for that in a way that still catches in my throat. But the point of this chapter is not a lucky outcome. The point is what the moment revealed.

Trauma does not disappear because time passes. It lives in associations, in shapes and sounds and tight spaces. It shows up when the stakes are high, and it does not care whether humans think it is “rational.” Divine’s refusal was not defiance. It was a nervous system protecting itself, and protecting Trey.

That day also clarified something else for me. A bond is not a sentimental detail. It is a survival system. When the world becomes unstable, Trey and Divine do what wild horses have always done. Bonds anchor relationships.

Stewardship, in that moment, meant honoring that truth, even when the adult part of my brain wanted a simpler plan. It meant reconsidering what was “the least harmful option”, staying present to understand that the answer is contextual and includes what is significant to them. It meant refusing to solve one crisis by creating another.

When the air finally stopped dropping ashes, when it finally cleared enough to breathe without tasting smoke, I stood again at the edge of the pasture and watched them, side by side, still holding their line. I thought, “Being a true custodian for them, keeping the promise I made to them will require I rethink how decisions are made for them. I will need to always consider their history, their context. I will always need to lead with my heart, not just my head. This is what commitment will need to look like.” 

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