When a horse owner gets their favorite horse returned after losing the animal in the wild for eight years, signing it off as gone, and then being surprised by the reunion, it’s a pretty amazing thing. Shane Adams had his life turned upside down dramatically almost a decade ago, including losing his home, his marriage to a divorce, and being seriously injured himself. Suffering from a brain injury in a car crash, Adams literally had his world reshaped, and he never expected to be reunited with his horse, Mongo, ever again after that fateful turn of events.
However, last September in 2022, Adams was going to be surprised again.
The man had spent his early decades growing up around horses. Being a Utah native, Adams was like many in the desert state, regularly riding horses to travel and explore the vast wilderness of the region. When he came across Mongo, the bond between him and the animal was unique and amazingly tight. However, in 2014, on a camping trip, things went horribly wrong for Adams. With a loud racket that woke the man up and had him scrambling out of the tent, Adams woke up fast enough to see Mongo taking off with a pack of wild Mustangs. No matter what happened, the horse was gone, and Adams himself ended up getting lost in the snow and blizzard affecting the area.
Adams hoped that the horse would just burn out his energy and then return, since Adams and family were what the animal knew. However, that wasn’t going to be the case. Adams kept looking for the horse in the wild for another three years, but without luck. With his dad helping, Adams scoured the countryside, but they never saw a sign or glimpse of the horse after that tear-off from the camping site. Adams didn’t give up; he contacted all the typical agencies in the area who would likely come in contact with wild horses, like the federal Bureau of Land Management, and left information to identify Mongo with. No luck.
Adams himself also had no time to keep up the search much. He had to maintain his career as a foreman on a construction project, and the work was picking up with more demand after hours and on the weekend. By 2017, everyone involved pretty much wrote off the horse as gone. And BLM never found any sign of the horse in any of their mustang roundups either.
However, towards the end of September 2022, there was finally a call from BLM to Adams. They found Mongo. The horse had been gone for 8 full years, but sure enough, the agency found the animal’s hiding spot. He had been grazing and running with a mustang pack in a high-security zone that blocked off most regular people traffic. BLM got an exception to access the area to collect more wild mustangs, and in that dragnet they picked up Mongo. The previously-domesticated horse stood out from the wild mustangs, being bigger and taller. Mongo also acted very calm around people and was not alarmed by their presence, unlike the Mustangs now facing captivity for the first time in their known lives.
Remembering Adams’ story, BLM horse inspectors went over the animal and eventually found his identification brand hidden under overgrown fur from winter. After getting the call, Adams trucked out for a four-hour drive to pick up his lost horse, still not believing it was Mongo. Sure enough, there was the horse, a lot lighter from hard living, but it was Mongo.
Today, Adams rides Mongo as he did before, and the horse pretty much acts like nothing ever happened. It may very well be that after living hard scrabble for eight long years, Mongo decided he was done with adventuring and needed some catering. Adams was happy to oblige his old friend.
