Picture, if you will, a nice winter snowmobile ride. Assuming your sleds are in good working order, you're out blasting around with your friends, just having a good time and not a care in the world because you're all toasty in your gear.
It's gorgeous, crisp, and sunny, and the air has that remarkable hushed quality that only comes from serious amounts of snow blanketing your surroundings and quieting just about everything down. Maybe even your busy, busy mind; praise be.
Now, imagine that in your journey, you wend your way up into the mountains. Maybe you've been here before, and maybe you haven't, but even though it's cold, it's a gorgeous day, and you're going to make the most of it. And then suddenly, you spot a horse. In the mountains. At the end of January.
That's ... not where a horse should be, is it? As it turns out, this particular horse had been missing since July 2025, when he got lost on a fishing trip. His owner had been searching for him for the past six months, but with no luck. The horse's name, incidentally, is Mouse; and yes, I wrote that in the present tense, because against all odds, Mouse is very much alive and in surprisingly good shape, considering all he went through.
Here's where I get to the best part: How Mouse got rescued by snowmobilers and judicious use of a rented river raft. Normally, I'd embed the YouTube video here, but the news station that posted it has apparently done a Dorna and disabled embeds, so you'll have to go to YouTube directly to view the video.
They Could Have Done Nothing. But Instead, They Chose To Help
Anyone can go out and have a nice, uneventful snowmobile (or other type of) ride. You know; the kind that's perfectly pleasant, but otherwise unremarkable. But the real test of what kind of person you are is what you do when you're presented with an unexpected situation.
Maybe there's an accident up on the road ahead, or you spot someone pulled over and having distress with their vehicle. Or maybe someone in your group goes down themselves. It could be somewhat less dramatic, too; like finding a random horse that's been missing for 6 months, or even finding a turtle in the road as you curve down an exit ramp near a pond, and you pull onto the shoulder so you can pick them up and move them to safety (true story).
And the thing is, most riders that I've known are happy to stop and offer help if they can.
That stopped vehicle on the shoulder, maybe they just need someone to call for help. Maybe their phone is dead. Maybe they just need some basic hand tools to fix their vehicle well enough that they can at least get home. If you're the type of overpreparer that I am, you might even have them on you and be able to help (or you can call someone who can).
But back to Mouse, the horse in the Wyoming mountains near Cody. The snowmobilers clearly couldn't load him onto one of their sleds, for a number of reasons. So how could they practically tow him the 10-plus miles they needed to transport him to get him back home? This is where ingenuity and a willingness to improvise come into play, and it's honestly kind of genius.
A volunteer called up a Cody-based river rafting business called River Runners, and asked owner Hunter Burrell if he could please rent a river raft. The owner, quite naturally, wanted to know why, because it was January.
So they told him, and luckily, Burrell agreed, according to Montana news outlet KTVQ. Why a raft? Because a regular sled wouldn't be big enough for a horse. However, the intrepid rescuers believed a river raft just might do the job.
Thanks to their combined efforts, using snowmobiles, a Sno-Cat, and that rented river raft, they managed to successfully coax Mouse onto the raft and sled him back down the mountain to go home. They managed to tow him around 10 miles, and the video linked above even shows a moment where he was relaxed enough that he laid down. (It's super adorable; if you're looking for a little dopamine hit, I highly recommend watching it.)
The Good You Do Matters
I've talked before about how much I love grassroots motorsport people. How they're frequently the type of people who will go out of their way to help you, even on what might feel (at the time) like one of the worst days of your life. When Mr. Rogers talked about neighbors, and extolled the virtues of neighborliness, I'm absolutely, 100 percent certain these are the folks and the attitudes he was talking about.
And truthfully, a lot of people I've had the good fortune to meet have fit this description. Sure, there've been occasional assholes, but there's also a school of thought that we're all only one bad day away from being a complete asshole, ourselves. Everyone has bad days; after all, we're human.
Those snowmobilers could have just gone on having fun, ignoring the poor horse stuck up the mountain. But they knew what the right thing to do was, and they did it. Pretty soon, a volunteer rescue effort came together to get that horse back home to an owner who'd given up. Seriously, how did that guy survive for 6 months without getting eaten by something much bigger and meaner? It's kind of a minor miracle, at the very least.
Anyway, sometimes, it is really that simple. Most of us have a solid moral compass, and we know in our bones what's right and what's wrong. And most of us genuinely want to help each other. Sometimes, all it takes is doing what you know is right, and not letting anyone talk you out of helping your neighbors when they need it the most.
