Incredible reason behind Aussie woman's 5,500km outback ride
Sarah Wheeler has been travelling through the New South Wales outback for the last four and a half months, doing it entirely on horseback.
The 26-year-old Aussie plans to ride 5,500 kilometres through outback Queensland and New South Wales to raise awareness about the rare cancer that killed her mum in 2022, a little over a decade after her father passed away.
With around four months left on her trip, Wheeler and her two horses, Shifty and Sally, are slowly trekking across some of the most remote and rugged parts of the country in a trip that has never been done before.
"I'd always thought about doing something like this throughout my life," Wheeler told Yahoo News.
"So after my parents died, I went out and bought two horses and, yeah, set off on a five-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre horse ride to honour and remember, and grieve."
Wheeler set off with her horses from her hometown Rowena in western NSW in May, and has since travelled across long stretches of highways, desolate plains and rocky terrain and has now passed the halfway mark.
She explained that in recent weeks she has also been trekking on foot and has contact with other people only when she stops in towns for supplies or when she feeds her horses, using a support vehicle.
"The car travels 10 kilometres at a time so that I can keep replenishing my horses, with both food and water. Ten kilometres takes me two hours, sometimes a bit longer, and I'm usually in the saddle for six to eight hours a day," she told the publication.
"The most challenging thing has probably been the saddles and saddle pads and cleanliness — that's all so important. I have to wash my saddle blankets every second day. Otherwise, things just start happening, like fungus type of stuff."
She added that while "this has been one of the hardest things I have ever done", the friendliness and support of locals has been a highlight of her trip.
"Everyone's so lovely and inviting and, yeah, I just I didn't think that I was going to see that to this extent," she said. "People want to invite me in and feed me, they just want to help me as much as they can."
Remembering her late parents' legacy, Wheeler said she wants everyone to know just how "remarkable" they both were.
"They were like everything this world needed and more," she said. "They were very kind and genuine and humble."
Wheeler's ride is raising awareness and funds for two key charities: Pancare Foundation, the lead organisation supporting families and funding research for upper gastrointestinal (GI) cancer, which claimed the life of her mother, and A Daughter’s Way, her own charity supporting rural families experiencing grief.
Images: Instagram