
By Robert Schaulis July 23, 2025
Next month, Humboldt County’s Jenn Laidlaw is slated to be the first Lost Coast local ever to compete in the Mongol Derby.
A 1,000-kilometer (more-than-600-mile) journey across the Mongolian steppe, the Mongol Derby is billed as “the longest and toughest horse race on Earth.” Riders mount semi-feral horses each day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and traverse contours of the country that messengers in the employ of Genghis Khan rode nearly 900 years ago.
“There’s no marked course, no packed lunches, no beds to sleep in,” the event’s website reads. “That’s the whole point. It’s just you, your team of horses and a thousand kilometers of Mongolian wilderness. The course consists of horse stations (morin urtuu in Mongolian) at 35-kilometer intervals where you swap your horse and refuel. You change horses at every station and deliver your mounts to the next in great health. How you navigate between them is where your adventure begins.”
The course-sponsoring organization, the Equestrianists, says it hopes to “deliver the greatest equine adventure in the world: high passes, huge valleys, wooded hills, river crossings, wetland, dunes and of course open steppe.”
It’s a far cry from Fieldbrook, the community just northeast of McKinleyville...
Read more here:
https://www.times-standard.com/2025/07/23/fieldbrook-native-jenn-laidlaw-heads-to-mongolia-for-longest-and-toughest-horse-race-on-earth/
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