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Revisiting 'The Last Ride of the Pony Express' with Will Grant on Tuesday's Access Utah

Will Grant
/
Little, Brown and Company

Though the Pony Express has enjoyed a lot of traction over the years, among the authors that have attempted to encapsulate it, none have ever ridden it themselves. While most scholars would look for answers inside a library, Will Grant looks for his between the ears of a horse. Inspired by the likes of Mark Twain, Sir Richard Burton, and Horace Greeley, all of whom traveled throughout the developing West, Will Grant returned to his roots and determined that he would ride the trail himself with his two horses, Chicken Fry and Badger, from one end to the other. The result is his new book The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West.

Will Grant lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s a writer for Outside magazine. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek and he was previously the Action Sports editor at VICE. Since graduating college, he has broken in horses at a Colorado ranch, apprenticed under legendary horse trainer Jack Brainard, cowboyed in Texas, raced the Mongol Derby, a nearly 900 mile horse race in Mongolia, and ridden horses on every continent but Antartica.

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Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.