
Darah Hubbard
“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.” — Louis L’Amour
There was roughly 15 minutes to dusk when the man and his horse pulled up to the white teepee and the family toiling outside. He wore a black cowboy hat, and beneath that, his eyes betrayed the exhaustion that comes with days of riding. His whole body was sore, especially his hips. He wasn’t used to this particular kind of saddle, so the jostling of the beast beneath him reverberated throughout his entire body.
Also, he didn’t know if the family had ever housed a visitor like him. All he knew was that they didn’t speak the same language as him. So, he did the only thing he could do: He hopped off the horse and started miming.
He pointed to himself and rubbed his belly. He fake-sipped from an imaginary glass of water. Then, using his hands as a faux pillow, he pretended to go to sleep. He pointed to his horse and repeated the same motions.
I need to eat, drink, and sleep.
My horse needs to drink and sleep.
The family patriarch, standing just outside the teepee, eyed this cowboy-turned-mime with curiosity. He scrunched up his eyes, and a flash of recognition passed over his face. Nodding, he turned to fetch the item he used to welcome all visitors like the cowboy.
“In Mongolia, they don’t shake your hand,” the cowboy said, recounting the incident a few months later. Instead, “They give you mare’s milk.”
That’s how the 46-year-old Josh Edwards, a pickup man-turned-competitive horse rider, found himself drinking mare’s milk in a “ger” (a Mongolian teepee) roughly 7,000 miles from home. He slept in the patriarch’s bed, too.
Their home wasn’t much bigger than your typical living room, Edwards noted, and it housed four people. On that night, he was the fifth — and the father gladly slept on the floor.
Looking back, it’s moments like these that stand out from his experience at the Mongol Derby.
“I wasn’t going only for the experience, and I wasn’t going just to win,” he says with a slightly mischievous smile. “I knew that when I start, how I start, that’ll dictate my process and the journey ahead.”
The Mongol Derby is a horse race based on Genghis Khan’s delivery system. Long before the days of the Pony Express, the conqueror Khan would send messages via horseback, with some of those horses traversing as many as 300 miles in a single day.
Since its inception in 2009, the race has gained a reputation for testing the mettle of the world’s toughest riders. Those riders must navigate 1,000 kilometers of the Mongolian Steppe: unique land that includes arid desert terrain, vast plains, and craggy mountain passes. Horse riders from Norway, Sweden, Kazakhstan, and Australia were all part of the most recent derby, as was a Waco-born man the riders called “Cowboy Josh.”
Edwards is accustomed to nicknames. For years, his colleagues in the rodeo business called him “Hollywood” (more on that in a little bit). Yet apart from the apt sobriquet bestowed upon him by his competitors, everything about the Mongol Derby was unique.
He subsisted on bread, rice, and water. He lost 11 pounds in 15 days. He rode all day, often in complete silence and often in pain. And apart from one fortuitous evening when he managed to mime “Wi-Fi?” to another man outside a ger, he didn’t talk to his wife, Kristi.
“To us, he was just a red dot on a screen,” she said, describing how she and her two sons would watch Edwards’ progress throughout the Derby. “We didn’t really know at all how he was doing, so all we could do was hope for the best.”
To be clear, this isn’t to say Cowboy Josh couldn’t handle it. In fact, the unique difficulty of the race was one of the key reasons he decided to apply for it in the first place.
“You have to continually put yourself into a situation that’s uncomfortable,” said Edwards — and to be clear, he’s talking about both the Mongol Derby and life in general. This philosophy is what led him to compete in the Ironman triathlon, and it kept him motivated throughout a 25-year career as a rodeo pickup man.
So, Edwards wasn’t daunted. But this isn’t a story about a badass cowboy who defied the odds and competed in an international horse race in his 40s.
Well, it’s not only about that.
It’s also about what happens when you stay curious: the people you might meet, the experiences you might have, and the connections you might forge.
“I was just sitting there, in that ger, drinking mare’s milk while everyone stared at me, because it’s not like you can just sit and visit, you know?” Edwards said. “Part of your brain is like, ‘What am I doing here?’ But the other part of you goes, ‘What else would I rather be right now?’”
“A cowboy is a man with guts and a horse.” — Will James

Darah Hubbard
Not long before that golden hour encounter outside the ger, Josh Edwards retired. For a quarter century, he was a pickup man in the rodeo. It’s one of the rodeo’s most important gigs, and what’s more, it often goes unnoticed.
Their principal role is safety: People like Josh ride alongside the bucking bull or bronco during the event, and when it’s time for the main competitor to dismount, the pickup man is there for them to latch onto as needed. Likewise, if a rider gets tangled up or if the bucking horse is running amok, the pickup man is there to help. All of which means the gig requires a very particular set of skills, including the ability to ride, rope, and guide animals who, in many cases, would rather not obey anything you say.
Bobby Steiner, a bull rider and member of the National Rodeo Hall of Fame, once said that being a pickup man is all about “staying in control in an uncontrolled situation.” A knack for control and stability has always been one of Edwards’ talents, but Bret Richards, who has known Edwards for 30 years, says there’s something else at play, too.
“Josh is a horseman,” he says. “There are cowboys and there are cowgirls that can get on there and rope fast and do all kinds of stuff, but Josh can do that and then some. He can get in there and get horses to trust him in a short amount of time.”
For his part, Edwards says his career as a pickup man was “kind of an accident.”
He was raised on a horse and cattle ranch in Waco where the cowboy lifestyle was really the only one he knew.
“We liked to ride colts and raise horses,” he said. “It’s a very fulfilling feeling when you can take a young colt and turn them into something.”
While some of his fellow young Texans dreamed of playing in the Super Bowl, Edwards wanted to make it to the National Finals Rodeo: the cowboys’ equivalent of the Big Game. One of his fellow dreamers was Richards, a calf roper and small-town kid who first met Edwards on the high school rodeo circuit.
Edwards was a couple years older than Richards, but they struck up a friendship over their shared passion for a unique sport.
“I remember going to one of my first rodeo events, and when you’re in a situation like that, you’re looking around, trying to see where all the gravity goes,” Richards said. “All the gravity was going to Josh.”
He had — and has — what Richards calls “cowboy cool,” an effortless mix of confidence and humility. And even now, despite the passage of decades, Richards still talks about his old friend like he’s the freshman and Edwards is the “big dog” who everyone knew was the guy to beat at calf roping. The way Richards tells it, those years on the junior rodeo circuit turned the pair into something bigger than friends. The Western movie “Young Guns” was popular around that time, and in the film, the heroes call themselves “pals.”
“If you got three or four good pals,” one character remarks, “well, then you’ve got yourself a tribe.”
Naturally, the two calf ropers adopted the moniker.
“Even when I see him today, it’s ‘Hey, pal,’” Richards said.
After high school and college, Edwards kept chasing his rodeo dreams, mostly at the Mesquite Championship Rodeo, a competition with a story that mirrors the rise of rodeo’s popularity.
Legendary stock contractor Neal Gay created the event in 1958 at a time when only two roads led from Mesquite to Dallas. LBJ Freeway was built about a decade later, leading locals and curious travelers nearly straight to the arena, but it was the recurring broadcasts on ESPN that ultimately earned his upstart rodeo millions of new fans. Celebs took notice, too: Everyone from the prince and princess of Monaco to Mick Jagger made their way to Mesquite.
“You could see the transformation of the rodeo,” Jim Gay, one of Neal’s sons, told Western Horseman.
Josh Edwards was in the middle of that transformation. He’d work in the radiology unit of a nearby hospital during the week, then enter competitions in Mesquite on Fridays and Saturdays.
As even the most casual rodeo fans can tell you, calf roping is extremely difficult to master. While riding on horseback, the competitor must catch the calf, dismount, then tie the calf’s legs together before it runs away — all while racing the clock. Edwards had plenty of practice from his upbringing on the ranch, and his skills, instincts, and reliability caught the eyes of the Gay family, who ran a convention rodeo in the offseason.
“They’d put on this big, entertaining show for companies who wanted the rodeo experience,” Edwards recalled, “and one day, they were short a pickup man.”
He filled in — and fell in love. He especially enjoyed how it combined the speed and energy of calf roping with the raising of horses he’s loved since he was a kid. Plus, he was both in the thick of the action and active behind the scenes — moving livestock, training horses, and doing all of the nitty-gritty cowboy work that makes the rodeo happen.
He didn’t know anything else that allowed him to do that.
“I don’t think I ever quit roping calves; I just quit entering rodeos,” he explained. “I phased out my roping career and turned to pickup.”
Even still, Edwards achieved one of his lifelong dreams: He made it to the National Finals Rodeo. Maybe he wasn’t roping calves, but when he stepped into that most vaunted of rodeo arenas, it hardly mattered why he was there. The point was, he was there, part of the biggest show in the business.
Not every cowboy gets that chance, and he got it twice.
Brooke Wharton, a longtime rodeo pro who now performs pivot setting at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, says Edwards’ Finals appearance are some of the most impressive elements of his resume. Many people spend months, even years, aggressively campaigning for a spot as a pickup man at the big show, she points out.
“Josh didn’t do any of that. The fact that he was chosen twice to pick up — and was a runner-up five other times — just shows the respect he has from his peers.”
When reminiscing on his pickup career, Edwards pointed to several other highlights, including the first time he picked up at the famous rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Another memory that sticks out is frozen in time courtesy of a photograph that’s quite popular in the rodeo world.
It was 2009, and an unstoppable force was meeting an immovable object. More specifically, 46-year-old Billy Etbauer, a famous bronc rider, was tasked with riding Painted Valley, one of the GOATs in the saddle bronc world. Etbauer ultimately achieved an 89-point record — quite the feat, especially when going toe to toe with an impressive athlete — and in the photo, you can see him holding on for dear life while Painted Valley tries to vault him into the air.
Edwards didn’t make the picture, but he was there, roughly 15 feet out of frame, doing his job.
“Every time I see that picture, I think about how I was there for this big moment,” he said. “I was a part of something really special.”
He was part of many more special moments over the next 15 years: He worked at every major rodeo competition you can think of, racking up a trophy case of awards for his pickup skills. Ultimately, he decided it was time to retire. He wanted to spend more time with his two sons — one’s an aspiring pilot; the other rides broncos — and he wanted to take some time for his other jobs, too. (As if his CV wasn’t wild enough already, Edwards owns many businesses, including a Kwik Kar franchise.)
But there was something else he wanted to do — another adventure he’d come across.
“You’re always striving for a goal,” he said. “And when you meet that, you set a new one.”
“It is easy to conquer the world from the back of a horse.” — Genghis Khan

Darah Hubbard
Bret Richards became an auctioneer, and he’d go long stretches without talking to the old pal who embodied “cowboy cool.” Yet no matter how much time passed (“It could be two days or two years”), whenever they’d meet up, they’d slip back into the style of conversation they established long ago.
“Josh usually spends the first half-hour asking about your life, your wife, your parents, your kids,” Richards explained. “Then, finally, you get to ask him a question.”
That’s what happened in January 2024 at the Fort Worth rodeo. Edwards had announced his retirement but was still working as a pickup man for a couple more months. He sidled his horse up to Richards, who was sitting in the stands.
First, Richards wanted to hear about Edwards’ life as a stuntman. That’s yet another side gig he picked up over the years: Josh Edwards is a SAG card-carrying stunt man (hence the “Hollywood” nickname, which he shares with a beloved palomino horse he owns.)
It started with B-movie gigs here and there. He rode horses, or sometimes he fell off them. (If you’ve seen the TV show “Zoo,” you may have seen him in action.) Over time, it blossomed into other gigs. One time, a hockey flick needed a guy who could get hit, so they hired Edwards.
On that particular day in Fort Worth in early 2024, he had a recent car crash scene to tell his old friend about. But Richards also wanted to know what was next. What does a guy like Josh Edwards do in retirement?
“Well,” Edwards said, flashing that mischievous grin, “I’m excited to tell you about that.”
Richards had never heard of the Mongol Derby before, but as Edwards explained it (1,000 kilometers, 10 days, rough terrain), he realized how much sense it made, retirement be damned.
“He said he wanted to challenge himself, as a cowboy and as a horseman,” Richards said. “My first thought was, ‘Yeah, that tracks.’”
Brooke Wharton had a similar reaction when she heard Edwards was interested in the Derby. When he mentioned the race in a 2023 conversation, he had no idea Wharton had competed in the Derby in 2017, placing sixth out of 40 riders.
“It’s something you can’t be prepared enough for, no matter how prepared you are,” she told Edwards. “No matter what you think it is, it’s more extreme.”
That said, she liked Edwards’ odds — and she connected him to a fellow Derby alum, Frank Winters, a lifelong cowboy who competed in the race in 2019, placing seventh.
He was 57 at the time.
As he later told a TV station near his home in the Panhandle, Winters had been dreaming of Mongolia ever since he learned about it at 14. He read a book, he explained, where a hero traversed the steppe. He wanted to be that guy.
Upon Wharton’s suggestion, Edwards and Winters met in person and worked out a plan.
Don’t worry about cardio, the veteran horseman told Edwards. “Just ride horses.”
“When I went, there were some of the most in-shape people I had seen in my entire life,” Winters said. “They could run for miles and do very kind of calisthenic on the planet, but when it came to riding horses, they were wiped out.”
Taking Winters’ advice to heart, Edwards devised a 20-mile trail near his home in Forney and rode it every other day. He had competed in multiple Ironmans at that point, so he was no stranger to intensive training. For better or for worse, he was also accustomed to building his life around his race prep regiments.
Once, while on family vacation in Galveston, Edwards knew he had to get in some swim time. There was just a slight problem: The family was on a hike, and the only body of water appeared to have trash in it — maybe even fecal matter. Still, he swam — and proceeded to get stung by roughly half a dozen jellyfish.
“I was so mad,” said his wife, Kristi, shaking her head and smiling. “But there was no stopping him.”

Darah Hubbard
If you’re one of the 40 Derby riders chosen from the thousands of international applicants, your loved ones can watch your progress in the race courtesy of a real-time tracker tracing the progress of each contestant.
That’s how Kristi found herself watching a red dot on the other side of the world this past August.
“When I was sleeping, he was racing,” she said. “So, I tried to stay up as late as possible, just to see how he was doing.”
Richards said something remarkably similar:
“They were racing while we were asleep, so you’d look before going to sleep, then wake up and check it, first thing. And I’d know, from the distance, how much Josh had got the horse to trust him.”
Here’s how the race works:
Riders like Edwards randomly draw a horse to begin the race, then ride to checkpoints spaced out every 35 to 40 kilometers. At those checkpoints, they randomly draw a new horse, then another new horse, and so on. In between each stop, it’s up to the riders to navigate how to best race the course within a designated corridor stretching from the starting point to the finish line. There are plenty of penalties, too: Riders will be forced to sit for two hours if they stray outside the width of the corridor or ride more than 14 hours a day. Likewise, they’ll be forced to sit if their horse’s heartbeat is at a certain level when they reach a new checkpoint. The idea is to win the race without pushing the horse too hard.
“I’d say there are really four elements at play,” Edwards said. “There’s horsemanship, navigation, and nutrition. Then there’s luck.”
For many of those elements, Edwards relied on the people around him. It’s just his nature to be friendly, and he also remembered a story Winters told him.
In the 2019 Derby, the veteran cowboy was making good time and setting himself up for a top-three finish. Then, one of his fellow riders — someone with whom he’d gotten close — got injured. Winters stopped, turned around, and tended to his friend.
“At that point, you’re like, ‘What really matters?’” Winters says. “Finishing as who I was as a person rather than trading that for some kind of advantage ... it wasn’t worth it for me.”
Edwards didn’t try to pull a fast one on anyone. He spent a lot of time riding in a pack, and when he felt it was time to turn right, he told everyone as much. At other times, it was just him and one or two other riders — his new friends Missy Morgan and Sam Jones. Harkening back to his “Young Guns” days, Edwards refers to their ragtag trio as “our little tribe.”
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Josh Edwards
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Josh Edwards
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Josh Edwards
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Josh Edwards
“We’d ride for miles together, chatting the whole way, and other times we didn’t say anything for what felt like hours.”
He paused, reflecting on the time spent with riders from around the globe. Then he added, “I think they call it ‘trauma bonding.’ That’s what I learned over there.”
There was one time, toward the end of the race, when Kristi was pacing the perimeter of the family pool back in Forney. It was late, technically morning, so the stars dotting the pitch-black sky were reflected in the still water near her feet. She was worried about her husband, who, according to his red dot, hadn’t moved in a while. And even though she wasn’t expecting a call, she held her iPhone in her hands.
It rang: Her husband was FaceTiming her from Mongolia for the first time since the race started.
When she answered, a tired Edwards told her how he’d managed to convey “Wi-Fi?” to a man outside a ger (the electrical tower, standing in a nearby field, aided his mime performance).
Then he told her he wasn’t sure if he could finish the race.
This wasn’t wholly surprising for Kristi. She’d heard tell of how grueling the Mongol Derby could be, and as she watched the dot symbolizing Josh advance across the steppe, she conjured all manner of hardships he must have been experiencing.
But still, she knew her husband. She knows he can fall off a horse, get checked in a faux hockey game, and get stung by six jellyfish. She knows he can take all that and keep going. So that’s what she told him.
He seemed to take heart in her words of encouragement, and soon, he started talking about something else.
He told her about the families he met when the sun was descending, and most folks in their right minds would send a stranger packing. He told her about the kids with whom he played games, and how he’d let them wear his cowboy hat.

Josh Edwards
The Mongol Derby is a 1,000K+ horse race through the Mongolian steppe. Here, Josh Edwards poses with fellow podium finishers Josh Dales and Grace Neuhaus.
“The people you meet were the best part for me,” Edwards later said. “The culture there is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It makes you stop and be still, because the world slows down to damn near a halt. It makes you just be a part of it.”
Those run-ins with loving, welcoming families also “softened” him, he said. They didn’t completely blunt his competitive edge, but this strong sense of kinship — and his budding friendships with riders like Morgan and Jones — reminded him that the experience was far more important than victory in any race.
That’s why he doesn’t really mind that one of his horses bucked him off and left him stranded in the dust. It’s also why he doesn’t much mind that he came in third, right behind his two new pals.
“If Josh raced in the Derby 10 times, he’d probably win seven of them,” Wharton said.
Winters echoed that thought: “It came down to luck of the draw. He drew a bad horse toward the end, and it cost him.”
It’s not that Edwards disagrees with their assessment; he thinks there’s a chance he could’ve won. But for now, he’s focused on those memories that will last much longer than the high of any win:
The youngsters racing around the steppe, wearing a stranger’s cowboy hat; the nod of a family patriarch, welcoming Edwards into his home; and the long hours riding beneath the Mongolian sky, sometimes talking, sometimes saying nothing.
“It’s an experience I could never repeat,” he said.
So, he isn’t going to try.
Many people compete in the Mongol Derby multiple times, but Edwards says he’s on to the next adventure. Maybe the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race; maybe another race that’s less famous but just as tough.
“He’s going to find something else to challenge him,” Kristi said. “I know he will.”
In a way, he already has. Being a dad, after all, can be just as taxing as any race — and just as much of an adventure.
“It’s our kids’ turn now,” he told Richards when they talked last January.
Still, don’t be surprised if you see him competing in another race sooner or later.
“I don’t know what’s next,” he admitted, grinning once more, “but I’m looking forward to it.”