In June 2023, a mother horse and her young foal found themselves stuck on a beach in Lake Powell, unable to leave, out of food and too weak to swim to shore.
Now, over a year after they were rescued from their deadly predicament, the mother Emma remains at Best Friends Animal Society with her rescuer — and Emma’s daughter, named Marina, has found a home.
Marina’s new herd
Gina DiLello remembers reading about the rescue from a Best Friends news release.
She and her business partner, Grant Johnson, run The Bedrock Homestead. It’s nestled in an area grandfathered into the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where they take people on horseback wilderness trips and host equine massage therapy workshops.
When DiLello expressed interest in the pair, Best Friends initially said they wanted to hold onto the horses for a while. But later, after Marina was weaned off Emma, DiLello and Johnson were able to adopt the daughter. The nonprofit also asked if the pair wanted to adopt Bell, a young horse that Marina had become good friends with.
Dilello accepted, and also adopted Bell’s mother, Libby, who she said was rescued from neglect so severe people didn’t even know she was pregnant.
“They looked at what I was doing with these horses and chose me because I am so involved with them,” DiLello said.
Marina arrived Sep. 6. Since horses have a hierarchy, Dilello said they had to slowly integrate the three newcomers into the herd. They put Marina in a large corral that she, Libby and Bell had to themselves. The homestead’s six other horses were in a field next to them, separated by a fence.
“She arrived at this big homestead,” DiLello said. “She was sprinting around the fields and just tearing it up. Just sprinting around, big circles, tail straight up in the air, just super happy.”
About a month later, when she thought it was time, she threw open the gate between them.
“Marina immediately just tore into the crowd,” she said. “All nine of them started racing around the field in a big circle.”
(Molly Wald | Best Friends Animal Society) Bell (center) and Marina (right) look curiously at a photographer with their pal Rose in the background.
Emma, a headstrong mom
DiLello initially wanted to adopt Emma as well.
But she said Jen Reid — the manager of the Best Friends horse sanctuary in Kanab, who played an important role in the pair’s rescue — wanted to keep her.
However, Reid said that with more thought, she has found that Emma may be too similar to the mare she already has at home for the two to get along; they both are dominant, and the two “would start World War III together,” Reid said. “Nobody wants that.”
Emma, she said, will instead be available soon for adoption to a better-suiting home.
“We’re continuing work with her training,” Reid said. “We haven’t started her under saddle or anything like that.”
She explained Emma’s proven sensitive, and a horse really gets to decide their own training timetable.
“She’s coming along,” she said. “She’s continually getting tamer and learning and progressing.”
Reid said she first heard of Emma from a local veterinary office, who heard of her from the National Park Service — which heard about her from boaters on Lake Powell.
The boaters had noticed the animals stuck on the beach, and although the park service doesn’t typically interfere with wildlife, they said in a news release that they determined the horses could pose a risk to the public because of the popularity of the beach they were trapped on.
A daunting rescue
(National Park Service) A once wild horse, now named Emma, and her foal, now named Marina, were left stranded on a Lake Powell beach for weeks in 2023 amid rising water levels. They were ultimately rescued and taken to Best Friends Animal Society's horse sanctuary.
Park service officials explained at the time that it wasn’t clear why the horses were there, though Emma could have wandered off to give birth. They also were not sure why she didn’t swim to shore and instead remained on the beach without food until she was too weak to make the quarter-mile journey through the lake.
The rescue, Reid recalled, was no jaunt in the park. It took about two weeks to plan while the park service brought food to the horses so they wouldn’t starve.
On June 23, 2023, the rescue began.
A horse trailer first had to be loaded by a small crane onto a park service barge that Reid said looked similar to a landing craft at Normandy.
The team planned to hit Emma with a tranquilizer dart and use a sled-like platform to drag her onto the boat and have Marina follow.
“Problem is, we didn’t tell Emma about the plan,” Reid said. “She would start to lay down, and then her little filly would nick her like, ‘Mom, what’s wrong?’ And she would jump up and fight the sedation.”
(Molly Wald | Best Friends Animal Society) Marina, left, enjoys a snack with her young friend Bell.
It was time for plan B — corral the wild animal with plastic snow fence and guide her to the boat.
Again, Reid said, Emma was not on board.
The rescue crew ultimately upgraded to four 12-foot sections of rigid fencing and hit her with another tranquilizer dart to take the edge off, knowing it wouldn’t do the full job to take her down.
Slowly, that did the trick.
“It’s a freaking miracle that it worked,” Reid said. “If she had been a different type of horse, like a much more reactive horse, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
Reid said she was happy she could help when the park service asked. Often, she said, Best Friends gets calls about similar situations and can’t do much because they don’t have any authority over wild animals or the land they are found on.
“We couldn’t have done it without the park service and Kanab Veterinary Hospital, and the support of people wanting to help horses,” she said.
