Searching for "Caballo Blanco," famed long-distance runner who died on the trail

At Outside magazine, a beautifully-written and skillfully-reported story on the search for Micah True, aka "Caballo Blanco." The long-distance runner who became famous by way of the book "Born to Run" died last month, after setting out on a 12-mile hike in the Gila National Forest. Related: this 2010 profile of True (PDF) in Arizona fitness magazine Sweat is one of the better ones.

Photo: Micah True in Mexico's Copper Canyon. Ryan Heffernan, via Outside Magazine.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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ricklouharrie

My wife and I met Caballo Blanco in the tiny village of Urique at the bottom of the Copper Canyon in 2002. We’d been so traumatised by the bus ride down to the village that we were considering trying to hike out of the place. We were the only tourists there at the time, except for Micah, who overheard us chatting and offered to guide us up and out. We ended up gathering enough courage to take the bus, but we always remembered ’Caballo’ for some strange reason (he definitely had something about him) and brought up his name often over the years. Now I wish we’d taken him up on his offer.