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Passing the Reins

A cornerstone horse therapy program changes hands, opening up expansive possibilities for the future

By Molly Priddy
Lynnette Holmes, right, laughs with Elise Aldrich during a session on May 13, 2015. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

There’s an idea in American culture, that we’re all responsible for our own destiny. We can manifest what we truly want, and if we work hard enough and have the follow-through necessary to navigate the thin, hard, tough times, we’ll be rewarded with our dreams coming to life.

But what happens when dozens of lives and dreams interconnect, weaving together in a powerful pattern, all pointing in the same direction?

The dream – and the destinies attached to it – becomes stronger, and its materialization more powerful.

That’s how Bob and Timi Burmood think about their former business now, SAMS Riders, which ran for 25 years under their considerable experience and has now changed hands, with an optimistic outlook at the future.

How Bob and Timi ended up together on a 7-acre farm outside of Kalispell leading around children with developmental and physical disabilities on kind, gentle horses is a story of fate and hope, and finding one’s path in this world.

“It is a story of love,” Timi Burmood said.

Elise Aldrich gives Sonny a kiss after a session with Lynnette Holmes, right, and Eric Fisher on May 13, 2015. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon
Elise Aldrich gives Sonny a kiss after a session with Lynnette Holmes. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

Out at the small barn and arena just off Farm to Market, miracles happen all the time. This is where SAMS Riders, a therapeutic horse-riding program, gets to work.

SAMS stands for Sensory And Motor Stimulation, which is exactly what the clients receive when they climb aboard therapy horses Imp’s and Sonny’s backs. The feel and movement of a horse helps with sensory input and the kids perform tasks, like stringing beads together, while in the saddle.

“The mental and emotional wellbeing that comes with working with horses is a given,” Lynnette Holmes, the program’s new owner, said.

A couple weeks ago, Imp and Sonny enjoyed the cool spring air out in the fields as Holmes and her crew got to work fixing fences.

Holmes signed on as the new owner in late April, and there was plenty of work to be done on the farm. But while maintenance filled her plate and will for the next few months, Holmes has big plans for the program the Burmoods nurtured for nearly three decades.

As an occupational therapist with roots in Bozeman, Holmes dreamed of one day working with animals to help people with disabilities. She started volunteering at the Burmood’s ranch a couple summers ago and felt a kinship with what was accomplished there.

When Bob and Timi decided it was time to retire, they offered to sell the business to Holmes. She didn’t have the cash up front, she said, but felt the strong urge to find a way.

Holmes decided to get in touch with her former employer, Whitefish philanthropist Mike Goguen, about getting a loan to buy the land and the business.

While completing OT school in California, Holmes had also worked as a nanny for the Goguens’ kids. She pitched the idea for a loan to keep the SAMS Riders program afloat, and Goguen went a step further, offering to buy the property and the business, and Holmes could pay him back for the business.

“This was probably meant to be because it was such a coincidental alignment of the stars,” Goguen said in a recent interview. “It just coincidentally lined up with the thing I like to do in Montana.”

Goguen is known for donating millions of dollars for programs that have immediate impacts in the valley, such as Two Bear Air Rescue. Keeping SAMS Riders around made sense, he said, because it has helped so many.

“Here, you donate dollars and kids get therapy that they need and their emotional well-being and their lives improve,” Goguen said. “ The project looked interesting to me, and I got to help Lynnette, who our family adores, achieve her dream in life.”

With Goguen’s backing, Holmes hopes to expand the capabilities at the SAMS ranch to include an outdoor arena with more space for straight lines, and may include a program for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

She also hopes to include more children who need the horses’ help by adding more horses and trainers, and allow for health insurance to pay for the sessions.

SAMS Riders has about 20 clients right now, with about a dozen more on the waiting list.

Her large, gentle employees have worked 11 years in the barn, and in that time have developed close relationships with clients. Some kids consider the horses their best friends, Holmes said, and the horses are known to nuzzle the kids after a session is complete.

Riding horseback can help with physical and balance issues, Holmes said, though the mental and emotional benefits seem to be the most rewarding.

“Autism is one of our biggest diagnoses in the program,” Holmes said.

Children with autism face a gamut of challenges navigating the social and physical world, she said, but riding a horse can help them stay grounded. Some kids benefit from lying down on the horse, covered with a weighted blanket, so they can feel the heat, the movement, smell the horse, hear the heartbeat, and feel the horse’s coat.

Most can only handle about 10 minutes due to an overwhelming amount of stimulus, but they get out of the saddle relaxed.

“When you get them off the horse, you get a sense of peace,” Holmes said.

Parents report their kids are sleeping better, and some parents have experienced a child climbing down from the saddle, climbing into their parent’s lap, and saying, “I love you” for the first time.

They’re communicating differently, having spent time with a friend who accepts them without question.

“Horses don’t understand disability. They see each person as they are, and accept them as they are,” Holmes said. “If you treat them with respect, they will respect and love you.”

Charlie Jones rests on the back of Imp under a weighted blanket during a therapy session with Lynnette Holmes. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon
Charlie Jones rests on the back of Imp under a weighted blanket during a session. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

Kjell, pronounced “shell,” is a bright, talkative 12-year-old boy, interested in building Lego creations and jogging. A couple of weekends ago, he sat rapt with attention, knowing he would earn the promise of shooting hoops if he sat quietly while his mother, Erika Johnson, spoke.

Ten years ago, Erika and her husband found out their 2-year-old son was autistic. He wasn’t speaking, communicating his needs through screaming or throwing blocks against the wall.

The family felt at a loss on how to help him; autism treatment doesn’t come with an easily laid-out process to follow, Erika said.

“It’s just a morass to navigate,” she said.

She heard about SAMS Riders through the local Child Development Center (CDC) office, and Kjell’s speech therapist, Kathy Heider, encouraged the family to put Kjell on horseback as a complement to the therapy they did in her office.

What Kjell needed was language, Erika said, anything to help him communicate what he’s experiencing. Once they started at SAMS, the 2-and-a-half-year-old boy began learning sign language.

At SAMS, the first phrase riders learn is “Go horse please.” Through his work there, Kjell was able to connect his signed request for the horse to go with the reward of getting what he wanted, which was a horse ride.

Eventually, he moved on to making a guttural “guh” noise, the start of the word “go,” to make the horse move. Soon, he was saying his first words.

“He said ‘go,’ and that was his first word,” Erika said. “Then he said ‘horse,’ ‘please,’ and ‘cookie.’”

Connecting speech to communication was a major step for Kjell. It helped form the neuropathways in his brain needed for talking.

“Once he understood, oh my gosh, it was like you turned an ignition over,” Erika said.

It was gratifying to hear her son speak after years of waiting to talk with him, she said, and it helped the entire family become closer.

“It just gave us – my husband, myself, and Kjell – it just gave us another way of connecting,” she said. “That was probably one of the happiest days and weeks. Peace came over the family; I knew everything was going to be OK.”

Inspired, Johnson joined the nonprofit board, Human Therapy on Horseback, the sister organization to SAMS Riders, which provides about 65 percent of the cost for the horse therapy sessions, leaving parents and caretakers responsible for the remaining 35 percent.

After Kjell moved on from horse therapy after three years, Erika’s interests moved on as well. But just recently, with another of her pursuits ending, Erika decided to go back to the HTH board.

“I feel passionately about horse therapy,” she said.

For his part, Kjell remembers specifics of his time at the barn. He knows he rode Sonny the horse, and that he liked the animals very much. Most importantly, he is no longer without words.

“I even got bubbles to make the ride more fun,” Kjell said. “They were very nice to me.”

Lynnette Holmes helps Wyatt Peterson as he works on his alphabet during a session. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon
Lynnette Holmes helps Wyatt Peterson as he works on his alphabet during a session. Greg Lindstrom | Flathead Beacon

Bob Burmood moved to the Flathead from Nebraska in the 1970s, taking a job with the Child Development Center (CDC) in Kalispell. During a conference on cerebral palsy, he stumbled on a presentation about equine therapy for kids.

“Horses have been a passion of mine all my life,” Bob said.

He brought the idea back to the CDC, but it was initially rejected. Still, Bob felt it would benefit kids in the Flathead, so he found families and horses he believed were suitable for one another.

“The first thing I would see immediately was a smile, no matter how painful it may be,” he said.

One client, a young girl with physical issues, boarded a pony and was seated fully within 15 minutes. Her physical therapist who was present at the session said it would have taken him a full 45-minute session to get her legs fully stretched out like that, and she would have fought the whole time.

Bob filmed sessions, with parental permission, and also had doctors, physical therapists, speech therapists, and occupational therapists observe the sessions and take their notes.

He presented the film and the notes to the CDC, and received backing in the form of insurance coverage. Around the same time, he met Dr. William Little, a radiologist who raised Arabian horses and made his arena available for Bob’s program.

Eventually, Bob was directing the CDC office, seeing a full load of 13 family clients, and running the horse program as well. He stepped down from the director chair, giving him time to focus on his caseload and the horses.

Working with the horses showed more promise than any other therapeutic method Bob had ever seen, and he didn’t want to waste valuable time.

“After doing the first session at the end of the first day at Dr. Little’s barn, I got down on my knees and looked up at heaven and said thank you God, now I know what you have been doing with my life,” Bob said. “I had found what I should be doing.”

He started a volunteer program, where he met Timi, who started to get help with her 15-month-old daughter who was diagnosed with left-side hemiparesis, making it difficult for her to crawl or use her left hand.

“I loved children and I loved horses, and I thought this would be great,” Timi said.

Before long, Timi was volunteering nine months out of the year. She moved to Bozeman with her then-husband, but felt compelled to get back to where she felt she truly belonged. She and Bob stayed in contact, and started working together again when she moved back to Kalispell.

They developed programs for Flathead Industries, working with adult clients on their own time, and also developed a successful program in Eureka, which they drove to once a week for 13 years.

“We weren’t successful monetary wise, but we were very successful at it,” Bob said.

Bob left the CDC to pursue horse therapy full time after 16 years. He and Timi fell in love and married, living and working to keep the program afloat.

“We were charging $10 a session. It was ridiculous, because we had no business sense at all. The cost that we incurred in order to do this was ridiculous,” Timi said. “But it was out of passion and we could just see the good in what was happening with the kids.”

Both took jobs to supplement their income, and eventually bought a house for the land. They operated SAMS Riders from 1991 until just recently, when Bob went in for a checkup after feeling crummy.

“They had found a tumor on my spine and I needed to start seeing an oncologist,” Bob said.

The tests found stage-4 cancer, requiring immediate chemotherapy and radiation. No longer able to do the work required of running the facility, the Burmoods started looking for buyers, and Holmes showed up.

“It always has been God’s program, and I think the cancer was God’s way of getting me out of the program,” Bob said.

Aggressive radiation and chemotherapy have reduced the tumor by two-thirds, Bob said, but he also believes the prayers and thoughts from so many people had a hand in the healing as well. The couple said they hadn’t realized how many people they had helped until the letters from former clients and their families started pouring in once word of Bob’s illness got out.

“One thing I heard a lot from the parents is they would come in and say, ‘There’s such peace here,’” Timi said. “I like to think of it, and I still feel this way, everybody that came through that door was like part of our family.”

Still, the Burmoods consider the horses to be the true miracle workers. They pulled kids from their shells and brought them to life, just by being kind.

“We had some incredible horses,” Bob said.

Bob and Timi Burmood, right, and Lynnette and Mike Holmes. Courtesy Photo
Bob and Timi Burmood, right, and Lynnette and Mike Holmes. Courtesy Photo

In Missoula, the Burmoods live in a condo, and are close to necessary medical care for Bob. He’s gotten used to getting up without having to attend to the backbreaking work required of horses and maintaining 7 acres, but the couple still feels the hangover from selling the business they built and ran for 25 years.

On May 2, at one of the largest fundraisers HTH puts on each year, the Burmoods were honored for their work. Goguen offered to send a helicopter to transport them from Missoula to make the trip easier, Bob said, but Timi is afraid to fly.

They drove instead, passing through the land they once called home, where they found their calling and meaning in their lives. It’s not the end, they said, merely a new chapter as Bob continues to fight back.

They may have passed the reins, but without them, there would be no reins, no saddles, no horses at all. That is a scenario they refuse to entertain, because their dreams have already come true.

“It’s very bittersweet because it’s going on, the program is going on, and it will be even better than what we had. It’s going to be different than what we had, but it’s got that youth and enthusiasm and imagination,” Timi said. “It’s awesome that something we helped build will carry on.”

For more information on SAMS Riders and Human Therapy on Horseback, visit www.hthflathead.org.