JACKSON, Wyo. — Two years in the making, Deirdre Griffith is finally headed to race in the Mongol Derby, a grueling 621-mile (100km) race across the Mongolian steppe.
Griffith will use the race to raise funding for the new Parental Mental Wellness Program she helped create at St. John’s Health.
“I struggled with [postpartum depression] myself, so when I was thinking about this race, I wanted to use it as a platform for something. When I thought about it it was something that seemed like such a simple fix, and it would have a big impact on the community.”
The program, launched in March, aims to connect new parents with the mental health resources they might need.
“It’s a little bit of a spinoff of the Mental Health JH Pilot Program, Griffith said. “We created a new set of protocols at the hospital that focus on parental mental health.”
Doctors and nurses at St. John’s will share information about mental health resources when new parents are being discharged from the hospital after giving birth. Lactation consultants, who are already calling every patient at weeks two and four, are now conducting mental health screenings and can provide referrals within the St. John’s network within 24 hours.
“Mental Health JH was so successful because they had providers ready to go,” Griffith said. “You need to have someone to help shepherd you along. This is a way to have more touch points with people that can get you to resources super fast and before you lose momentum being caught up being a new parent.”
To date, Griffith has raised $100,000 for the program. “If someone isn’t insured or can’t pay, that’s what a lot of these funds will go towards,” Griffith said.
Funds have already been used to train three St. John’s staff through Postpartum Support International and will continue to be used for ongoing training and helping uncovered patients get the care they need.
“I think we get pretty wrapped up in the fact that it’s always the mom when in fact being a new parent affects the dad just as much. A lot of it is wrapped up around lifestyle change,” Griffith said.
Piece by piece, guess and check
Coined the “longest and toughest horse race in the world,” the Mongol Derby is modeled after Genghis Khan’s messaging network, set up in 1224. Using horse stations, known as urtuus, riders would trade out their horses as they carried messages hundreds of miles. At its height, the network allegedly connected half the world. Remnants of the network carried messages into the 1950s.
Today, forty or so competitors model this system, riding semi-feral Mongolian horses for 25 miles before selecting another horse from the lineup. The race takes anywhere between seven and ten days, and riders must navigate the course via GPS. There are no marked trails.
“You can’t really prepare for it all the way. It’s such a unique experience and there are very few ways to simulate it,” Griffith said.
Much like mental health journeys, the race is one step at a time.
“The best way to do it is to pick a landmark in the general direction and try to figure a way to try to stay straight, crossing rivers and passes,” Griffith said.
Griffith explained that at the end of each leg, the horse has to pass a vigorous health check before she can select another horse. The goal is to trade out three or four horses per day before the race pauses in the evening. Another caveat is racers have to stay within range of the front runners due to resource limitations.
“The field can only spread out so far. If you fall too far behind they will disqualify you and truck you forward if you want to finish,” Griffith said.
Griffith, a lifelong rider set her site on the 2020 race but the derby was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-19, keeping her at the proverbial starting line.
After growing up riding, packing and showing horses in California, Griffith moved to Jackson after she finished her masters at Colorado State. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t riding,” she said. “I moved here with the intention of finding a pack outfit to work for.”
She landed a cooking job with Triangle X for their summer pack trips. When August came around, she joined the hunting outfit as their first female wrangler. She spent the next four seasons working for Triangle X where she met her husband, a hunting guide.
“When we started having kids we were like we can’t be doing pack trips and hunting camps. It was like, Im not going to stay home and you’re not going to stay home so thats when we moved on.”
Griffith now works as a real estate agent, specializing in ranch and recreational real estate. The couple has two daughters together.
Griffith is sharing her love for horses with their daughters.
“I took my older daughter on a pack trip last summer, just the two of us went for three days, she was five and we just had the best time. She loved it.”
