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Maui Fire Survivors Are Finding Solace In Horse Therapy

A Kula ranch has provided more than 1,800 equine-therapy sessions to help survivors of the Lahaina and Upcountry fires cope with their grief and other deeply rooted trauma.

ByErin Nolan/ January 9, 2025

(Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)

Golden afternoon sunlight poured over Garrett Higgins as he stood quietly in the center of a gated corral in mid-December. He was almost completely still, his eyes focused on the beige and white horse a few yards away. 

The horse, named Sugar, kept her back to Higgins for several minutes, and the only sound was the wind sweeping through the surrounding rolling hills.

Then, something unexpected happened — Sugar turned around. Slowly, Higgins approached the horse, now facing him, and caressed her nose. When Sugar leaned into his touch, he gently reached around her neck and hugged her.

“Mmmm,” Higgins, 31, exhaled into Sugar’s butter-colored coat, and beneath a shadow cast by the brim of his suede cowboy hat, he smiled.

The interaction was the conclusion of an exercise called “connection,” a typical part of Higgins’ weekly sessions at , a nonprofit in Central Maui that uses horses to help people through grief or trauma.

Higgins, who lives in Honokowai, is one of several people affected by the fire that destroyed much of Lahaina and parts of Upcountry on Aug. 8, 2023, who receives free “equine-assisted trauma-informed care” at the ranch. This unique form of mental health care focuses on the body’s reaction to trauma and addressing past trauma that is unearthed following a crisis like the Lahaina fire, said Paige Deponte, the organization’s director.

“With the wildfires, we quickly became aware of how that trauma brought everything to the surface — all historical trauma, generational trauma, childhood trauma,” said Deponte. “People didn’t really come in here talking about the fires.”

Deponte is also one of three caretakers — or facilitators — at the ranch who guides clients like Higgins through sessions. Facilitators are not licensed therapists, Deponte said, but they are trained to work with clients who have experienced complex trauma and to use a variety of techniques intended to improve clients’ mental health.

The ranch had begun offering these services in early 2023, Deponte said, and only to youth clients. But when fire swept through West Maui, killing more than 100 people and displacing thousands, ranch leadership and the Maui Non-Profit Directors Association, a group of local nonprofit administrators, agreed this kind of care should be available to all affected community members, free of charge. 

“We didn’t even have our funding yet, but we said, ‘Let’s do it. This is what we trained for,’” said Deponte. “So we opened our doors. We wanted to help people get back into their bodies.”

The ranch was first awarded funding for its community trauma relief program nearly a month later, said Deponte. Since then, funding has come from individual donors, the �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�� Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund, Maui United Way, The Rotary Club of Maui and others, she said.

In total, the ranch has provided more than 1,800 sessions to fire-affected community members since August 2023, according to Duponte. 

A typical session begins when the client arrives and hops into a pickup truck with their facilitator, said Deponte. The corral is a short, rugged drive away — tucked in a small valley past steep hillsides and rocky terrain — but the location is worth it for its privacy and stunning ocean views, she said. 

Once inside the pen with the horse, the client and facilitator typically sit face-to-face in folding chairs and decide what the session should focus on. Deponte said she often also brings her 5-year-old Australian shepherd named Blue into the corral.

“The goal is for the client to find out more about their needs through a series of questions,” Deponte said. “No session is ever the same.”

Higgins, a facilities and project manager for Maui Gold and the Hawai‘i Farm Project, began making the hour-and-a-half drive to the ranch to meet with Deponte a few months after the fire, he said. His 150-square-foot tiny house and the half-acre lot it sat on had become a sort of refuge for displaced friends and acquaintances, and he was providing food and shelter for more than a dozen people, he said. 

Past experience had left him wary about the idea of therapy, he said, but stress was mounting and he decided he needed to address his declining mental health.

“I didn’t want to come. I was very resistant,” he said.

But with encouragement from a former girlfriend, he agreed to start working with Deponte at The Spirit Horse Ranch, he said. 

“At first, I was coming here sort of in survival mode — ‘What can I do? How can I face this? How can I move forward?’” said Higgins. “But the more I come here, the less it becomes about the fire and the more it becomes about me and my traumas and the deeper meanings behind them. Over time, I realized there was a lot more going on than just a big disaster.” 

Over the course of about a year, Higgins has confronted difficult past experiences and worked through dark thoughts, he said, but he has grown into a much happier and far more confident person.

His bond with Sugar, whom ranch staff hand-picked to work with Higgins, has also grown, he said.

“Sugar is funny,” Higgins said, chuckling. “When I first met her, she put up walls and she liked to ignore me, which was kind of like a mirror looking me right back in the face. That was exactly what I did.”

Deponte said she has enjoyed watching Higgins and Sugar, and their relationship is a testament to the benefits of working with horses.

“They’re sentient beings, and they think and feel and have incredible memories,” Deponte said about horses. “They were made to do this.”

Sugar has reliably comforted Higgins throughout his sessions with Deponte, he said, and she sometimes actively participates in exercises in which the client attempts to emotionally connect with the horse.

“Typically I think my energy is a little too much for Sugar, and she can tell that I am trying to force a connection rather than just allow the connection to happen,” said Higgins, explaining that Sugar typically remains with her back to him throughout the exercise.

When she did turn to face him on that Friday afternoon in December, he said, “it felt like acceptance. It felt like she was there to support me. It felt like love.”

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawai‘i Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.