Still No Sign of Missing Central Oregon Horse

For many, the first dusting of snow on the mountains around Central Oregon is a sight of wonder and excitement for the winter ahead. For Erika Dunning, it elicits misery and heartache.

One of the La Pine resident’s horses, Cinnamon, a 24-year-old Chestnut gelding with a “whisper” of a white star on his forehead, white socks on his hind legs, and a roached mane, “bolted” Aug. 4 during a trail ride at the Benson/Tenas Trailhead (https://www.fs.usda.gov/r06/willamette/recreation/benson-tenas-trailhead) in the Mt. Washington Wilderness in the Willamette National Forest. There’s been little sign of him since.

On Aug. 8, a few pieces of his tack were found near a small seasonal body of water that Dunning has coined “Cinna Pond.” It’s northeast of Benson Lake, from which he disappeared. There’s been no sign of Cinnamon since that day, despite nearly two dozen searchers looking for him, scent dogs trying to track him, a small plane trying to spot him from the air and Dunning spending hundreds of hours hiking and riding while looking for him.

Cinnamon, a handsome chestnut gelding, on Aug. 4, just before the trail ride during which he spooked and ran into the woods. Credit: Erika Dunning

“This has been one of the hardest experiences of my life. It’s been two-and-a-half months of constant trauma,” said Dunning, 26, who’s an Outdoor Science instructor at the OMSI Hancock Field Station in Fossil, Oregon. “I was out there looking for him every day for two weeks and then slowly had to decrease it.”

Dunning, who received her master’s degree in astronomy and astrophysics in May from San Diego State University, has spent all of her savings and exacerbated health issues — she has Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and a fused spine — in an effort to find the former polo horse.

“I’ve had to come to the conclusion that he probably got caught up in branches with his saddle and died,” Dunning said, her voice breaking down the phone line. “That’s the worst possible way for him to die. And I have no way to find closure. He was so loved. I would do anything to have him back.

“It’s an absolute gut punch every day. Every time I go to look at (my other) horses or see my tack, it’s so hard,” she said. “When you lose an animal because you put them down, it’s definite and you can find closure. I don’t know how I’m supposed to find closure.”

Search efforts have mostly ceased, Dunning said, as she had to take the job in Fossil to begin earning money to bolster her savings depleted from the search for Cinnamon. The handsome gelding is a former polo horse who helped many people learn to ride and play the sport in Lakeside, California. Dunning said that when she prepared to move back to Central Oregon, Cinnamon’s then owner, a friend of Dunning’s, gifted him to her. She said having Cinnamon meant she could take friends who don’t have horses out on trail rides. Dunning also has four other horses, including Terra, a mare in her late 20s; Nyx (named after the moon of Pluto), a 16-year-old mare; Cadoc, 3, a Mustang named after the horse in the Eragon book series; and Rhea (named after the moon of Saturn), 18, who Dunning’s friend, Simon, was riding when Cinnamon spooked and ran off. Dunning had dismounted to adjust Cinnamon’s reins and says she doesn’t know what scared him.

Cinnamon and Erika Dunning preparing to play polo in May in California before they moved back to La Pine. Credit: Erika Dunning

“He worked as a lesson horse for a long time, so he was not a hot head,” she said, explaining she first met Cinnamon when she began exercising polo horses at the Lakeside Polo Club in California while working on her master’s degree. “This is a horse who, once when I was about to fall off, moved his head specifically to prevent me from falling off him. I don’t know what spooked him. My other mare that was with us didn’t spook.

“We tracked him until his tracks disappeared. All of the old horse packers say that a horse will go back to the horse trailer, so we went back to the trailer and then also called for help. But what I should have done is kept going and kept trying to find his trail,” she ruminated, adding that hikers, rescue organizations and others helped with the search for several weeks, but no sign of the horse has been found. She’s explored nearly 70 lakes and seasonal bodies of water in an effort to find a trace of Cinnamon.

The search was hampered by a partial closure of Oregon Route Highway 242, also known as the McKenzie Highway, due to the outbreak of the Foley Ridge fire in late September. “They actually closed it while I was enroute to go up and search for him, so I had to stop and turn around,” she said.

Now the west side of OR 242 is closed for the winter, with the east side likely closing up within a couple weeks. That means any further search efforts will be extremely difficult and potentially treacherous.

“I’ve been thinking about what I can do to get help,” she said, explaining that she has a geographical area in mind that she’d like to search, but it’s tough to reach.

“You can access it through the Robinson Lake Trailhead but it would be about 11 miles (in) with serious elevation gain. I would do anything to have people who could go and search really thoroughly, who are very experienced in back country (exploring). But then I worry that if I ask for help, would I be liable if anything happened to them? And I don’t think I expect anyone to find anything. It’s a needle in a very large haystack,” she said.

Map depiction of where Cinnamon ran off on Aug. 4 and where some pieces of his tack were found on Aug. 8 near Benson Lake. Credit: Erikka Dunning

“I think he’s been dead for a while, but honestly, I just will never know,” she said. “I drained every resource I had. I would love to find a way to have some closure, but I’m worried that the only way I’m going to find that is, once everything opens up in the spring, I’m just going to have to keep going back until I find anything. Until I have closure, I don’t know what else to do, even if that means I have to find a skeleton with a saddle that’s caught on a tree. That would at least be closure.”

“I’m trying to just accept the fact that I’m never going to know what happened to him,” she said. “I don’t know what else to do. I would do anything to have him in the pasture. I would like to know what happened so I could deal with that. If what I think happened actually happened, I don’t know that I can ever find peace with that. I think about it all the time. I would do literally anything to find him.”

If interested in helping with the search for Cinnamon, go to https://findcinnamon.com/. There’s a $2,000 reward for Cinnamon’s safe return, information that leads to his safe return, or photos and GPS coordinates of his remains.

This article appears in the Source October 23, 2025.