STRATFORD - Last year Bill Greendeer walked the entire length of the buried pipeline pushing Canadian tar sands through Wisconsin.

A member of Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk tribe, Greendeer spent 33 days walking what’s known as Line 61 owned by Canadian pipeline giant Enbridge.



Tuesday morning, he was among a couple dozen people who saddled up horses to ride along part of the route in central and northern Wisconsin as a way to protest the pipeline that carries around 890,000 barrels of tar sands each day and possible efforts to build another pipeline to move more of the black sludge also known as bitumen.



“I don’t want to see the Earth destroyed,” said Greendeer, who lives in rural La Farge. “As a Deer Clan Ho-Chunk tribal member our goal is to take care of the Earth. Horses are a connection to the Earth for us.”



A group of 45 people, mostly tribal members, and 29 horses started the three-day trip in Marshfield on Monday and rode to Stratford by the evening. On Tuesday, three groups of riders rode portions of the route followed by a support team driving large horse trailers with plans to finish in Gilman.



Organized by Winona LaDuke, founder of Honor the Earth, the Wisconsin event is the latest protest by horseback against oil pipeline construction and expansion. LaDuke, who lives on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota, said protesters came from North and South Dakota, Minnesota and other states to participate.



Donny Hughes, a Standing Rock Sioux member from North Dakota, has participated in other horseback rides protesting oil pipelines including the proposed TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL expansion through Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska.



“I’m out here to answer the call and help these guys fulfill their dream,” said a shirtless Hughes, as he rode bareback on his horse Chief. “Me and my brother fought against the Standing Rock pipeline and we wanted to come out and support people here.”

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There are four Enbridge pipelines in Wisconsin with the largest, Line 61, bisecting the state diagonally from Superior through Delavan before continuing south through Illinois and other states to the Gulf of Mexico. Though it carries more than the projected flow of the controversial Keystone XL project, Line 61 hasn’t attracted nearly as much attention.



Environmentalists, landowners and some government officials have criticized the pipelines passing through Wisconsin and other states because of worries about spills, particularly since tar sands are diluted with volatile liquid chemicals to make it easier to move through pipes but are more hazardous than crude oil.

The mixture is called dilbit, for diluted bitumen, and when it spills into water, the chemicals evaporate and send toxic clouds into the air while the remaining tar sands sink to the bottom, making it difficult to clean up.



A 2010 spill on an Enbridge-owned pipeline into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan sent 1.2 million gallons of tar sands into a Lake Michigan tributary. The cleanup cost $1 billion and took years.





Enbridge spokeswoman Jennifer Smith said Tuesday that the Kalamazoo River spill “made a lasting impact on how Enbridge operates and the lessons we’ve learned from that incident ultimately made Enbridge a safer company.”

She noted that Enbridge instituted several measures to improve safety and reliability of the company’s entire North American pipeline system including more verification digs and in-line inspections and doubling the size of the leak detection and pipeline control team.



Greendeer spoke to landowners along the route of Like 61 when he walked it last year and learned that some are worried about being forced to sell their property to the Canadian company.



More worrisome to Greendeer and his fellow horseback-riding protesters as well as other activists is what they say are plans by Enbridge to build another pipeline in Wisconsin to handle the glut of tar sands coming from Canada to seaports. Dubbed the twin Line 61, environmentalists say it would run along the same corridor as Line 61 and could carry an additional 800,000 barrels.



“They say they’re not really (planning to build another pipeline) but if they’re not why are they paying millions of dollars in surveying and talking to landowners about 200-foot easements,” said Greendeer, noting that landowners currently have 80-foot easements where Line 61 passes underneath their property.



Smith said Enbridge does not have a new pipeline project planned in Wisconsin and is not seeking easements. She said survey work was done in 2014 and 2015 in order to document features and environmental sensitives in a wider corridor than Line 61.