Here are a couple of photos of today’s ride. It was beautiful! The trails here are fantastic, lots of single track up and down winding through hills. We did a lot of yesterdays trail in reverse. I rode Cheefy, and he was pretty much a doll all day - of course, I love riding him so even if he isn’t perfect I won’t admit to it . :)
Posting photos here to show the climbs we did, and also Chief’s heavy winter coat - i was melting without a coat so I know the horses with coats on this ride were working *really* hard. Even some of the SoCal horses were clipped or partially clipped. What a relief that we made it safely and healthy through this ride with that much winter fur on.
There were 26 riders today with Julie Herrera finishing first. I don’t know who got BC (sorry, the superbowl was on) though I know Julie’s horse looked really good. The other horse in contention was Jonathan Bowman’s. So it was either one of those.
Chief and I finished in 5th place. I don’t think we’ve top tenned in ages - it’s certainly not high on my priority list but today we just managed to get into our own space and I was able to let him trot at a pretty reasonable 8 mph trot through a lot of the trail and we had a really nice time. He really is great on those kinds of trails and even though he hadn’t been out earlier to mark trail followed them precisely even when I wasn’t sure where a turn was. I really don’t know if I am subtly cue-ing him and not aware of it, or if he is just reading my mind. He is so reactive and quick about making tight turns with so little effort on my part. I love that about him. I have to give him some credit since he did spook at a big boulder when we were trotting through a neighborhood today - not normalfor him, but I think it snuck on him and he wasn’t expecting it! Silly boy. He got lots of points for not caring at all about the snakes (see photo, lol), mattresses, abandoned cards, shooting range or the dozens of barking dogs chasing us through fencing....more
No comments:
Post a Comment