City of Rocks 2012 – 200 Miles in Idaho! - Karen Chaton

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Just back and finding time to write a bit about the City of Rocks ride in South East Idaho. The ride also crossed state lines into Utah.

We had a great time and really enjoyed each day of the ride! I decided at nearly the last minute to go. I had been hemming and hawing over it for some time as I really wanted to go, but then also was weighing going to do Tevis again.

In the end, I decided that I wanted to ride both of my horses and that I’d have a greater chance of riding each horse 100 miles at City of Rocks over going to Tevis where I’d have a 50/50 chance of riding one horse 100 miles. Plus the ride looked like it was in nice country that reminded me a lot of Fort Schellbourne.

The trip to camp was almost 600 miles for me. When I got there, I found the instructions from endurance.net took me to a campground rather than to ridecamp.

Fortunately I was able to call my husband who looked up Steph’s # and by some miracle was able to reach her and find out that the instructions were indeed wrong and that I was only a mile and a half from where I should be. I was one of the first ones to get to camp, that’s why I had trouble finding camp on my own. A day later and I would have seen enough rigs that I probably would have been able to figure it out on my own. They were able to put up more signs, ribbons and arrows and update the website so others would be able to get to camp without the detour.

I had a day and a half to let the horses rest before the ride started. I like to give them at least a day to rest after they have hauled a long distance. It was hot in camp. I was able to get a pretty good spot on an overgrown RV pad (camp was in an old RV park) with the trailer facing so that it provided shade to the horses in the afternoon when it would be the hottest part of the day. As it turned out, the ground temperature in the sun where my horses were reached 135 degrees. In the shade, it was in the 90′s. It is amazing that the difference in ground temp was consistently 40 degrees different between the sun and shade...

Read more here:
http://enduranceridestuff.com/blog/2012/07/city-rocks-2012-200-miles-idaho/