Cursed!

Yall remember when I rode somewhere for a while? That was off to the northwest, behind the airport. All the rest of my riding has been to the east or northeast. I really enjoy it, but motorbikes are allowed to the east, and they're technically not allowed to the west. I thought I should go back to the west and scout it out.

Well, Monday the weather kind of sucked. Usually, Peavine looms dramatically over everything, looking like the Lonely Mountain:


On Monday it was 50, very windy, and huge snowclouds were rolling down from the Mountain:


We went out anyway, but my heart wasn't in it and we called it quits early.

Today I woke up with new resolve: Make horse wear boots. Make horse explore western hills. Take pictures and cool GPS tracks to share with blog friends. Well, two and a half out of three is pretty good, right? I think I'm cursed to not get GPS info from that area!

The GPS battery was dead. I could've sworn it was fully charged and turned off before I stuck it back in my backpack, but apparently it was fully charged and turned ON. And I strapped the brand new slightly bulky expensive camera very securely on the horse, but I only took a few pictures - I dare not try to fumble it out while trusting Dixie to stand still on the side of a mountain, so I have to dismount and fumble it out.

I got a few pictures, at least!


Here's the adorably named Swan Lake, an alkali lake:


See the snowy mountains on the right of this photo? They're the ones that Rides of March is held at the base of.


Later, I was leading Dixie through a redneck valley filled with dead appliances and car parts, all full of bullet holes, when I noticed... a house? It was SO weird - there's NO real roads anywhere nearby! I took one very quick iPhone picture, hoping to get the GPS info from the pic, then mounted up and we rode out of there.


Of course, it didn't grab the GPS coordinates on that one. :( And the mystery house is newer than the sat photos in google maps - but it really was there!

The boots stayed on, no rubs, and Dixie seemed to get used to them pretty well. At first she cantered like a padded horse, but she figured it out eventually. I walked and jogged a lot - almost all of the downhills - and I feel like I broke something in my knee. Cersei is sacked out, doing her Dead Dog impersonation. Time to cook dinner!

Hay dammit!

Dixie is trying to drive me insane. She ate half the bale of Lemmon Valley hay, but now ehhhhhh not so much. She's picking at it. I just bought a bale from the feed store across from the Bonanza (apparently THAT'S Green's, not sure what the name of the one in LV is) and tomorrow I will offer some to my princess. I predict she'll eat half a bale of it, then decide she hates it. It's like having a very large cat.

We had a lovely long ride today. Averaged 6 mph even though I kept stopping - once to pee, and twice to offer water to Cersei. Hungry Valley is such a pretty place to ride! I promise, I'll get brave and strap the camera on the saddle and take pictures next time we go out there.

We rode up the valley to the little mini airport for the RC planes. Found a cattle tank on the way - of course Dixie didn't want to drink, but Cersei was glad to see water. It's too high for her to drink out of, but I brought a gallon ziplock bag for a collapsible bowl. I hopped off, filled up the gallon bag with water, and held the bag on the ground for the dog. I think if we went all the way up the valley and did a 20 mile ride, when we hit that tank on the way back, Dixie would drink. I'm not too worried if she doesn't want to drink at 5 miles.

It took right at 7 miles before Dixie settled down and really got serious about things. She's such a fun, tough, honest horse. I judged all three of us fit to continue when we got back - Dixie was still bright-eyed and willing, Cersei wasn't exhausted, and I was ok. Well, I was really regretting wearing jeans, and my knees aren't happy, but nothing too terrible. Do they have Adequan for humans? ;)

Hay baby

So the last time I fed my own horses was in Memphis, where everybody bought local bermuda hay. If you wanted, you could buy overpriced alfalfa in the feed stores, but very few people did that. I became a pretty good judge of good bermuda vs. shitty moldy cow-hay bermuda. My horses always ate their hay cheerfully, and I never really understood yall in other parts of the country talking about your weird hay.

In Ohio, the barn owner fed pretty hay that the horses liked. Then out here, S fed half grass and half alfalfa - I didn't pay a lot of attention, but the grass hay wasn't bermuda. It was some of that mystery non-southern hay. Dixie liked the alfalfa better, but she ate the grass hay pretty fast too. When I moved Dixie to Lemmon Valley, I got to re-enter the world of hay buying.

So I went to a hay yard (Mendez, for the locals) and bought a $10 bale of mixed grass/alfalfa hay. I thought it was really pretty hay, and there wasn't much alfalfa in it at all. It was green and leafy, not dusty or moldy or full of tree branches or kudzu or blackberry canes.* Dixie kind of picked at it, but she ate it. I went back and bought two more bales... and she decided it was horrible. She nosed it around and sulked for two days - there's a really impressive pile of rejected hay in her pen.

I decided she wasn't just being picky and bought her different hay today, from the feed store in Lemmon Valley. (Greens?) I got an even bigger bale for $11.50, and it's completely different. There's like five different species of grass in it! It smells better, and most importantly - my horse is eating it!

*Actual things included in hay in Tennessee.

Trim (picture heavy)

Yeah, I've gone trigger happy with the new camera.

Blow me

OMG, it was SO windy today! Cersei was sure that she was going to explode if she didn't go somewhere, so I rode anyway, but man it was windy. My face is windburned. My helmet would've blown off my head if it wasn't for the chin strap. My horse went noticeably slower into the wind (even though "into the wind" was headed home!) But at least the dirt bikes weren't out :)

We did six miles in just under an hour again. Dixie's rack continues to improve - it's about 10 mph, and she can keep it going longer and longer. She likes to (step) pace on slight downhills, which is fine with me and just as fast. I was very happy with how steady she was, even in that wind.

It's funny, the weird regional superstitions we develop. In Memphis, I would never have ridden in that kind of wind - horses get stupid when it's windy! But out here, it's incredibly windy like 30% of the time, so the horse and I are learning to deal with it. And it's not like we were all wusses back home - we'd ride at speed on ground no sane Nevadan would walk her horse through.

Oh experienced endurance peeps, tell me how to deal with trails with "waves" in them! You know how they get hollowed out from quads and dirt bikes, where the crests are 15-20 feet apart and the troughs are 1-2 feet deep? It seems like there's no good gait, there's no way to stay centered on the horse, and it feels like it's really rough on the horse. Almost all of the walking we did was because the road was wavy - I won't ride that trail again, but how am I supposed to deal with it in the future?

I have this love-hate relationship with Dixie's mane. Yeah, sometimes I do think longingly about pulling it - it'd be so thin and short! It wouldn't get tangled in my reins! But it's just beautiful. Today in the wind it was like a living thing - it looked like a sea anemone waving around my hands, or like Medusa's hair, or like foamy waves crashing on the beach. And yes, it totally got in the way of the reins. Sigh.

Got a new camera. It's too new to take riding, but I did get a nice glamour shot of Dixie before we headed out. I made it my profile pic, but here's a link to the bigger version.

Always fun

It snowed some more today. We were completely unimpressed by it. I'm not even surprised that it's April and snowing! Random snow flurries are the new normal.

Yesterday I rode for a while and went some places, but that's the best I can tell you. Yep, I forgot the GPS! Eeek! I think we got close to the end of American Flat Road, circling around behind the Stead airport. I rode on land that's not supposed to have dirt bikes, and of course there were 5-6 dirt bikes, and of course Dixie lost her freakin' mind. We spent 20 minutes stuck on the side of a hill, doing one rein stops - every time I'd tell her to walk and point her down the hill, she'd try to take off and I'd haul her back around in a circle. It was way too far to walk, so I didn't want to get off, and she was way too hot, so I didn't want to let her trot down the hill. Yes, babe, dirt bikes do make scary noises, but you've heard them before, and I promise they won't eat you. Sigh.

When we got back, I worked a bit on trying to teach the sidepass from the ground with clicker training. I think the first step is to move a back leg over, then a front leg, then back-front-back-front. The first step of "move your back leg over" is "move your back leg, just a bit, without moving the others, and without going forward", so that's what we worked on. At first Dixie wanted to move forward, then she wanted to ignore the tapping, then she gave me a tiny bit of what I wanted, then she started moving into the pressure - sidepassing perfectly toward my whip arm. WTF? Took a break from it and did some reverse and some head down, then tried one more time and got a bit of what I was looking for and quit for the day.

Today I went out and did more clicker training. First we worked on the sidepass lesson again - she was a bit better, so I just repeated it a couple times on each side and then quit. Then we tried targeting, since there's actually a traffic cone in her paddock already. I am trying to gradually stretch out the distance so that one day she'll walk over, touch the cone, then walk back to me for her treat. Right now she just gets frustrated and starts pawing.

Whenever Dixie gets frustrated or impatient, she paws. She's always done it. It's actually what she's doing on trailer rides - not real kicking, just "why am I tied up standing still" pawing. I don't think it's something that I can effectively punish, and I've been hoping it would go away on its own, but it hasn't. Hmm.

Anyway, I did a bit of rope desensitization with her legs (not popular), then I played with her tail. Partly just because I should be able to, and partly because I think we need a crupper for down hills. I am not at all eager to actually try putting a crupper on her and then riding, so right now I just get off when the saddle scootches forward on downhills. But maybe one day I'll get up the nerve to do this insane thing, so I'm getting her used to having her tail messed with.

The last thing we did was at-liberty backing up. The first time, Dixie gave me one step of grudging reverse. Then we walked forward, stopped, and I asked her to back up again. She came forward and sideways and tried to slam me with her hip, so I smacked the hell out of it with the lead rope I was carrying. She leapt away, slung her head once, stopped, and looked at me. I said "Come here" and she walked over. She stopped when I raised my hand, then started backing up (straight and with impulsion!) when I said "back up." Much better! She's never easy, but she's always fun.

Settled in!

J kindly helped me move Dixie to her new digs yesterday. She seems to like it ok, and I think we'll be happy there. I took a lot of pictures.

She was so sure that the phone was actually edible.


I never managed to convince her otherwise.


I had to retreat to the aisle to get my whole horse in the shot.


It's an individual run, but it's a very good sized one. She is paying the other horses just enough attention to let everyone know that she does see them and she's choosing to ignore their antics.

Today I got out there pretty early and took her on a shakedown cruise. She was very fresh and full of go, and it was almost all smooth - probably 20% trotting, 20% smooth fast pace, and the rest a lovely rack. Gaited horses are the way to travel, yall.

Dixie racked down a gravel road today. Usually I steer her off the road onto the softer shoulders, but she didn't want to leave the road so I didn't make her. I know I need to start riding her in the boots, so she can get used to them, but she is SO sound!

More on my thoughts about crossing the Rubicon: (If you don't know - it's a phrase from when Julius Caesar led his army across an Italian river. It was the deliberate point of no return in his rebellion.)

• There is no more walking. Well, we still walk, obviously, but I think the days where we walked to calm down and walked to get places are over. I'm glad we spent so much time walking, but it's a lot of fun to go faster.


• She wants to go. She doesn't drag-ass as badly as she used to. It's like she realized that she can keep moving out forever.


• There is no more "well she'll get tired and then I can make her behave."


• I am not so worried about saddle fit. I still don't think this is the perfect saddle for us, but it's good enough for LDs.