UnSummer

Ok, look, I know it's technically spring. I'm cool with that, really I am, but the thing is, there's early spring and late spring, and late spring is supposed to feel more like summer. There's a progression that happens, where between January and June the temperature goes up.

Except not in Reno, not in 2011. It's still windy and 50s and sporadically snowing. And it's totally harshing my vibe. It's not like I really want to be back home, where it's like a sauna - humid and 90s. I'm just saying I'd like some warmer days and no more damn snow.

Dixie agrees.

Dixie is mad about the Memorial Day weekend snowstorm from Funder on Vimeo.

Anyway. G came home for the holiday weekend, and that was cool. I'm getting ready for NASTR this weekend, and that's equally cool. My tomato plants died over the weekend, which is not so cool. I swapped out some light fixtures in the house and my house looks way cooler than before. I am woefully uninspired to blog; I blame PMS and this ridiculous weather. No guesses when I'll get my mojo back, but I'll definitely take lots of pictures at NASTR for yall :)

Yerington Castle

Ok here we go!


What do you mean you can't see it? It's clearly a castle with various half-finished stone outbuildings plopped down in a Nevada ranch.


I thought this thing with the columns was a folly the first time I saw it. Now I think it's something else that's just perpetually half-complete.


I totally want stone columns instead of t-posts now.


How bizarre is this.




Ok. So I went and did my little one-day job in Yerington.


It was a lovely day and when I finished up at 3 pm it was 70 glorious degrees. And windy. Some googling has tentatively identified this obviously manmade hill thing as an inactive and flooded open pit copper mine. So the dust was probably mine tailings full of cancer. Yippie.


There was a storm line moving east as far as I could see. The wind was amazing, tossing my truck all over the place.


Here's the other dichotomous view of the castle.


I ran north along the storm line all the way to Fernley, where I headed straight into it.


It rained on me all the way home. Here's Reno in the rain - look, ma, no mountains!


The wind blew down more of that damn fence.


Peavine got snowed on.


But it sure does look pretty anyway.

Electrolyte protocol

In the comments to my last post, Aarene asked what my current electrolyte protocol is. I thought I'd go ahead and post it, so it's not lost in comments - and we can see how it changes over time.

I have some very basic unflavored no-filler powdered electrolytes. I mix electrolytes 2 doses at a time. I start with 3/4 to 1 oz of them and add 3-4 oz applesauce. They say you should taste what you're feeding your horse, so I tried that mix and it's just unbelievably disgusting. If I'm pre-mixing syringes in the house, I heat up a gob of honey in the microwave and stir that in - if I'm doing it in the trailer, I'll just use sugar. Enough sugar takes the edge off the awful salt, and for a non insulin resistant horse, I don't think it's too much carbs at once. There's probably a tablespoon of extra sugar in each 2 oz syringe.

The Internet isn't really very clear on what a dose of electrolytes is, but so far Dixie tolerates this mix quite well. For a 10-25 mile ride, I just give one syringe before the ride and one after. If it's a longer ride, more days in a row, or if I think she really wore herself out, I'll give more - a dose at each stop, one at night, one the next day. They really seem to improve her recovery, but I can't swear to that (because I'm unwilling to ride hard and NOT electrolyte to see if she recovers slower!)

Method of administration - I tell Dixie I need to electrolyte her and show her the tube. (It seems more polite to me than to try to sneak up on her.) Then I shoot a tiny bit of it on the front of her tongue, down where the bit sits. She flings her head around and spits out the elytes, plus all the hay she's got wadded up in her mouth. Then I syringe the rest of the tube as high up in her mouth as I can get. Since there's no wad of hay in there, she's got no choice but to swallow most of the electrolytes.

Dixie doesn't hold a grudge about the electrolytes at all. I usually rinse her mouth out with a syringe of water, again to be polite, but as soon as I quit messing with her she dives back into her haybag.

I really think she drinks slightly better with electrolytes than without. She seems less tired and sore the next day, and I don't worry so much about whether or not she's drinking. She really does drink when she's thirsty, and I don't really worry anymore that she's going to idiotically dehydrate herself waiting to get home. (Ok, honestly, I do worry that all the time, but now I think it's an irrational fear and I ignore it.)

Off to Yerington for the day today. I'm going to do my best to get a picture of The Castle!

Good mare

The NEDA ride was the best kind of uneventful. 23.5 miles in 3:30. Dixie wasn't too hot and she certainly wasn't tired. She drank a couple gallons at the trailer (and of course drank better when we got home).

I photoshopped all of these pics. You can't take HDR photos from a moving horse, and there's no other way to get the high contrast landscapes. The colors are accurate though! The sagebrush really is mint green right now.


We fell in with Nancy and Feena - Feena was Dixie's buddy at High Desert.


Poor Dixie. The other horses had the real Power Trot thing going on, but Dixie doesn't think she can trot faster than 9 mph. When they'd speed up, Dixie would have to canter to catch up, then slow back down to a trot or a pace or something. They'd pull ahead and she'd have to canter again.


The other people I was riding with thought it was very humid. Once they mentioned it, I could tell that the air was in fact moister than usual, but no southerner would ever think it was humid.


Astonishingly, it rained on the way home! Look, raindrops!


So I sent in my entry for the NASTR 50. I need a new rasp - mine is no longer adequate to deal with summer desert feet. And I need to scrub Dixie's mane and tail again if it's warm enough Friday - they're approaching whiteness but they're not fairy-tale quality yet. ;) That's about all I've got!

EHV1 - thinking about the risks

So, if you're not a horse person, or if I am somehow your only source of horse news, you may be unaware that there's an outbreak of EHV-1 in western North America right now. If you read this blog, you probably already know that.

I've been looking for numbers on this outbreak since it started, but it's only today that I started to find firm ones. I wanted to try to quantify the actual risk. News sources only talk in vague terms - the disease is highly contagious and fatal. They tell you how many have died, but not how many were exposed. How highly contagious? How fatal? That gap in the information really pisses me off.

To be fair, part of the problem is that the vets just don't know. Tbe equine herpesviruses are, they think, largely asymptomatic. Most horses have antibodies to them without ever showing signs of being infected. And when they do show symptoms, they only shed the virus for a short period of time - apparently it's hard to "prove" a horse has EHV.

My first questions are how virulent and how fatal is this outbreak? Any googling at all will tell you running totals on how many horses are confirmed to have EHV-1 / are confirmed dead of EHV-1, but that's kind of useless. How many were exposed? You have to have both numbers to get a percentage. Here's (pdf) yesterday's USDA situation report. It's the only document I've seen so far with numbers of horses exposed. It's also really fascinating! Look at Texas - 26 exposed at the Ogden event, 323 exposed secondarily, ONE death. Versus California - 54 exposed in Ogden, a totally unknown number exposed secondarily, five deaths.

As of yesterday, there were 997 horses exposed (primarily and secondarily, not including California). 21 were confirmed to have EHV-1, and 13 of the 21 had neurological symptoms. Personally, I'm rounding that up a bit and calling it a 1.5% chance of Dixie dying if she's exposed to a sick horse.

(There's a new article on thehorse.com with slightly increased totals, but it doesn't have corresponding increases in exposed horses. Ffffff so frustrating! The new cases in WA are secondaries, exposed at the vet hospital. There are 8 new cases in CA, but they're all fever-only, not neuro. I'm not changing my 1.5% based on that.)

You might think that's all you need to know. Maybe it is. It's not enough for me, though. I've read a lot of hysterical content online about how any risk at all to our precious ponies is too much. They do so much for us and how could we possibly be so selfish as to risk their needless deaths! Just stay home and don't be an asshole.

Here's my problem with that: we're killing them every time we ride. We're killing them every time we feed. We're killing them by ignoring them. You cannot win. There's no way to Do It Right and make sure your horse lives forever. If everything you do carries a risk, you should at least know those risks and try to decide if it's worth it.

The main cost to keeping Dixie at home for two more weeks is that I'll be bored. (Poor me!) I'm also missing out on opportunities to train her - we can go slog on through training rides in our backyard, but they're not the same mentally as organized endurance-type events. That's it though. The "don't risk your pony" people are right about that - there's not much cost to me keeping her at home.

But, regardless, I'm going to a NEDA ride tomorrow. The actual risk is much much lower than 1.5%. There are no cases in Nevada. At the ride, there are no vet checks and it's only 20 miles, so I can insist that she drink our water from the trailer. This is a really great opportunity for a good training ride, in all senses of "training" - trailer somewhere, deal with race environment, stand tied at the trailer for a while. Since I've seen the data and worked through the risk, I'm ok with it.

Longer term plans: Wild West has been rescheduled for the end of June. If NASTR doesn't cancel/reschedule, I might do NASTR then Wild West three weeks later. G's coming home for Memorial weekend, then I'm going to SF for our anniversary in mid-June.

Hawthorne, dithering, tomatoes

Yesterday I went to a temp job in Hawthorne. It's 140 miles from my house!

View Larger Map

It's a tiny little town very far in the middle of nowhere. It's incredibly patriotic, much more so than the other military towns I've been in - but there is literally no other reason for Hawthorne to exist, so I guess it makes sense. :) According to Wikipedia, I have now seen half of the towns of Mineral County - Hawthorne, Walker Lake, and Schurz. (Schurz is an Indian community named after a white politican - cultural sensitivity fail.)

I also saw the castle outside of Yerington. I had no idea it was there, so I just gawped as I drove past the small but very real castle. I am going to Yerington again next week, so I'll be ready to snap a picture when I see it again.

Pics!
Walker Lake is huge, endorheic, and is just now turning too saline for fish, sadly.


El Capitan is The Casino. I don't remember what the red white & blue building is - at least half of the buildings in Hawthorne were RWB, and the main street had RWB bunting, and there were RWB-painted missiles in everybody's front yards... I'm telling you, very patriotic.


Schurz had a lot of falling-down vacant buildings - a few were really interesting!


These hills were stunning! They really were brilliantly colored - copper-green, white, ochre-red, bright gold.


I am not sure what these large white signs were for. I think maybe an emergency airfield, but that's really just a guess?


Lahontan Valley is so huge, so flat, and so green. It makes me feel at home :)


Looks kinda like Mississippi.


All of the small towns of Nevada have those Small Town Signs, the ones listing off all the churches and community organizations.


****
I don't know what to do about the EHV-1 neuro outbreak. I guess if Wild West gets cancelled we'll go to Owhyee. It's a lot further - more drive time, more gas. I dunno. Trying (unsuccessfully) to not think about it.


So last weekend I bought tomato plants. (Costco had 3 one-gallon plants for $8!) I was too lazy to plant them the day I bought them, which was good because the next day it was windy and blowing snow. I had to bring the poor things inside. Today the weather finally seemed decent so I got them in the ground. A couple hours later it started sleeting. My poor plants!

Third time's the charm - longwinded

Yesterday's ride has been really unexpectedly hard for me to write about! I'm super tired, but in many ways it was the best of the three rides, so I'm not sure why this is so difficult.

We did almost 8 miles in 3 hours - we were truly just ambling along in no hurry at all. Here's the map - zoom in and check the terrain and satellite views! I don't really trust my GPS in the trees, but it looks pretty accurate.

View Thomas Creek ride in a larger map

In a delightful change of circumstances, I went and picked up ~C and Diego and we hauled up to a trailhead by her house, off of Thomas Creek. Look at that, it's my horse and my truck and MY TRAILER! Tough call, but I suspect my horse is the prettiest thing in the picture.



We wound slowly up the creek canyon. It was very dramatic - very much what you think of when you think "riding in the Sierras." (And minutes from Reno!)


There was a crappy road and a scenic singletrack trail. We switched back and forth between the two - the road had a more boring view (bad) but fewer horse-eating monsters (good). The trail is popular with hikers and mountain bikers - our horses did just fine together, but I don't think I'd want to ride it alone any time soon.


I quickly braided Dixie's mane in a running braid, just to see how it'd do. It had mostly fallen out in 2 hours, but it was substantially quicker than the viking braids I do for races. Here's the other thing - you see those ears?


I had paying-attention-to-me ears the whole time. She was the calmest, sweetest, most obedient pony I've ever ridden.


I just realized, as I was writing this up, that I hadn't brought Miss Thing her nightly carrots. Sometimes I run out of carrots and bring her apples or pears, and sometimes I have nothing to give her, but most nights, I bring her a couple of carrots.

I don't think I've ever told you this - well, maybe I did at the very beginning of this blog, but I think Sara's the only person who was still reading that long ago. Anyway, I had no good reason to buy Dixie - I had three perfectly good horses and she cost more than all three put together. My friends tricked me into looking at her - Jen said that Jody wanted her to buy one of Jody's horses and let's go look at her. We walked in the stall with this absolutely wild-eyed spazzed-out show horse and I immediately knew that Jen didn't need or want this kind of horse. And then I realized that it was a setup, and they wanted me to look at her, but it was too late for me to walk away. Dixie gave me this fearsome glare, the kind that said "You! Human! Get me out of here." I've told yall that before, but here's the part I never told: I scratched her neck, and her face softened and she made silly faces for me. So I bought the stupid horse. It took almost three and a half years for me to pay her off. It took almost four years for us to get comfortable with each other. I've ridden her almost a thousand miles. And now, this year, she's finally started making the silly faces for me again.



It's not for lack of trying, either. She doesn't like to be touched, and for years every time I'd scritch her withers or her neck or her tailhead she'd move away. Or she'd purse her lips and endure it. It was heartbreaking, over and over. I started to think I'd imagined her ever wanting to be scratched. Finally, slowly, in 2011, she started to warm up to me a tiny bit. She'd lick my hands and, I swear, give me a hopeful look. I am dense, but I finally realized that maybe she would permit me to scratch her withers? Yes. Yes, human, you may scratch me.



So yesterday, after two hard scary days of riding, I went and haltered Dixie and loaded her in MY TRAILER and took her off with Diego. And she gave me "what next?" ears, the whole time. We led Dig past scary mountain bikes and scary dogs, and he led her through scary rushing burbling running creeks. We walked up tiny singletrack along steep canyon walls, through old snowbanks. I hopped off and led her whenever I felt like it, because I knew she'd stand still (just long enough) for me to remount. And the whole time I felt like she was listening to me and asking "what next?"



And tonight I brought her carrots, and she gave me the hopeful look, so I opened the gate and slipped inside to scratch her. It's freezing (literally! IN MAY!) but her mane kept my fingers warm. I spent a good twenty minutes scratching her. She is a jealous beast - she charged Cersei and ran her off from us - but so gentle and polite with me. I love that horse.