Ride Bear 25: We remember how to do a proper LD!

I know, I'm such an absentee landlord blogger.

So last weekend, Dixie and I went to a local ride, Ride Bear, to do an LD with a brand-new endurance pair! M has an adorable opinionated Haflinger named Fetti, and last weekend was their debut ride. Dixie'd had several weeks totally off, with nothing to do but eat tons of hay, hay pellets, and beet pulp. She was looking much less like a greyhound, and I was hoping she would be feeling good.

Dixie was SO excited to see the trailer! She loaded great, hauled quietly (ridecamp, in Gilroy, was maybe an hour away), came off the trailer and had a quick look around, then started eating.


Camp, before it filled up.


Majestic. Fastidious. Immaculate.


In the morning, Dixie had a tiny meltdown when the 50s left, but not too bad. There were maybe 15 LD riders, so we just let the first 4-6 leave then we headed out. Our ride strategy, such as it was, was to make the mares walk for the first couple miles. The only real hills of the LD were in the first couple miles, and we didn't want them to get frothy and go insane at the start. We hopscotched for a bit with Julie Suhr (on a very green chestnut) and her friend, but eventually we got in front and stayed that way. A guy on a cute spindly little Arab passed us and towed us along for a mile or so, then we fetched up on Pete and Leslie and rode the rest of the day with them.



Pete and Leslie are gaited riders. Pete was working on his homebred SSH/Arab gelding's first AERC completion, and he'd wheedled his wife into keeping him company on their good TWH mare Ladyhawke. Sadly, Ladyhawke took an instant dislike to my precious angel Dixie, so Leslie and I had to stay pretty far apart, but other than that, everybody got along great and seemed to pace well.



We had one away vet check. Everybody pulsed down right away and vetted through with no problems. Some awesome volunteers offered us food and held horses while we headed to the porta potty. If my horse develops superpowers, it's from this mutant carrot I fed her at the vet check:



M and I were a few minutes late leaving the check and we had to put the pedal down to catch our friends, but the mares were in great shape and we just plowed along for a couple miles and caught up to P & L.



We saw a whole family of mule deer. They were super cute :) but I don't think I'll ever get used to these spookily tame California animals. Are there really so few hunters? I mean we rode down a trail less than 50' from three adults and two bambis and they didn't even bother to wander away. You can see a deer silhouetted under the tree:



And just a couple miles from the finish, I saw a boar! My very first pig sighting ever. I've seen deer in every state I've ever lived in, but this is my first boar sighting. I was very glad that he was across the ravine looking for acorns - boar can be pretty scary.



Dixie and I were in at 12:05 and pulsed down at 12:07. She had a great CRI (56/48) and generally spent all day trying to pull my arms out of their sockets. I was, as always, incredibly proud of her!

After we vetted out and visited with our friends, I took Dixie to the hose (a hose! LUXURY!) and washed her off, then let her roll a couple times. I packed the trailer, talked some more, and realized I was totally completely done at 2 pm. There wasn't any food for hours and hours yet, and it was 90+ degrees, and my house was just a couple hours away. So we totally skipped the dinner and awards ceremony and headed home.

Ambushed by Satan's Minions

Yay, I used the Forerunner today! It works ok, except it wants to tell me my pace in minutes per mile instead of miles per hour. I think there's a way to change that, but I haven't tried yet. Also, the damn thing auto-pauses if we stop moving. That's cool in some circumstances, but I think it's more honest to let our time standing still drag down our total pace.

Her best head-nodding let's-go-somewhere forward walk was about 14 minutes/mile, and her fast rack or medium trot is 7 minutes/mile. I think that's about 4.2 mph and 8.5 mph, respectively. We did the whole Mines (4 miles) in exactly 1:01... plus the untimed pauses.

The biggest pause was when the demons appeared. We were chugging on towards home, in the canyon, when we came around a corner and HOLY SHIT DEER. Only 50' ahead, halfway up the canyon wall, were a big mule doe and a lovely 6 point buck. Dixie froze, head as high as it would possibly go, and started shaking. The doe looked at us and the buck didn't even climb to his feet. Dixie started slooowly backing away and I asked her to stand, so she did. Everybody kept staring at everybody else, except for Cersei, who hadn't figured out why we stopped. After a couple minutes, I said "Shoo!" The deer stared at me. I said, louder, "Bang bang!" The deer were unfazed. Then Cersei (bless her heart) realized what the horse and I had been looking at and let out an enormous bark. The buck leapt to his feet and he and the doe headed over the hill.

Dixie was still terrified, and it took a lot of very gentle coaxing to convince her to keep going. But she did, and she stayed in the gait I asked her to be in! Almost all walk, a little trot, and a little rack.

Yall might remember that Dixie doesn't usually like to be brushed. I spent a long time trying different brushes, techniques, ways of approaching her, and I finally gave up. I must brush the dirt off before I ride, so she must stand still for it - sorry, kiddo. When we got back today, my poor hairy yak was pretty sweaty, so I rubbed her down really well with a towel and walked her dry. And you know what? She loved it! Stuck her nose out and waggled her lips around, making happy horse faces. Yay! Then when I turned her back out she absolutely wallowed in the dust and got back up as a rare brown-and-bay paint. Sigh.

Pretty feet!

Trimming:
Oh my god, I finally have a good trimmer! Like I said, all the other horses at the new place have awesome feet, so I was really excited to get the trimmer out to balance Dixie. Of course I didn't take before and after pics, but yall would be shocked if I had. Keep in mind, she was "trimmed" two weeks ago in Ohio.

The guy in Ohio was just a farrier who gave a perfectly standard farrier trim. I was never really happy with his work, but it's hard to see hoof changes day-to-day. When she got here, her feet looked good from a normal person's standpoint and substandard from a barefoot hoof nerd standpoint - long toes (hurf, cause she's a TWH) and short heels, no roll, short laterally and long medially. She was sound though, and I've been riding her anyway. The rocks and sand were already starting to roll the edges, and she lost a decent chunk of that too-long outside wall off of her RF. (It was beautiful self-trimming, actually, cause it gave her that concavity on the sides that she needed.)

Joe, the trimmer out here, is an Olivo person. I am not up to date on the bickering amongst the barefoot people, so I don't know if she's the best in the universe or just second or third best, but I'm happy with him. He immediately saw all that I'd seen and more. He was very patient (and Dixie was very good!) and he didn't bring her toes back too far. He spent about 45 minutes trimming her, then we talked for another half-hour - he had bones! I got to see an actual coffin bone, navicular, p2, and p3.

Sara asked how often the horses out here get trimmed - he said in the summer, they go 5-6 weeks, then in the winter, 6-8 weeks, depending on how often they're ridden. S's horses get ridden the most, so they tend to go longer. I think Dixie could go longer as well, because I'm riding her quite often, but I'm going to have him back in 6 weeks. I want all the underlying things brought firmly under control before we start letting her go two months between trims. We're hoping to see some good heel growth and get rid of the fairly minor flaring in front.

Riding:
Before he worked on her, I took her out for a short lesson all by herself. She was quite sure there were wolves in the sagebrush, but I picked a destination (a particularly tall juniper, not far from the neighbor's horses) and we rode there, dammit. Then we gaited back to the other edge of the neighbors and I got a very nice rack. Turned around and went back to the juniper again, then gaited back to the ranch. And past it! She was appalled, but cooperated. We didn't go far past the ranch gate, just enough to prevent the habit of going straight home.

Yesterday we went on a short ride with S and saw more mule deer! They are even funnier looking than whitetail, what with the big goofy ears. Let's play "who can spot the deer" - it's much harder to see them in a picture than in real life! They were a little wary but generally unconcerned about us, and we stood and watched them for at least 10 minutes. Dixie was not quite convinced they aren't equinivorous.



Click on the picture, and it'll take you to my flickr page. When you're sure there's no damn deer in that shot, move your mouse over the picture and a little box will pop up to show you where they are. They are remarkably well camouflaged.

If that's too much like one of those damn magic eye posters for you, here's a pretty good silhouette.



And here's a shadow picture of us, on the way home.




We went on a BIG ride Saturday, but I didn't think to bring the camera, so no pics from it. Hopefully we'll go back this weekend and I can get some shots of this stunning mountain we climbed. We're probably 30 miles from Reno, but it's so high up you can see the bigger casinos! And just huge gorgeous mountains everywhere else you look, and bright blue sky, and the light's just magical, and there's no sound at all but hooves thunking and the wind whipping through the scrub.