The Urban Trail Ride

It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted because we've been working on the same things. We got a short ride in on Thanksgiving Day, a training ride in the back on Saturday, and a trail ride that Sunday. The same schedule was followed this last weekend. We trained on Saturday and rode out on Sunday. I've been working through the RWC Series II exercises. It's been a challenge because I really want to do these exercises exactly right. I've been wondering if I've been a bit lax in completing some of the exercises. There are times Jessie doesn't seem as light as I think she should be and I think she still likes to drag me around where she would like to go instead of following my leadership (as suspect as that might be).

Sunday was absolutely perfect weather for riding here. We headed off down the street to our alfalfa field. I had the camera and took a few pics. This is one of the streets we ride down to get to the field.



The Road Out

From here we ride by a truck storage/parking area. There are several horses stabled here. There is a large Hispanic population and many of them use this area.




We ride through their lot and out the back end where this concrete and trash has been dumped. From here we head in the direction of the city farm. This is an impoverished part of our town and has been that way for some time. Not sure why this is, but people dump a lot of garbage out in these areas. It offers us unnatural trail obstacles even though it looks like shit.



Cottonwood Villages is a housing track that never even got started. We occasionally ride in there. The ground is good and flat.



The city farm grows alfalfa crops. There is a water treatment plant nearby that's pretty smelly. We try to avoid that. There were a couple of dozen beehives being stored at one end of a field and we rode between the bees and the trash dump on the other side of the road. Having the bees buzzing around us is a pretty good de-sensitizing test.


Water Treatment Plant in the distance

Why someone would haul their sofa here instead of having the city pick it up for free is beyond me. Maybe they didn't want to haul the palm frons away too.



One of the saddest sites we've seen in awhile. Someone dumped their dead colt here.


Hard to say how long its been there. There are always a number of animals dumped out here in the "sticks". We saw a sheep, a calf, and occasionally a dog or two.

There are some positive images like this kestral watching us from a power pole.



I took some video too. I didn't spend any time editing it. First is Ranae and I doing some loping in the alfalfa field. You can see her nice WP lope and good stop followed by cue to lope Jessie and her ignoring me. You might see though that her lope has gotten much slower. The stop is sloppy as she turns to face the camera.

I think next is us riding by the beehives with the garbage on the other side. All the video was shot from horseback so blame Jessie for the bounces. Last, is the ride by the egg farm. These are long sheds that house thousand of chickens clucking on the other side of the plastic sheeting. Another good urban trail riding obstacle.



The quick video