Who Does This?

We've been shopping for a new car. We finally decided on a Honda Accord, worked out a details with a local dealer and brought it home on Saturday. It's a sharp ride but by the end of the weekend we had put more miles on the horses than we did on the car.

The View

We don't live in a very fancy house, but it has a great view out the back door - especially in the morning.

Unwanted Company - But a Learning Experience

I was able to sneak in an evening ride last night. Ranae plays tennis so it was going to be just Jessie and me. There are a lot of Mexicans in our neighborhood. I like Mexicans. I speak a little Spanish. They have improved our neighborhood in some ways.

As I'm riding out, off in the distance I see a guy and a horse about 1/4 mile behind us. I'm working on transitions of canter and trot, he's walking, I figure I'll stay ahead of him. 10 minutes later, I look back and see him galloping down the canal bank. His horse is on the muscle. Jessie is listening to me, but also checking back to see if this horse is coming.

At a little crossroads, I decide to stop and see which way it goes. Of course, he sees me stopped and thinks I'm waiting for him. Great! His horse is in a bosal and for the next 35 minutes I never see slack in the reins. Jessie stays relatively calm. I knew I wasn't going to get to do what we wanted so I headed for home. He followed.

He thought his english was pretty good. It WAS better than my Spanish, but every time he said something I had to say,"What?" We walked the 3/4 mi. back to my street. I got to hear all about his job and I think a bunch of other stuff. The guy could talk.

He would occasionally spin his horse around. I'm not sure if that was for control or to show off. I worked on moving Jessie back and forth across the road two-tracking style. And, as luck would have it, his horse was walking so fast, we got to do walk-trot transitions.

It was a good experience for us to meet up and ride with a strange horse like that. I wasn't quite sure how Jessie would handle it. She was calm, but alert. Once we got back to our house we did work on bending and side-passing, so we were able to get a little work done.

Thursday is likely to be our best shot a full-moon ride. We'll give it a shot and hope that Ceasar and his horse Bruno don't show up.

It's Ugly Hot

The searing heat arrived about the same time as our three-day weekend. Saturday's ride was right after breakfast around 9:30. We did a nice little loop about 2 hours long. We loped some and worked on sidepassing and backing up in between just trail riding and talking about our week. The horses were both well-behaved and we had a very nice ride.

Sunday was hotter. We got up an hour earlier and were on the trail by 8:15. We did a backwards loop through the canal when we discovered an unlocked gate. We found a couple of cool(er) fields to lope between as we made our way around and back home. We didn't do a whole lot of training, but we did try getting collection and worked on two-tracking back and forth along one particularly wide road.

I'm looking for a place to work on rollbacks. We don't have access to a practice arena anymore and it's been hard to find a fence with good footing around it. Jessie tends to quit on me when I do a straight stop - back up - rollback - and go. She'll do the first one good and the second one she just won't stop because she anticipates the back up and rollback. It's on our bucket list.

Sunday afternoon we took the dogs up to Mt. Pinos, elevation 8,000 feet, and did a two mile hike to the summit. It's a casual hike and I got to take some pictures:

View from the summit. They say you can occasionally see a condor up here.

Max & Rusty at the top.

It was an easy trail, but the air was thin.

Sunday night was hot and noisy with all the fireworks going off in the neighborhood (and, yes, Sunday night was just the third of July). We tried getting up early, it just didn't work out. We started our ride around 9:30 once again, only it was hot. Really hot. Ugly hot. We rode a simple loop. I didn't ask too much in the way of loping. Jessie was working up a sweat at a trot. We kept it simple and just did some transitions and collections then headed for home. The horses enjoyed their bath and slept the rest of the day.

We found a garden project on the shady side of the house to occupy our afternoon.

A 20 Mile Weekend

We laugh at temperatures in the high nineties. Well not really. It was hot. We still managed a long ride on Saturday morning. We went past the city farm almost all the to Edison Hwy. We rode past the recyle yard and across railrod tracks. We rode past a riding stable. We rode for about 4 hours and logged almost 13 miles. We did some loping whenever possible. Are average speed was 3.4 mph. Here are some pics:

The City Farm

Yes, that's sweat folks!

Dusty is thinking he has to jump that!

We are such scofflaws

Riding past the recycle plant

Doing some rollbacks

Does it look like we're going fast?

This owl was too hot to fly away

Sunday's ride was a little tamer. We went out to the development and parcticed some loping where I got a Western Pleasure 6.4 mph lope out of Jessie. Can't say that I see what the advantage of that is. We also worked on some sidepassing and backing up. We played a little game of simon says where one of us calls out a gait and we did transitions up and down between walk trot and canter. The horses were quite done with us by the time we got home and spent the afternoon snoozing. Their feet are chipped up. Going to have to take a file to them. Twenty miles wears them done quite well.

I've taken to cleaning their pens twice a day when possible to reduce the fly population. That and the fly predators seems to have improved the condition in just one week.

We've been doing groundwork in the evenings. I'm hoping to get some in tonight.

River Ride

We trailered out to the river for a ride on Sunday. I'm not sure how we do it, but we wake up at 8am, have breakfast, trailer 30 minutes, ride for 3 hours, and don't get home until 4 in the afternoon. Sunday time math just doesn't add up...that's a good thing.

These pictures are in no particular order. Thankfully we didn't have to ride up any of those hills. The horses had their feet trimmed early in the week and they both seemed a little tender.

My pretty girl with her head nice and low.

Some of the nice homes along the river.

The river is flowing high and fast because of all the rain.

Taking some shots with the timer. It's hard to get back on your horse and pose in 10 seconds.

It was a good ride. Jessie still has her head on a swivel sometimes, especially through the park with all the kids and cars and stuff. I could have done some groundwork before we left, but I'm not sure it would have helped. We did serpentines through a quiet part of the park. We circled lots of trees and she did well. As soon as we were back in the open, she was looking around again. More importantly it was a beautiful ride and a fun day.

The weather is still weird

The weather was nice both Saturday and Monday and we did get to ride. Sunday a storm blew in and it was windy with showers - weird weather for these parts.

Saturday we rode out east and had a couple of good sessions. We were working on trying to keep our lower backs soft and supple while sitting the walk, trot, and canter. The end result is both of our backs were kinda sore on Tuesday.

The riding areas have been cut down so the weeds are not as tall. With the rain the ground was relatively soft. Jessie did very good on her long lope. Each time she gets just a bit easier to control. She is softening nicely, too, as well as changing leads.

I took a few pictures. This is the artistic shot throught the stirrup:

Then at the end or our block the neighbor is keeping goats. They all came running up to us as we walked by so, of course, I had to try and pet them.

All-in-all we got in about 4 hours of riding over about 14 miles. The farrier comes next week.