Author: Redheaded Endurance

Horse Saints and Experiments

/ Redheaded Endurance / 7 Comments
A few days ago, my mom and two young nieces came over from the north coast for a summer visit. The girls had their first horseback riding experiences here two years ago and were ready for another go! It was also my younger niece, A’s, birthday and on the evening of their arrival we had some great cake made by my mom and decorated by A’s sister, M. 
Pre cake, we got our appetites up with some fishing at the local river. My husband made the kid’s day as ever getting them set up for fishy success and with just a little assistance my niece A landed this beauty in no time! 
That evening, I also enlisted A’s help in a little horse experiment. Trimming hooves has become nigh impossible this summer after a practically non existent winter, the hooves are rock hard and trying to shed out old sole even with nippers is almost a joke. I personally don’t have enough water to spare to keep their eating areas wet and get a good soak going that way, so I decided to try packing a damp clay poultice into Scrappy’s hooves and then booting and leaving them on overnight. Since I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to ruin his feet overnight but caution is the better part of valor, I only did 2 hooves instead of 4, for starters.
bag o’ mud and a couple sizes of boot just in case
assistant A gets acquainted with Scrappy
pretty much like it sounds..gob mud into sole and put boot on
🙂

 When getting covered in goop but still needing to handle boots in between times, it’s best to bring something to wipe your hands off on. Or, you know, this happens: (better than wiping my hands on A though, right?)

 My nieces quite enjoyed the fluffy mini Doxies, and it was pretty mutual!  M and Rip

 Saturday morning A and I went out eagerly to see how our boot experiment had gone, and let’s just say Trial 1 is a failure, as Scrappy was standing at his fence line eagerly awaiting breakfast with both boot shells slid off and the boots hanging around his ankles. He had a slight wrinkle of consternation regarding the crap attached to his legs by the silly humans last night, but mostly had eyes only for hay. I’m thinking I’ll first try putting less goop in there, as I was pretty generous and I think when he put his foot down into the boot it really smooshed down and got slippery in there. My husband suggested vet wrapping the boot on, which is an interesting idea though I also get a vision of going out in the morning to feed and discovering Scrappy had hogtied himself with slipped vet wrap and muddy boots. Back to the drawing board there, but I’ve got a few idea and will post what comes next as it works out or doesn’t.

 After a hearty breakfast the girls were ready to saddle up, so I pulled my faithful horse saint,Blaze, out of the field. I feel guilty these days that I don’t use Blaze more, I think he really enjoys some time out being used, but he is great babysitter/kid/LD horse, and I don’t do a whole lot of that stuff lately.  Anyhow aside from basic maintenance and saying hey in his field, Blaze hadn’t been worked in the last month, but I knew he would be good for the kids and in fact I decided to up the ante to a “Trail ride” through the neighborhood instead of going in circles in the arena like last time.

❤ my sweet boy ❤

The girls were all game for the different riding experience and since my usual kid saddle, the “western” Abetta has been bastardized beyond recognition, including not having any way to attach stirrups currently, I threw the Skito and treeless Sensation up there. I figured with me hand walking him it was a safe enough bet and lord know it’s kind on the hind end, especially for those not used to riding! 
M on Blaze
    
A on board
We had a nice cruise through the HOT neighborhood with my mom and I walking and the girls trading off riding Blaze, though we all walked together on foot on the pavement part heading out where we had to pass the Beast of Doom:
Blaze thinks this mild looking Donkey is devil spawn
A getting toasty riding Blaze. She ditched using stirrups by her second time on board and wanted to know if I didn’t have 4 saddle horses we could ALL ride and really go somewhere. Horsey girl potential indeed! 

 We cooled ourselves off at the river after our horse hike Saturday and spent the evening on a great dinner and board games; Sunday was shopping day, and there’s certainly nothing exciting to be told about the city consumer experience except that we did manage to find some critters for them to ride while in a mall, too!

The girls loved helping feed the horses every day and after horse chores and breakfast this a.m. my mom wrangled them up and they headed home. It’s always great to get to see and enjoy time with the family and seeing the next generation enjoy animals and especially get interested in the horse fun is also rewarding in and of itself.

 My feeding crew led back to the barn by doxie Wilbur

Stay cool out there, it’s a balmy 102 degrees here!

Danger Baby

/ Redheaded Endurance / 4 Comments
“Danger Baby” first came into my vocabulary about the time my older sister’s first born child started crawling. 14 years later she now has 4 glorious children, the youngest of which is currently heartily embracing the original’s title. While I don’t have and don’t plan to have human children myself, I’ve got some 4 legged babies of my own and true to the age group, they’ve gotten themselves into a little trouble lately. 
There was of course Sheza’s leg banging incident while at training, nicely taken care of and resolved while in trainer guru April’s hands:

Now I have two “kids.” I took this picture of Rushcreek Aurora (Rory) the other day, as you can see she couldn’t be bothered to look up from her groceries, but it does at least show that her front end has started catching up with her hind end. She’s been extremely butt high since she got here and believe it or not that’s leveling out in this photo. I reflected how calm and sensible she was as I snapped this photo, how unlikely to do silly things, and went on my merry way.

 This morning Rory wasn’t at her feeder spot for breakfast. I had 10 seconds of panic that she was missing and then saw Rory stride around the corner of Desire’s shed, now in the paddock next to the pasture she should be in. Huh. I immediately looked down to the gate panel at the bottom of the paddock to see if she had somehow finagled it open but it looked undisturbed. Rory cruised around the paddock, completely calm and expectant for breakfast while I walked the fence line until I discovered a break in the hot wire and some smushing at a spot in the fence. That *definitely* hadn’t been there the day before, so quickly I finished feeding, unplugged the hot box on the way by, and circled right back into the paddock to splice the hot wire back together and straighten the fence that best that I could. I grabbed her hay next and Rory followed me calmly out the bottom gate into her own pasture, trotted around, then settled to munching as I began to circle her with bated breath, ready for the inevitable wounds to show themselves.

Sure enough:

I could tell by my own reactions at this point that I’m on my second Danger Baby. Where the slightest scratches or swelling on baby Sheza used to throw me into a tizzy, I found myself heavily on the unimpressed, “Well done, I’ll clean you up and you’ll live.” side of things this time. Rory has been in the big pasture for almost a month now, sharing fence line with Blaze *and* Desire, and hasn’t seemed in the least perturbed at being “alone” in her field. I can’t quite see why she attempted to sprout wings and relocate, except that perhaps she’s a bit of a Funder and well, “..it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She was pretty reasonable about getting it thoroughly cleaned and treated, for a yearling with about 4 months of handling who hadn’t been hurt before (that I know of). As of now she notices it’s sore but isn’t lame at all and seemed quite chuffed to get a mash out of the deal.

Gotta love horses!

Crewing Ride n Tie Championships

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Last weekend I crewed the Ride and Tie Championships for Team Worst Ever, also known as fellow bloggers Mel and Funder. I had a blast helping get Farley and the gals through the day, as well as hanging out with my other crew members including blogger LCT. My other experiences crewing have been for Tevis and while this was RnT Championships the atmosphere was *ahem* a good deal more relaxed than that! The event was held at lovely Dru Barner campground, site of the Gold Country endurance ride coming up this weekend. The high was about 90 but with the shade in camp and breeze it certainly could have been a lot worse for summer in July (says the lucky/unlucky one not out leaving it all on the trail). 


Anyway my activities beyond standard crew servicing (food/water/tack & rub maintenance for all) mostly consisted of whining about saddle fit for hours on end, so I’ll leave you all with these links to the ride n tying gals posts to read instead:


Here’s a few highlights from my photos of the day:

FINISHING VICTORY!

Saddles and Smart Fillies

/ Redheaded Endurance / 6 Comments
On Wednesday I had another wonderful evening session working and riding Sheza filly. 
“trail riding” in our big pasture
Something I have to be very conscious of with bringing Sheza along is to avoid falling heavily into habit patterns early on. That is, some routines and patterns are great to establish comfort and consistency, but Sheza is on the smart, manipulative end of the brain spectrum and it takes doing the same thing in the same order and time frame approximately twice for her to think she knows what needs to be done, at what speed, and especially when we’re finished and ready to do something else. This means I need to keep nagging myself to switch up my own habits of doing everything in the same order, finishing up and putting the horse away immediately, etc. As much as she needs to go out in the world and experience ride camps and spooky social situations of all kinds, she also needs to spend plenty of time tied various places, learning that standing around quietly is old hat. She the sensitive type that let’s the world know that to be tied in a new spot is DIFFERENT, or when things are moved it’s DIFFERENT. Sheza so far in her riding horse incarnation is much as she was before–super smart but undeniably *dramatic,* and so similar to her mother at times that it’s almost like transposition in time. Still she has absolutely found a lot more of her brain after those 2 months at training, and I just can’t wait for all our adventures ahead!
looking down at momma Desire and little step -sister Rushcreek Aurora. Time flies!!
❤

Below is a fine example of how Sheza has mellowed out! After about an hour session of round pen work and a short “trail ride” around the big pasture, I parked her at some alfalfa scraps and had her stand there for untacking, not tied. She obliged completely, didn’t move a muscle but to clean up the hay, then stood there quite happily for a hosing off. Pretty mature of my spazzy girl! 🙂

****************************

My much anticipated Skito saddle pad arrived yesterday and this morning I saddled up Scrappy with it and the Sensation and worked him in the round pen for about 30 minutes, refreshing our session the other day about giving to bit pressure. He was really getting the picture today, both in the round pen *and* out on a 13 mile cruise through the neighborhood. A mile of that was us having a turn-around-and-canter back the other way discussion about not rushing home, but otherwise we had a really nice ride.

his front Rennys were a little tight so we rocked the Renegade Vipers today, so far so good

 Oh, this happened:

Yeah, apparently there are tarantulas around here?! We were merrily heading for home when I saw this big dark shape in the road. When I saw what it was I immediately pulled up to take a picture so I could stare in proper zoomed in disgust later when I wasn’t on a horse. It rared back and waved seemingly hostile body parts at us, for all the world as if it wasn’t intimidated by us stopped and staring so near. I got my picture and was sufficiently squicked out and we went on our way; not even a minute later a truck sped by us on the road and I’m nearly certain the spider met it’s demise, but wow, I won’t forget it!

So we had a lovely, spider-sighting ride. BUT. When I hosed him off back at home I could just see the pink skin starting to show through at those spots behind his shoulders again! Not badly, but visibly pink where it wasn’t before. Since I wanted to test it straight first I didn’t use the crupper or goop his back, but we only did one hill of any real gradient and I haven’t seen the pink since I stopped using the Frank Baines and regrew the hair there.

***@#(&$!! And also, WHY!***

What do I do? My husband says goop Scrap’s back at those spots, use the crupper, and go to the ride next weekend. My cautious side says that’s going in with an issue already there (though he isn’t back sore and there aren’t any actual sores or rubs currently). That pink showing again though says something is brewing again to me, yes?

Sigh.

Round Pen a la Scrappy

/ Redheaded Endurance / 2 Comments
 WEE! okay that was enough wasted effort entirely..
look at me human, look at me trot so pretty.
She keeps comparing me to a giraffe, it must be my spots! 

 *grumble* giraffes have high heads. I am learning not to. 

Seems like if lower my head the pressure goes away. Hmm..

Oh yeah, this is much more my speed..

Sheza At Work: First Ride at Home

/ Redheaded Endurance / 5 Comments
Sheza had a week off when she got home from training, time well spent eating, sleeping, eating, and mooning at the geldings over the fence line. Meanwhile, the (clearly well used *cough*) round pen needed mowing if we didn’t want to wade through knee high thistles, and a sprinkler line put in if we didn’t want to expire in a 40 ft circle of dust. 
round pen getting some love
It’s certainly gratifying to come inside the pasture gate with a halter, call your filly, and have her head right over. ❤  You may detect Scrappy the Bathorse's suspicious body language even from a distance in the photo below. 

Really? You’re going TO the halter? you know you have to like WORK, right? I guess there might be food involved too but I dunno..seems like a lot of effort…
Since this was our first session at home as well as first solo effort, I hauled my tack and helmet down to the round pen but started working her just at liberty, tackless. Might as well start from the ground up and give her and I the best chance at succeeding together. Sheza essentially worked herself, in that I made her stay out on the circle and changed directions and speeds, but she moved her busy little feet around and around, burning off steam. She spent maybe 15 minutes with her head pointedly turned away from me on the circle, working herself, and then as some steam burned off and the direction changes started to get more polite, on one of the circles she finally checked in with me. 
Ahh, hello filly!
She started to slow and wanted to stop so I made sure to keep her going a few more circuits until it was *my* idea to stop. Which she did quite nicely, and for her good work Sheza earned herself thinking time tied in the round pen while I went to get a drink. 😉 Impatience is in the bloodline with an extra sprinkle for Sheza and time spent tied which is clearly not her idea, is a great thing for her! 
Look at those ears..”BUT MOM! Come back and pay attention to me and HMmPH!” 
When I found myself sufficiently re-hydrated, and more importantly Sheza had clicked over her brain and found herself standing tied at the Rail of Boredom, I saddled and bridled her, for which she stood like a rock! Sigh, swoon, hallelujah! Then it was time for her to move her feet again with the gear on.
Sheza’s particular go-to move is the right ear spazz/head shake, inherited somehow from her mother Desire. Desire legitimately has a small scar on her right ear and her TMJ is often out so she may have pain there, but how her daughter managed to pick up her exact habit without pain or apparent reason I’m not sure! (Sheza has been chiro checked clear before going to training and will be checked again soon). April spent a lot of time working her with ropes and reins and junk tied over her ear so she just had to get over it but as we expected it’s her go-to spazz expressing move. 
So with the tack on, a little bit of hinky filly came out, and she exhibits that by again keeping her head turned away from me but also tilting her head to the right, head shaking a bit, always reverting to that “ERmahGawdMYEAR!.” It’s quite amusingly predictable I must say!

myearrrr!!!

 little back hump but no bucks, just her head spazz in each direction til she mellowed

starting to work a little calmer

It only took maybe 5 minutes of moving her feet and a few direction changes to have a quiet licking and chewing filly working at a nice trot and not shaking her head. When I saw that we were done and I tighted my girth and got up in that saddle! Just as she had at April’s Sheza stood like a rock, even dropping her head, turning side to side to snuff each of my shoes. We opened the gate from the saddle–ah thank you April for those lovely leg aides installed–and rode out of the round pen and out around the big pasture on a “trail ride” around the little track in the lower acreage my husband scraped in with the tractor. 

First Sheza tried pretending she didn’t know what walking out and cues meant, sort of faltering uncertainly between my legs but I bridled her up a bit and moved her out and she was over that. Next she tried rushing forward a little, shaking her head BUTMYEAR!, but bending her side to side and a few circles curbed that. She is incredibly light in the bit and I already notice that the lighter I am, the lighter she is, as only makes sense. We did 2 or 3 good balks riding away down into the “terrifying” pasture she grew up in, including one good sideways sproing that tested my seat in the treeless, but I sat quietly and made her look at each scary thing, then collect on the bit a little and move on. Her responses transitioned then to a quiver in her skin and stop and stare, but much calmer. We circled a spare round pen panel laying the grass that had her snorting and staring, then when she was dropping her head to graze at various places we rode up towards the gate out. 

Sheza has always been a gate rusher and she’s the first one to clue into things like “gate means OUT!” whether under saddle or not. As we approached the gate she tried to brace against the bit and rush toward it but I bent her the other way with rein and leg and circled at the trot and walk until we were standing, bored, grazing, again. The big gate isn’t doable from the saddle so I dismounted at a mellow moment and hunted out my husband to take a few more photos! 
Sheza good girl!
wearing her momma’s bridle ❤
Nothing like a nice cool bath after a workout on a 100 degree evening, and a sloppy mash to boot! Sheza super model when the mash comes out. 

 Not bad for a three year old! 😀

In other horsey news, Scrappy’s Skito pad for the treeless saddle should be here Wednesday and I have notions of getting a 25 mile ride in on him when it arrives to see if we have any business going to the Gold Country ride in a few weeks. Before that though he is heading to the round pen for some ground work and collection brush-ups.

 Hope you all had a wonderful and safe fourth of July, stay tuned and stay cool!