Saturday dawned (reasonably) bright and (reasonably) dry, so I hooked up the trailer and booted up Galen and Andy. Kelsey Weinberg has been taking lessons from me for about a year now (wow!) with the aim of doing Ride and Ties. She is getting closer all the time and we’ve been out on the trails now several times.
The first time we went to Lord Hill and did a very easy loop.
We’ve been to Mann Road at least twice now, each time doing a little bit harder ride. This one must be during summer sometime.
This one was a few weeks back – note that she’s wearing heavier clothes here.
And this weekend, we went back to Lord Hill, even though I knew it would be slippery because of all the leaves on the rocks. But, as the name suggests, it has one thing in spades…HILLS!
For those of you that ride trails, you know that coming to a steep, slippery hill can either be terrifying or amazing. I always vote for amazing. So, as we don’t have any hills to speak of in the arena, where Kelsey has done most of her lessons, we have to go out to find some. We had done some mild ones at Mann Road, but I hadn’t taken her up and down anything really big yet. While we didn’t trot much at all, as it was just too slick, we did quite a lot of hill work and both horses were pleasantly tired afterwards.
We went up the hill towards the Quarry and took off on the new trail that was made this year. There are several pretty steep hills on this, so Kelsey got to practice her ‘grabbing mane and keeping your legs under you’. Unfortunately, there was a big tree down about a half mile or so in and I didn’t see any way to safely get around it. So, we turned around and headed back, now working on downhill. Downhill can be harder than uphill, with an unbalanced horse wanting to go faster and faster (like you running down a hill losing your balance forward). So, we do tiny half-halts, to help the horse keep its weight on his hind end and take their time. Kelsey and Andy did great! We also got to do a little over and under, with some logs down on the trail. She also got to practice her leg-yielding around some deep holes in the trail.
Then, we were heading back to the trailer and I asked her if she wanted to go up the ‘Big Hill’, no idea what it’s called, but it’s on the gasline and I never go down it, only up. She was game, so up we went! I don’t have photos of that, as our horses were working hard.
We met some bikers and runners and talked about meeting people on the trail. I usually go pretty early in the day to try to miss the big crowds. It’s not that we can’t deal with it, it is just way easier not to.
It really was beautiful, with all the colored leaves on the trail, but it was slick. Maybe next time we’ll head to the Redmond Watershed and do lots more trotting (really lovely, well-maintained trails) and get more practice with runners, bikers, etc.
