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Sep. 4th, 2006 09:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThe scheduled horse event in which we rode from Tasha's up over Ray's Hill to my house and back up over to her house (via a different route) took place entirely without incident today. The IRH was alarmingly sane and well-behaved. Martini (who was ridden by La) was sane and well-behaved. The whole thing was pretty non-event-ish.
Ray's Hill has an elevation of about 1900 feet above sea level. My house is around 1300 feet and Tasha's is lower than that. Unfortunately I don't know how much lower because I can't find my USGS map of the Wells Tannery quadrangle. Anyway. It's a lot of mountain to drag a horse up and then down and then up and then down again. It's rocky, because mountains are made out of rocks. (There are not very many mountains made out of high quality farmland.) These things help make it a lot like work for the horses. They're too busy keeping on trucking (and not going ass over tin cup) to really kick up a fuss.
The IRH, whom I apparently call Goober frequently enough to cause strangers to ask if that's actually her name, did a yeoman job on the trip. She was fine. I don't understand how I can spend a good four hours (9:30 AM to about 2 PM) on the IRH and she does absolutely nothing wrong... but I ride her along the road for five minutes and she dumps me on my damn ass in a fit of bucking.
It's not like we had bucolic woodlands, either. We had "Wow. There's new Dept. of Forestry deer-exclusion fencing. Pity they closed the road." events. Three of them, you see. Deer-exclusion fencing is big and you can't get horses through it. We took the horses around the fenceline. (Deer-exclusion fencing, for our newer readers, is 8' coarse wire mesh fence that Pennsylvania uses to enclose areas of its state forests so that the trees can grow back. If they don't fence the damned deer out, the forest can't regenerate. And still my state is full of fucking yahoos who feel that there are not enough deer. CLUEBAT, I summon YOU!) Anyway, since the fenced area was tidily placed on the top of the ridge, we wound up going down (and I mean that in a very precipitous sort of way) the side of the mountain and then across and then up (again rather precipitously) to get around it. Thrice we encountered deer-exclusion fencing and thrice we detoured in such a fashion. The IRH got a lot better at balancing herself for going down steep hills and demonstrated a very workmanlike power-up-the-steep-climb modality. All of that was good.
She had sore feet (see "rocky" nature of mountains, above) so we stopped at my house and got her easyboots. (These are like sneakers for horses, kinda.) I'd taken off the plastic clips, though, and so the easyboots didn't fit as snugly as they had last year when we used 'em. She kept losing 'em so I finally gave up and didn't put them back on after they'd come off twice. I tied 'em to the bareback pad so that I wouldn't lose them (an easyboot costs about forty-five dollars) and that worked pretty well. Of course, the lack of easyboots didn't help her sore feet, but such is life. It's not like she'll die from it or anything, but it was another non-bucolic element of the ride.
We saw a couple of kids with bikes and one ATV and one sedan (going like two miles an hour). The IRH was minimally insane for that stuff, none of which was very challenging.
La's current theory on the IRH is that she uses the vehicles as an excuse to dump me. *sigh* I don't know if I go for that or not. I mean, if I were the IRH, I'd have damn well not have wanted to do about twelve miles of rocks with sore feet. That'd be a good time to use my "excuse" to dump a person, if I were a horse. But she didn't do that. She was absolutely delightful and pleasant the entire time. I don't get it.
La also says that the IRH is evading because I don't make her come to a stop when turning circles during car events. Partly this is because everyone else keeps walking and I don't want to be left behind to die alone on the road. This, though, I can work on. I can do better at this. It's interesting that some trainer thought on the subject suggests that have the ballistic horse turn teeny circles allows the horse to evade the fear. That line of thought suggests that one should work with one's scared horse to acclimate to the danger while facing the danger instead of allowing the horse to turn circles.
Finally, La thinks that maybe I should not turn her to face vehicles coming from behind but should just keep on going and wait for her to do something first. The problem for me, here, is that I know damn well that she's going to do something stupid. It's terrifying (for me) to wait for certain death from behind. I'd rather see it coming, if it's all the same. Me being terrified isn't a good thing. People who are terrified get hurt. I don't know how to do better at this besides recruiting a driver to DRIVE by my damn horse while we acclimate, using a real road and a real vehicle.
The vehicle thing with the IRH frustrates me because if we can fix that, the fucking horse is rideable and pretty damn solid. Until it gets fixed, though, she's not very usable.
Ray's Hill has an elevation of about 1900 feet above sea level. My house is around 1300 feet and Tasha's is lower than that. Unfortunately I don't know how much lower because I can't find my USGS map of the Wells Tannery quadrangle. Anyway. It's a lot of mountain to drag a horse up and then down and then up and then down again. It's rocky, because mountains are made out of rocks. (There are not very many mountains made out of high quality farmland.) These things help make it a lot like work for the horses. They're too busy keeping on trucking (and not going ass over tin cup) to really kick up a fuss.
The IRH, whom I apparently call Goober frequently enough to cause strangers to ask if that's actually her name, did a yeoman job on the trip. She was fine. I don't understand how I can spend a good four hours (9:30 AM to about 2 PM) on the IRH and she does absolutely nothing wrong... but I ride her along the road for five minutes and she dumps me on my damn ass in a fit of bucking.
It's not like we had bucolic woodlands, either. We had "Wow. There's new Dept. of Forestry deer-exclusion fencing. Pity they closed the road." events. Three of them, you see. Deer-exclusion fencing is big and you can't get horses through it. We took the horses around the fenceline. (Deer-exclusion fencing, for our newer readers, is 8' coarse wire mesh fence that Pennsylvania uses to enclose areas of its state forests so that the trees can grow back. If they don't fence the damned deer out, the forest can't regenerate. And still my state is full of fucking yahoos who feel that there are not enough deer. CLUEBAT, I summon YOU!) Anyway, since the fenced area was tidily placed on the top of the ridge, we wound up going down (and I mean that in a very precipitous sort of way) the side of the mountain and then across and then up (again rather precipitously) to get around it. Thrice we encountered deer-exclusion fencing and thrice we detoured in such a fashion. The IRH got a lot better at balancing herself for going down steep hills and demonstrated a very workmanlike power-up-the-steep-climb modality. All of that was good.
She had sore feet (see "rocky" nature of mountains, above) so we stopped at my house and got her easyboots. (These are like sneakers for horses, kinda.) I'd taken off the plastic clips, though, and so the easyboots didn't fit as snugly as they had last year when we used 'em. She kept losing 'em so I finally gave up and didn't put them back on after they'd come off twice. I tied 'em to the bareback pad so that I wouldn't lose them (an easyboot costs about forty-five dollars) and that worked pretty well. Of course, the lack of easyboots didn't help her sore feet, but such is life. It's not like she'll die from it or anything, but it was another non-bucolic element of the ride.
We saw a couple of kids with bikes and one ATV and one sedan (going like two miles an hour). The IRH was minimally insane for that stuff, none of which was very challenging.
La's current theory on the IRH is that she uses the vehicles as an excuse to dump me. *sigh* I don't know if I go for that or not. I mean, if I were the IRH, I'd have damn well not have wanted to do about twelve miles of rocks with sore feet. That'd be a good time to use my "excuse" to dump a person, if I were a horse. But she didn't do that. She was absolutely delightful and pleasant the entire time. I don't get it.
La also says that the IRH is evading because I don't make her come to a stop when turning circles during car events. Partly this is because everyone else keeps walking and I don't want to be left behind to die alone on the road. This, though, I can work on. I can do better at this. It's interesting that some trainer thought on the subject suggests that have the ballistic horse turn teeny circles allows the horse to evade the fear. That line of thought suggests that one should work with one's scared horse to acclimate to the danger while facing the danger instead of allowing the horse to turn circles.
Finally, La thinks that maybe I should not turn her to face vehicles coming from behind but should just keep on going and wait for her to do something first. The problem for me, here, is that I know damn well that she's going to do something stupid. It's terrifying (for me) to wait for certain death from behind. I'd rather see it coming, if it's all the same. Me being terrified isn't a good thing. People who are terrified get hurt. I don't know how to do better at this besides recruiting a driver to DRIVE by my damn horse while we acclimate, using a real road and a real vehicle.
The vehicle thing with the IRH frustrates me because if we can fix that, the fucking horse is rideable and pretty damn solid. Until it gets fixed, though, she's not very usable.
