maybe not the best buckaroos...

So, if you're one of my Facebook people, you saw the post last night saying how my horse Shylah and I would be helping out with a cattle roundup today, helping look for and gather 8 or 9 stray yearlings on one of the neighboring properties.  Seeing as how this is totally unlike anything I've ever done, I was a little apprehensive.  And if you know Shylah at all, you're probably thinking "hmm, she's not so much into things that involve moving quickly."  Yeah...

Actually it was fun, although it showed how EXTREMELY out of shape Shylah is.  The experienced horses were running all over the place, and by the end of 4+ hours going up and down hills and over creeks and around trees (And seemingly trying to scrape me off on oak trees?  Or was she just trying to get close enough to eat the trees?  Jury's out on that one, but I lean toward the former...) she was just flat out of gas and had nothing left to give.

We actually only saw two cows.  See, these strays are Limousin, a breed my family used to raise when I was a kid.  So when the cow folks say "those cows are nuts" I have to chuckle... oh yes, how well I know this!  Had some experiences with them in my younger years...  The non-Limousin cows are ever so much better behaved.  They managed to corral one of them, the other got away.

At any rate, I had absolutely no idea what to do, and just followed Jen, but our horses were kinda feeding off each other's slowness.  I have to say though that Shylah did get kinda amped up a few times, and did really get into the spirit of the chase at one point and covered some serious ground at a pretty good clip.  I was impressed, maybe there's hope for her.  I also don't know the lay of the land at all, and get TOTALLY turned around out there, so I don't have a real good concept of where the cows might be and where we are supposed to herd them.  All in due time, I guess...

That might be the last of the roundups here this season, I'm not sure.  I think the strays are getting left behind at this point.  They took all the other cows in May and June before I was moved up here.

Bottom line, Shylah needs some serious conditioning to be good at that, but maybe in time she and I could end up useful.  I was afraid we'd screw things up today.  Good news is we didn't mess anything up, but we certainly didn't manage to be any help either!  It was a lovely trail ride though!

pics from the ride

I went on another ride to Starbucks today. Great weather! We've had so much rain that much of the trail was flooded. Good thing about being on a horse is you can get through that no problem! ;-) Anyway, I don't own a lot of green, and my horses own even less, but I managed to find a green t-shirt. Shylah got to wear a saddle-pad that belongs to Jan, which I still happen to have over here from ages ago, and I found a green ribbon for her hair. A bit overkill, perhaps, but I know that at least one gaggle of tweenage girls who walked past us was entertained by her fashion sense.

The horses tied to the fence outside Starbucks (can't ride through the drive-thru anymore):

Um, was she napping when I took this? ;-)

trail ride today

I went on a nice couple-hour trail ride this morning with my friend Cheryl. It was a little toasty by the end, but much of the ride went through shady areas, so it was nice. Shylah was great. She mostly poked along bringing up the rear as always. She doesn't mind being last, but I think she minds my constantly asking her to trot and keep up. She never cares if the rider in front goes out of sight. But, as I've discovered a few times, I think she's a great deal happier in the lead because SHE gets to set the pace and not have to struggle to keep up with everyone else! So she led the way for a good part of the ride too. She's a good little trail horse once you come to terms with the fact that she moves through life at a slower speed than most. ;-) She's such a dork though, she's got this thing about walking next to the trail, not on it. Given free rein, she's always go just to one side or the other. It can be sort of annoying, if a trail has been mostly cleared of rocks, and the rocks are now alongside the trail, she'll get into all that mess and get this peeved expression like "this is too hard, I don't like this" meanwhile I'm trying to steer her into the CLEAR trail and thinking "well dummy, stay on the trail and it would be much easier!"

Wondering who that cute mule is? It's Sara!!!!! :-) It was great to hit the trail with Sara, she's just an awesome animal and totally unfazed by the world. She and Shylah even got along pretty well! Shylah can be kind of unpleasant with other critters, but they did well.

Yay!

The Search for Sasquatch

This is my one thousandth blog post. :-) Happy anniversary, blog. You're pretty fun, and thanks for bringing some new people into my life.

You might have noticed (did you?) the week-long gap in blogging. I was gone. I am back. I had fun. :-) It was time for the Search for Sasquatch, a sequel to Bears and Boulders. Heh heh. Yay for longtime readers who know what Bears and Boulders is.

First, a sentinel bird is sent out to scout the area. Sentinel bird says it's safe:

(Or, perhaps the real story is that I spent the last 5 days in the mountains east of Redding with JC and DC and my cute horse Shylah, lots of trail riding, lots of fun, and J agreed to adopt two Rosecomb chicks I accidentally hatched (long story) since she had just gotten hatchery chicks).

The sasquatch thing came up as a joke that we would be sure to see something really awesome (like a bear) because I was only bringing my munchkin camera and therefore would not be able to photograph it well. I won't even get into the rest of the story, it's one of those "you had to be there" sorts of things, but that's how the Search for Sasquatch ride came about.

This is normally something we do in the fall, but busy schedules and a few other complications made that impossible last fall, so this was a makeup ride. It was interesting to see the place at a different time of year when things were still green. The weather was decent. A little hot, but not bad. JC and I went out riding for several hours every day, and I also got to see Star Trek (loved it!) and even managed to get a little bit of work done too.

The riding was GREAT. Shylah seemed so much more sure-footed this year, and over-all very calm and confident on the trail. She's slow, yes, very slow, and takes hills even slower than slow, but I can deal with that. You just have to adapt to a different time frame with Shylah, you can't be in a hurry, she's just not a fast horse so you'd better kick back and enjoy the scenery. She's a "stop and smell eat the roses" kind of girl. She does try to graze constantly, which drives me batty, but that's another story. J was riding her "green" 3 year old Gypsy cob gelding, Aragorn. I was very impressed by how well he's doing in his training. He was a little concerned about Shylah at first, but quickly settled down and they ended up being a great match. Both slow. Yay! It's darn near impossible for me to trail ride with anyone because of the speed difference (especially the gaited breeds!). Shylah spent most of the time as the lead horse, and I have to say she seemed to enjoy that position. This was definitely the best pairing we've tried for trail riding (this is the third time we've done this), and it was so much fun. I sure wish I could do that more often. It's beautiful up there, except when it's a gazillion degrees. ;-)

Here are a bunch of photos, a virtual trail ride for you. These are from all the days, so this covers a very large amount of acreage.

There's a few rocks up there...just a few...

That's Mt. Lassen way off in the background. It was really hazy. Click on the pic to see it bigger.


That's Mt. Shasta off in the distance.


I was amazed at how well these two got along. Not that they were super chummy or anything, but Shylah didn't try to kick him and only made a grumpy face at him once (when he was backwashing and blowing his nose in the water trough as she was attempting to be a normal horse and take a drink)








(Slowly) climbing the rocky hill! This hill is her least favorite, for sure.



The view from the top of the world. Awesome.

Shylah says "grass, must eat grass, must eat..."

"can almost reach..."

How bout a closeup of that lip action. "so close! mmph, errg."


In the end, I think I can safely say a great time was had by all. I'm not sure Shylah loved the hills (in fact I'm pretty sure she didn't) but she does seem to enjoy being out and about and looking at things, she's quite the lookyloo on the trail. The chicks settled right in with their adopted brethren. We did not see a bear, or a sasquatch. Thus, the search shall continue.... :-)

pics from the Starbucks ride

Here's a bunch of pics from last Sunday. Thank you Alora and Suzie for taking pictures. :-)



"Hmm, do they have anything without coffee in it?"

Why yes, my horse is rather cute isn't she!

The red ribbon is used on a horse that kicks. Shylah unfortunately has a rather large personal space when it comes to other horses (thank you Gwen, ugh). She does NOT kick people. The red ribbon is a symbol that all riders know means to mind their distance. That's something everyone ought to do every horse anyway. I try to be REALLY careful with Shylah on a group ride and usually put her last (she's always the slowest anyway). On many rides there is a non-ribboned horse that kicks someone.


Shylah and Trog. They have met before.



The big red horse is Sampson, he lived here several years ago. He's a tank!


Uh oh, we're holding up the line! I got some chocolate minty iced thing, it was quite yummy.

The Adventure: June 28: Granite Canyon Trail Ride

It was another lazy morning until the farrier came out and reshod Amigo (remember he lost a shoe a few days earlier in Teton Canyon). However, considering his problems with navicular disease he was still too sore for a ride that day so that ruled out another jaunt through the field.

So lacking any other specific plans it was decided that we would go out to Jackson Hole and trail ride with B's friend R. R has Rocky Mountain horses, I'd never ridden one of those before. Size-wise similar to Shylah (in height AND girth, lol). ;-) I'd also never ridden in an Australian saddle before. It was pretty cushy. My horse for the day was a chestnut mare named Sugar. She was okay but we didn't really click and she was kinda disrespectful at times (and not the time and place for me to do anything about that), so it wasn't as fun a ride as the previous ones had been. However, I did enjoy getting to do some gaiting, she was really really smooth and that was a lot fun. She weren't no Shylah or Sara though! :-)

Here are pics from the ride. This was in Granite Canyon (aptly named!) which is in the Grand Teton National Park. A lot of my pics came out very blurry, perhaps an indication that the coolpix camera was starting to have some problems.



Hmm, could that be some granite there in the canyon?

Look at those ears, she's contemplating tossing me in the river and making a run for it (she was NOT a fan of water and got airplane ears every time we were near it).

And then we saw bears. Bears! Plural! A female and two cubs! And where was my camera? Why it was turned off and put away in the camera bag. Why? Because I'd had to dismount and fix the saddle when Sugar suddenly managed to deflate and I started slipping over the side. And somehow it didn't dawn on me to get the camera back out. Yeah, I really have impeccable timing sometimes. See those brown blobs? Those are bears. We were REALLY close, like "OMG do we need to turn around?" close. I was concerned what the horses would do, recalling when Shylah saw a bear once. Eh, the horses were fine. I was in a bad photo spot, and the camera was slow and not focusing where I wanted it to.

The cute blob with the face is one of the cubs. Oh these are cinnamon bears. Or are they called cinnamon black bears?

Back view of the bear blob.

Purty!

We all went to dinner at a little place in town, and on the way back what should I see but moose #3! Now I thought the third time was supposed to be a charm, but it was almost dark and she was moving fast and was looong gone by the time we turned around. Foiled again! Sadly, I have no moose photos to show you. :-( That of course means I just have to go back some day.

Next: my last day, sigh...