If you are here for knitting and fiber stuff, alas, I have none for you currently.
And if you are here for photos, I don't have any of those either right now.
If you are interested in more blithering about my horse, well then! You've come to the right place!!
Saturday saw us on the trail at 8:00 a.m., Bhen, me, Sam and D, plus the Jacksons and their 2 equine buddies. We had bookmarked Saturday for aerobic training on the hills. Less mileage on the horse legs, but still good aerobic conditioning. Luckily, we have a ready-made set of hills just to the south of us, which form a ridge dividing our little town from the Camp Williams Army Base. A great place to train, as long as you watch for unexploded ammunition and trip wires. (Staying on the 2-track dirt road is usually safe, although we did find some wire on the road.) We climbed steadily uphill for the entire first half of the ride, stopping to check pulses on the horses as we went, and then gave the crew a break in a big grassy meadow, so they could have a snack. We had fairly slow going on the steep downhills home, but we were able to trot a bit once we got out of the canyons and headed back to the subdivision we live in. The huge irrigation canals now have water running through them, so we steered the horses into the cold, deep water to help cool their legs off after the ride.
Sunday saw us on the road to the west desert by 7:00 a.m. (best to ride in the desert before the sun gets too high this time of year). We set out to the east out of the parking lot, followed a 2-track along for a little ways, and then cross-country to pick up another trail to head south. In the dusty sagebrush, Bhen and I saw our first snake of the day (maybe a rattler, but it was moving, we were moving, none of us stopped to check.) We picked up another 2-track and were motoring along, when D noticed Sam seemed a little "off". He stopped and got off to check the big guy's feet and found out he had thrown a shoe. Bummer.
Dean volunteered to ride back to the trailer so "the girls", me and MJ, could do the rest of the loop. He and D set off back towards the trailer, with MJ's horse hollering for his best girlfriend, Finney, who got to ride home with Sam. We pointed Bhen and Rum into a canyon trail and headed uphill at a slow trot. We wound around juniper and large rocks under vivid blue skies, and came up out of the canyon onto another nice, sandy 2-track (where Rum stopped to call for Finney again!), and then picked up the pace to set off towards home. This is where we ran into snake #2 of the day, slithering it's way through the dust. Bhen just stepped over the snake at the trot and kept going.
One of the great things about riding with MJ is that she's been doing it SO long, I just holler "How fast, MJ?" and she can guesstimate if we are going 8 mph, or 10 mph, or 12 mph, or whatever. And it's something I'm trying to better learn to gauge by how fast the ground is zipping by us, and how Bhen feels. I also took this ride opportunity to slap a pulse-rate monitor on him. This nifty device works just like the ones for human athletes. I have a wristband read-out (looks/acts like a sportswatch), and 1 electrode attaches to the saddle girth, and the other goes to the other side of him, somewhere under the saddle pad. Part of what I was looking for was to see how fast he'd drop from an exercise heartbeat to a resting heartbeat after exercise around 60. So, on our slow trot up the canyon, he ran about 90 beats per minute, but dropped to 58 in less than 90 seconds once we stopped. The helpful thing I found out is that for every extra mph he trots, his heart rate goes up by approximately 10 bpm. At 8 mph, he runs about 95; at 10-11 mph, he runs about 115; at 12 mph, he runs about 128. This is a really handy tool for me.
We were cruising along at about 12 mph (trust me, this is a fast pace to trot - Bhen's doing an extended trot and I'm just trying to keep up with it) when we ran into snake #3 of the day. This one was attempting to leave the shade of the sagebrush, and had just started to drop down into the sandy road bed when Bhen caught the movement out of his right eye and jumped to the left. At full speed. I lost my left stirrup, but..... and this is the great thing (because Bhen likes to GO. He doesn't really care if you are with him when he's going, he likes to GO! And we were headed back to the trailer, which is GO CUBED!)..... he slowed down. He pulled himself back off that 12 mph trot, scootched himself back under me, evened out his gait until I could get my stirrup back, waited for the click that tells him he can go, and THEN he took off again. That was a BIG step forward for us as a horse/rider team!
After that little excitement, we slowed the boys down since we were just a few miles out from the trailer, and then let them walk in the last quarter mile. Bhen was down to 87 bpm, even at the end of all that trotting, and when I hopped off and loosened his saddle girth, he dropped another 20+ bpm down to 65 or so for the last 500 feet to the trailer. He was down under 60 by the time I got him tied at the trailer. Not shabby at all for about a 10 mph average pace over 20 miles! (We rode the 20 miles in 2 hours and 15 minutes, which included some breaks to deal with Sam's missing shoe and to let Rum look for Finney once we had left the guys.)
I think Bhen's just about where he needs to be for the 50-miler!
All for now......
