Hitting the Trails

For my birthday, my mother offered to buy me something from the tack shop.  Horse-related gifts were definitely the theme this year.  A friend of mine offered to buy me something from the tack shop as well (I picked out a new mint green halter for Walker), and two of my other friends paid for my show fees for the last show of the summer.  My mother had a more expansive budget, however, and I decided to buy leather saddle bags from the man who redid my saddle.  They look kind of like this and are black:

This month I convinced one of the girls in my lesson to lease the horse she rides.  Pokey is a 17 year old mare who is pretty well near retirement.  My friend really loves her and so the barn owner offered to keep her for the rest of the summer so that she could lease her.  Then she will be going to another barn where she will be ridden minimally and live a leisurely pasture life.

Anyway, today she sent me a message to go to the barn and I figured that it would be a great time to whip out the new saddle bags and take a trail ride.  I've only ever been on the trails with Walker twice so far.  The first time was with three other horses who were all spooky.  Walker was leading, and we only made it about 10 feet inside the trail before the other horses were leaping all over the place and threatening to bolt.  End of trail ride #1.

The second trail ride I went on was a couple weeks after that.  I went with two different girls and their horses, and their fathers also accompanied us on the trail (walking beside us).  This turned out to be great actually because I didn't actually know the trail so it was nice to have some adults with us.  One of the girls ended up turning around with her father half way down the trail because her horse was clearly not enjoying it, but the other girl, her father and I continued on until the base of the lake.

The trails around my barn supposedly lead to a lake and the trail then weaves around the lake and back to the barn.  Originally it was described to me like this: "You will come to a fork in the road.  It doesn't matter which one you take because you will come out the other one after going around the trail."  Yeah.  Not so much.  There are actually a lot of twists and turns, and the trail connects to several four wheeler trails and roads in the woods.  I'm not from the area at all so I really was glad to have that girl and her father.  However, she was starting to get nervous (she had fallen off her horse on the trail not that long ago), and when we got to the base of the lake, we turned back.

For today's trail ride, I decided to go to the dollar store and pick up some Hawaii leis.  You can get the cheap, brightly coloured ones in a pack of 5 and I picked up two packs. I stuffed them in one of the saddle bags and whenever we would come to a fork in the road, I would hang one from a tree so we would find our way back.

You're probably thinking right now that taking my crazy horse on a trail ride is a horrible idea.  Actually, Walker is a rock on the trails.  He doesn't seem to mind the trail at all - except for the bugs (which, luckily, were good today).  He only did a mini-spook once when a gigantic crane flew up out of the lake from behind the bushes (which scared me too).

The lake was beautiful and there was even a nice spot to sit and have a picnic if we wanted.  Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out where the trail was that went around the lake so we had to go back the way we came.  The Hawaiian leis worked perfectly.

When we got back, my friend wanted to go into the arena and lope Pokey so I decided to see if I could recreate my amazing ride yesterday. As suspected, he was not having it.  I guess he only intends to be good every once in a blue moon.  I got him to lope one really nice circle and after that it was all bucks and bolting.  When I started to have a hard time actually getting him to lope, I decided to try a new exercise with him - an exercise that one of the girls at the barn suggested to me.  We did some rollbacks which essentially means that I would ask him to lope along the side of the arena, halt, turn, lope off, and repeat.  This got him paying attention to me and he picked up the pattern quick enough that he started loping off without me even asking.  I was happy that I got his attention back on me so that he didn't think that he got away with his foolishness.

Even though I couldn't have as nice of a ride as I did yesterday, I was pretty happy with my day overall.  A great trail ride on a beautiful day with a friend and we got to finish our ride with him listening to me.  Success. :)