First Trail Ride of the Year and A Dusty Update

On Fridays I usually get Lyssa from school and we haul to the arena to ride. Last Friday was so beautiful that I convinced her we needed to go for a trail ride.


Lyssa rode the Mare since we are not confident enough to let her ride Dusty. We had a plan though. First we would ride Voosh and the Mare around to break trail and see how our horses would be on the first trail ride of the year. The snow was belly deep on Voosh on the trails in the woods. You can see that on the snowmachine/snowshow trails it's only about fetlock deep on the Mare. We took a mile long loop that took us about an hour to complete. We had to stop several times to rest from trailbreaking. I forgot where the ditches were and got Voosh into an area of snow that was midchest high. She panicked for just a minute but worked her way through it.

When we got back to the house, Lyssa worked Dusty on the ground for a while just to get her attention. Then Lyssa got back on the Mare and ponied Dusty in the pen for several minutes while I explored our options for leaving the house. I led Voosh down the driveway. It had been plowed and sanded all winter so there was gravel in the center but glaze ice on the edges. Voosh wouldn't stay in the middle and almost fell several times as she scrambled to maintain her footing on ice. She never did go down.

So the option of going down the driveway was out. We opted to retrace our trail from earlier.


As you can see, the two horses got along well and Dusty ponied like she had done this before. We rode for another half hour. An added benefit of riding in the snow was that the horses' feet and legs got really clean. It was nice to see Dusty's white socks gleam.

The days are getting longer and with DST it's light until at least 8 pm. I can't wait until we can ride in the evenings.