Hey y'all! Now that I'm home I guess I'll catch you up on our trip. It was absolutely amazing and we had a blast. I posted pics earlier of the first day so I'll pick up from there.
My uncooperative borrowed horse... He is a gelding that belongs to my sister's boyfriend and was/is broke, but a complete jerk. We finally figured things out about the third day.
Various pics. Story about losing our minds to follow. It was defiantly the most "interesting" ride we had the entire trip.
Grace was acting like a goof ball during lunch, and Maurice and I were talking about how far we still had to ride back (8 miles) just as I snapped this picture. It was such a funny coincidence that her face matched the timing of 8 more miles to go after already riding 6 miles....
Ok so now I guess I'll get to the story... We woke up early Sunday morning to drive to the trail we'd picked for last because it was rated as moderate on a scale from easy-moderate-hard. We get to the trail and saddle up. Everything is going great. We ride the first little bit and it's relatively easy. We cross two streams and from there on out, it would take till christmas for me to explain. We climbed 2500 feet in 8 miles. HOLY COW if this was moderate, I don't want to know what is hard. It was solid rock, anywhere from softball to truck size, that is SMOOTH, no edges to it. The horses had to search out their inner mountain goat. We didn't think it was going to be a long stretch so decided to try and get up it slowly. We were about 1/2 through it before we realized this probably wasn't a great idea but by that point there seriously wasn't any turning around without chancing a horse falling more than there already was so we pushed on. We finally got out of that mess and it was relatively easy from there on. At 11,750 feet we were above the tree line and had a picnic by the lake and the wind was blowing harder than I had ever seen. I walked down to the lake to water my gelding, and I'll be dang if my hat didn't blow off. I watched it float about halfway across this lake before it sank. Ticked me off royally, but Maurice promised me that we would stop and get me a new one at the next Cavenders. After lunch it was time to go. It was just a hairy coming back down. The geldings were positive that we had left our sanity at the trailer that day, and I'm not quite sure that we didn't. Here are the pictures. I didn't get any pictures of the trail because I was more worried about saving more horse than a camera at that time.
Yesterday we stopped and rode at Caprock Canyons in west Texas. This was another day that I didn't get many pictures because about 1/2 through the ride Grace started limping pretty bad and wasn't wanting to bear weight on her foot again. Maurice's gelding accidently stomped on her a couple of days ago, she had seemed ok, I am thinking she just needs a little time to heal whatever is hurt. So I wound up carrying her out off the Grey horse. He was PISSED. As you can see from the pictures he kept turning his head and glaring at her/me. But here are the couple that we got.
On the way home
We had a blast and have more memories to add to our collection.
