Pilchuck Tree Farm

The fir tree is pollening all over my truck lately and it's GROSS

 Cortney asked me to accompany her to Pilchuck Tree Farm on Sunday so she wouldn't be riding completely solo with a lady who was trying out her Pandora saddle.  I gladly agreed. I never made it to ride there when we lived here last and I always was jealous of the pictures I saw of folks who did ride there.

 My day started fairly early, though due to the time change it wasn't that bad. I made a run to the trash and recycling transfer station to unload my truck and was off to the barn to hitch and load. I ended up running SUPER early, which is unheard of for me. I ended up being incredibly glad I was early/on time though!

I got to the meet point parking lot (there are three places where horse trailers can park to access the trails) and horse trailers started arriving in quick succession after me. There were two there, I was the third, a local rider next to me and Cortney came after. Then a couple strangers. The lot was FULL.

 I was pleasantly surprised that the rider who parked next to me was a face I recognized as I follow her on blogger as well! Aarene of Haiku Farm is a pretty well known voice in the PNW endurance community and the standardbred endurance community as she rides a giant standardbred mare named Fiddle, aka The Dragon. I started following her blog shortly after moving to Michigan so I could live vicariously through her awesome posts (And I do recommend subscribing to her posts or adding them to your feed if you want more of witty, intelligent horse women). She frequents these trails and I've seen many pictures of them through the seasons.

Many thanks to Aarene for taking this photo for me!

This was the last day the single track trails would be open on this side of the tree farm. After Nov 4, the trails would close for the season to preserve the trail integrity but the logging roads would still be available.

 We kept mostly to a walk, as the lady who was purchasing doesn't do much more than and wanted to test ride Cortney's saddle for a ride she would normally do. There was some shuffling of trail order after the lead horses, two geldings started getting upset at continuing on the trail and hadn't  quite settled down to behave yet. Splendid and Gwyn were more than happy to eventually strike out in front which helped pull the boys along and gave them a chance to absorb the chill energy from Gwyn and Splendid, who were both just pleased to be out on the trail.

 Gwyn quickly figured out that we were not racing and while she really just wanted to hug Splendid's butt, she was content to maintain a forward walk.

 The sun was out and while it wasn't particularly warm, especially in the denser forest canopy, it was at least dry and pleasant.

I wish this wasn't so blurry. The ground just dropped away

Looking out toward Lake McMurray to the east

Cortney snapped this picture just a bit further down the trail, again by a steep drop off so I wasn't willing to try. Lake McMurray and looking east toward the Cascades

Magic Forest Trail

 We came out to a familiar sight of the monument. I've seen this a lot on Haiku Farm's blog and also on another blog from someone who has also moved away from the PNW. It was awesome to see the sculpture/monument in person. I didn't realize the thing was hollow and happily, neither Gwyn nor Splendid seemed to care about the sound when we idly knocked in.

The best grass was right at the base.

I did test out the scoot boots again and one foot was good, the other twisted around ridiculously. I ended up taking it off completely. Thankfully the footing wasn't that bad except for some parts of the logging roads where the giant rocks were placed over new culverts. I'm still troubleshooting, though I'm pleased with the change to the EVA foam instead of the Easyboot gaiters for rubbing prevention. Gwyn had NO rubs this ride. Nearly 10 miles.

Gwyn was nice and sweaty by the end and got to snuggle in her cooler. Cortney and I are already planning return trips through the winter. Both here and Taylor mountain should be fairly good through winter, even if some trails are off limits and I want to develop my own sense of direction for the trail network at both places. That's likely going to require some solo wanderings on my part though.

Elbows

My nemesis, apparently. And by extension my hands, which seems to be a thing going around blogland today (as I distract myself from writing this by catching up on my feed...)

"Mom, I have not finished eating. Do you see all this wonderful soft hay right here?"

 I resolved this week to work on my hands (and elbows) both on and off the horse. Jim suggested I toss balls and catch them with my elbows bent and practice the give and take with that. So I've been doing that. But I also wanted to incorporate something intentional into my gym trips as well.

"I'm suspicious Mom... why do you have that bucket?"

 So I added a half hour before my T/Th yoga sessions to go run on the elliptical at the Y (thank you included childcare...)   I kept my hands gently, closed fingers on the swinging grips, not the heart rate monitor grips, and focused on maintaining steady contact as my legs moved them.

"It's okay, I'll just stand on my hay before my hoof armor cures, guaranteeing that the hay will bond to my hoof"

 I did this T/W/Th. Wednesday evening I went out to ride after my Monday lesson. I gave myself permission to ONLY work on my hands. I wasn't going to try and maintain pace through seat only, I wasn't going to really focus on my leg. Just on keeping steady rein contact. I felt like my hands were EVERYWHERE. And I'll need to check in next Monday to be sure, but I think that's more what I'm supposed to be doing?  Just by keeping my hands in motion with Gwyn she started dropping and carrying herself more. Probably because I wasn't banging her in the mouth anymore.

UGH. Hands.

 Then I had the shortest ride ever this morning because after getting a coat of hoof armor on I only had about 20 minutes before I needed to start untacking and leaving to pick up Hazel. For that ride the rain held off just long enough. I started to notice that my WHOLE body was moving instead of just my arms and elbows, so I practiced stillness in my core while keeping elbows moving and giving.

 We also walked up the slight hill on the property twice. And I made her trot over those cross rails in a 'course'. She does not jump them. They are too small. For a super short ride, I was pleased that she was walking around with her head lower, and not giraffing. In fact, she was fairly lazy. But also dropping into contact, which I tried VERY hard not to jab her in the mouth by stiff hands.

Pretty pretty colors

Snuggles while I listen to the rain on the roof.

Glorious glorious tail right now. She's gone back to blonde. Let it be known, that mane USED to be the same length. 

Anne Gribbons Clinic thoughts

Equestrian's Institute out here often pulls in some clinicians throughout the year and Jim will attend them as part of  his continuing education credits to maintain his instructor certification. He always encourages his students to attend, and I was able to get a couple hours to join him on Sunday to watch Anne Gribbons.

The clinic was held at the most beautiful facility a mere ten minutes from the house. It's a dressage barn and is just plain fancy fancy fancy. They had a lovely deck overlooking the covered arena with a VERY nice heated observation lounge complete with full bathroom, full kitchen and conference room.

For EI members, attending would be free, I'm not one so I paid $25 for the day and it included lunch. Pretty decent deal.

 There was a wide variety of levels represented in the horses from Training (a 5 year old Hanoverian) up to I-2. Three of the horses had come up from Oregon who were all being trained by the same person and two were ridden by that trainer, and one by the owner. 

 Clinics with Jim are interesting and informative because he's watching the horse and rider just as much as the clinician and sometimes gleaning a different conclusion  in how to handle the gaps he's seeing. Jim rarely attributes failings in movements to the horse, he's firmly in the 'the rider forms the horse' camp so we'd be seeing a horse be reticent in performing piaffe and Anne Gribbons was telling the rider to make the horse do A, B, C while Jim is whispering, "Look at her hands and upper body, she has no give on the horse's mouth to let the energy through, it's going to go up."  And sure enough, up goes the horse in protest as that fine balance in having the throughness was not struck.

After watching closely I was able to start to predict as well. And it made me reflect on the last clinic I watched, in Michigan, when piaffe and half steps were being taught and the horse was clearly also having issues.

In many of the horse/rider pairs, the answer was always more leg, to which I got an elbow and an "See? What have I been telling you?" stare from Jim (also something I work on, lol) . The young horse was the only one where Anne wanted the rider to use more half halts to bring him back and stop him from rushing.

A shocking number of riders had terrible posture, their elbows were stiff and the movement from their lumbar back traveled all the way up to their head. These are all problems I'm dealing with as I correct all my bad habits from years of no lessons and it was a little shocking that they weren't being called out on those faults in their riding that could have allowed the horse to perform better. They looked like bobbleheads. It makes me want to go back and review the videos I took at WEG to watch the riders more closely and find the differences.

I went to ride that evening and tried to focus on that flexibility in my back where my head and shoulders remain stable, while my lower back moves.  I think I do better in that, though I was certainly not riding a sitting trot on a giant warmblood bred for GP dressage. However, there was a lot of stiffness even in the walk. One lady rode around looking like her shoulders were touching her ears the whole time and it was the strangest thing I've seen in a rider, much less someone who is apparently not an AA but Open.

Lord Hill and Lessons

We played DnD on Saturday and that evening Eric told me, "So, you're going trail riding tomorrow, right? For your birthday?"  I was confused, it wasn't originally in the plan for me... but yes. I can pick up what you're putting down, husband.

I went for a trail ride.

She's gotten trimmer, I need to buy a new girth... 

I decided to hit new trail from previous just so I could reacquaint myself with the trail system at Lord Hill.  I also wanted to do as much as the pipeline trail as I could because hills. Hills are good for horse butts that need to be strengthened for cantering and climbing more hills for endurance.

Dear folks on foot, you are NOT allowed to use the horse entrance >:[

 It was overcast but not raining (that's today and the next 8 days). Pretty great weather, and ended up warming up more than I expected and the sun even came out a little bit!

Happy Ears

 The colors, while not as dramatic as the northeastern part of the country, were still in good form for the area, so it was a great fall trail ride. I also wanted to test my scoot boots with the gaiters I bought.

 One thing that always eluded me was finding the river access point within the trail system. There's talk of removing horse access and count me selfish, I wanted to get on that trail before that happened. The trail was pretty much all down hill to the water. The parking lot is at the top of Lord Hill so there was a lot of downhill. The blackberries were trying to overtake the trail and it's not rider friendly since nothing is cleared well at my torso height.

Salmon spawning season. 

 But it was a nice sandy shoreline on the river, which is pretty impressive given most of the time it's a ton of glacial till.

 Gwyn wanted to go out deeper but I wasn't willing to let her. She got a good drink of water though.

 Then it was climbing back UP UP UP, which had Gwyn suddenly going "wait a fucking minute..." She tried pulling the stop and act tired on some of the minor stuff and I wasn't amused. She got short breaks and then we continued. There were nice peekaboo pops of color.

 We did encounter quite a few hikers and bikers! Everyone was incredibly polite and followed the yielding rules, which I appreciated. Gwyn did really well with the bicyclists. We pretty much encountered them while they were climbing up hill so going quite slow, which helped her. She wasn't nearly as nervous about them as she's been in the past. She did seem to expect that everyone on the ground would have treats.

This is the Quarry. It's a meadow and steep steep bowl 

 The pipeline starts from the quarry. I remembered that there was a side trail to avoid the first, steep part of the pipeline, and technically, while the trail is physically there, the maps have you take the side trail to get up the initial hill. I looked at the hill and thought, That looks doable.

Narrator: It... probably shouldn't have been doable.

Standing above Gwyn on the pipeline.

 Gwyn gamely started up the slope. She had to stop and blow, but with my urging would take a few more steps, then a few more. Then I started feeling her legs tremble. I looked up, I looked down. We were about a third of the way up.  At that point I realized this was likely not the best idea I've ever had but going down seemed more risky than continuing forward. So I hopped off Gwyn. We climbed that damn thing together, a few steps at a time. But by god it was amazing when we got to the top where it finally leveled off.

I'm on foot, Gwyn is behind me, believe it or not. 

 This horse is amazing, y'all. She was willing to try because I asked. She's a trooper. Some wonderful soul made sure there was a bench at the top of the hill so I sat on the bench because MY calves were protesting the thought of being in stirrups and I let Gwyn regen with the very nice grass all around us. The bench also served as a pretty good  mounting block.

It's like looking over a cliff.... 

 I did realize though that I was running behind the time I'd told Eric I'd be done in so my other plans to do the whole pipeline were tossed and I just oriented to the most direct route back to parking. This, unfortunately, meant more pipeline climbing (but on less aggressive slopes...)  Gwyn was unwilling to trot at this point and I hadn't brought a whip. We made it back and I think she was pretty well recovered by the time we got near the trailer.

 She was a sweaty girl and worked hard. I was pretty pleased with her. The scoot boots worked well too. I don't like how bulky these particular gaiters are, so I've ordered some DIY gaiter supplies that will be more targeted to the problem area. After a consultation with a scoot boot rep, it seems the rubs I did see were typical. We'll have the winter to dial in everything and make sure that a 15 mile ride won't cause issues (compared to the 6 I did on this ride)

Biiiiiig booty

 Then on Monday I had my dressage lesson. There was a hot air balloon just taking off for a sunset/twilight flight as I was crossing the valley.

Looking east toward the Cascades. Lord Hill is just off frame to the right.

I got close enough I could see the flame igniting every so often.

 I was a little more frustrated with myself in this lesson. Pragmatically, I know I'm working to break my bad habits. And once I get it correct Gwyn moves wonderfully. She's fully capable. I just need to be more consistent. I just hate that I'm not better at it.

I need to ride from my seat more and get out of her face, like hauling on her face to slow her down. Doing that immediately causes her to giraffe. UGH. I need to practice. Though reading some other folks who have friesian crosses and seeing them work on similar concepts but at a higher level is oddly comforting. And knowing that if I can work on this now it will be better for us later makes me more determined to improve.