Sheesh! It’s been 5 weeks since I’ve exposed you to the Horse Hell that is Sunny’s life. Lucky you – but your vacation is over, this is going to be a long one.
The week after our beach outing with Sylvia and Doolittle (15 Sept post, I think), I went up to check out the NATRC ride in the Oakland Hills – since I’d signed up to do one in October, I thought I might want to know what I was getting us into. After seeing the reality, I decided it was *way* over our heads, so we are deferring our NATRC start until next Spring – but we’re really looking forward it. The NATRC community was uniformly welcoming and informative and it looks like good training with good people and a fun time. I enjoyed checking out the Oakland Hills ride so much that I also went out and watched the Round Hill ride, which was in October.
Oakland Hills - midpoint watering
I volunteered at the Pulse and Respiration (P & R) checks on the Oakland Hills ride, but I took my camera, and (surprise) ended up taking pictures instead of taking pulses. And, after I told the ride manager that Sunny and I weren’t ready for the October ride, Round Hill, I got invited to take pictures at it instead. So I did. The pictures can of the Oakland Hills ride can be seen here and the pictures of the Round Hill ride (the east side of Mt. Diable) can be seen here.
To recap, I hope not too inaccurately but certainly incompletely, NATRC rides are intended to assess both the conditioning/training of your horse, and your horsemanship – and each are judged separately, so you can have a horse that places well, and a rider who doesn’t. (Which I just love. Anyhow.) The rides are set up so that you are expected to spend at least one night in ride camp, and the judging starts as soon as you sign in: how you park and set up your trailer, the way your horse is tied, how you tack up, etc – and continues, of course, right onto the trail.
For the ride itself, there is a pre-defined route and also a time that you are expected to take to get to certain points on the route, and you get penalized both for being too slow *and* for being too fast. At the stops, there are horse wellness checks – P & Rs and vet inspections. Also, during the course of the ride, the judge(s) go out to various points on the route that provide some sort of challenge, and evaluate your performance. The points will usually (I think) be relatively steep uphills and/or downhills, creek crossings, points where a dismount/mount is required, etc – all the challenges were ones that even Sunny and I have run into on the trail, that is, the skills that were evaluated were ones that are, in fact, necessary to be safe on the trail.
Coming out of lunch
The rides were impressive – 2 days, lots of climbing both days, and over 15 miles each day, even for the novices, and the average speed (moving average: it doesn’t include lunch or required rest intervals) required to meet the expectation was about 3.5 mph – so Sunny would have had to trot a significant portion of it, since she definitely does *not* walk up hills at 3.5 mph. (BTW, novices only have to do one day, but can do two if they want to.) Anyhow, Sunny and I now have our first concrete goal for 2010. Anybody want to come along?
The next week we had several Major Events. First, we got invited to go out with the Capo de Tutti Fruiti of the local trail system. Sunny and I met her at her barn, and her first words were “Hi! Do you guys mind trotting a little?” And off we took. My mantra has been “With an Arab, slow has to be taught, go will come naturally” so we have walked all this year – well, no more. We trotted just about the whole darned ride. Sunny was outraged, but survived.
View from The Top of Fort ord
The next day we went down to Fort Ord with Cory and Jade. Wow! What a great place to ride! The horse-friendliness starts in the parking lot: there is a separate lot for parking horse trailers, with the medians set up so that you always pull forward, both to park and to leave. And there is a little paddock outside the restroom to leave your horse in while you “get ready” for the ride.
There are 83 miles of trails, according to the website, and the footing on all the trails we were on was great. From the parking lot, all trails led uphill, which was a change for Sunny and Jade – our usual haunts feature lots and lots of quarter mile climbs, so the multi-mile climb was a mental as well as physical challenge for them, but they did well. We stuck pretty much to dirt fire roads and single track trails on the perimeter of the park, which gave us great views of our surroundings: the Bay, Salinas, Mount Hamilton, etc. We ran into a couple of mtn bikers and a few hikers/runners and all of them were polite and friendly.
I can’t tell you what a great ride it was; we could look off into the distance and see the city (of Salinas), but all we could see in near us were the hills, with empty trails on them. There was fog in the air, so the light had that sort of gauzy look, and the wind had a little edge. Days like that are why I ride.
After a couple of rest days, we were off to the St. Jude’s Benefit ride on the McCrary’s property – where the Lockheed Fire was most severe. The McCrary’s own Big Creek Lumber, and are wonderful conservators of their environment, and supporters of horse activities in Santa Cruz county. They usually open their property for a few events a year, and one of their regulars is the St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital benefit. Many of us who’d signed up for it assumed that it would be off this year, what with the McCrary’s being evacuated for the fire, losing a substantial amount of their forest to it, etc – but no – Emma McCrary said she thought that the community would be interested in seeing the damage, so the ride was on.
This was a carefully calculated outing. First, we roped Susan and Mister, who have chaperoned us on several expeditions, into participating in this one, so I knew that Sunny would have a Good Example to follow. I expected lots of horses (and wasn’t disappointed – there were 80 riders), but you could leave any time between 9 and noon, and there were, I think, 7 different route combinations you could take, so I hoped that the participants would distribute themselves so that Sunny could see a few horses in the parking area, we’d see a few on the trail, she could ride some new trails, and she could eat some hay after the ride with new horses around. Oddly, that’s pretty much the way it worked out.
We rode the 6.5 mile option, which, when I mapped it on a topo map, came out to 9.2 miles – GPS just doesn’t know what to do with lots of climbing – and it was all beautifully groomed singletrack, mostly on the coast side of Swanton Road, so you could see the burned areas from the ridgetops. We crossed four creeks, went under downed trees, and got passed on the singletrack by a couple of fast movers. Mister was in the lead most of the time, but Sunny stepped up and took the lead for about a quarter of the ride. As usual, Mister was a perfect gentleman and a delight to ride with. The experience was absolutely what I had hoped for: Sunny’s first “public outing” was a success in all ways, which I could tell because I had a good time.
Naudia and Judy Being Keyed Up
Sunny got the next week mostly off, except for one ride: we went out with my friend Judy and her endurance horse, Naudia. Naud is a good citizen, but sometimes it seems like really fit endurance horses just sort of exude a “go-fast” energy which puts the other horses on edge. Fortunately, it didn’t happen this time: Naud and Sunny just walked along like old rental horses or something. It was fabulous.
The next thing we did was Big. Pam, another client of MaryBeth’s, has been wanting to ride a new trail up in Valley Springs that goes from Lake Camanche to Lake Pardee. The trail is 12.5 miles long and Pam was having trouble getting someone to ride it with her. I was looking to up Sunny’s mileage, so we volunteered. It’s a point-to-point ride, so we dropped my trailer at the Pardee end and started from Camanche – so we went the uphill direction.
What a great ride. Pam’s horse George is another Steady Eddy Quarterhorse and they sheparded us all the way. The trail is mostly on EBMUD land, but goes on and off some privately owned property, so there are about 8 gates to open and close. Sunny and I didn’t know how to do it when we started, but we had figured out an inelegant but effective method by the end of the ride. The trails range from beautiful singletrack to fireroad. The only quibble I had with the trails was on the fire roads: they’d been recently gravelled with just the wrong size of rock and George picked up a rock in his shoe, which caused us a few moments of WTF?
The first few miles are along the edges of the lake, so there were opportunities for the horses to drink. Also, there were about a zillion deer, peering out from the trees, or trotting down the road in front of us. We’d know something was out there when one of the horses would freeze. If we followed the sight line established by their noses, we’d find one or more deer. I think the largest group we saw was 7 of them, all does. And, of course, there were lots of birds.
One of the scarier moments was when we crossed under a road with quite a lot of traffic on it – the bridge over our heads amplified the tire noise as the cars passed over our heads, and it worried the horses quite a lot. After the bridge, the trail started to head up, and turned into mostly beautiful singletrack – about 4 feet wide and perfectly surfaced. As we went up, we had a constantly changing view of the Lake Camanche. Finally, we left the lake and the trail followed the course of the Mokulome River – but from about 400 feet up. In one place for about a hundred yards, there was a wall on our right and, on our left, a border of scrub trees, then a straight drop to the river. I forgot the Centered Riding admonition about “soft eyes” and focused firmly on the the point where the trail widened!
At the top, there were picnic tables and benches and a tie bar for the horses, so we stopped for a break – we were all ready for one by then. Pam had the forethought to bring sliced apples, which George and Sunny devoured; there was no water after we started climbing, so they were looking for anything that was wet!
The view from the top was crazy – you could see forever: both lakes, the river, an unidentified town in the distance. An EBMUD employee stopped to chat with us and he said that on a clear day you could see Mt. Diablo. Hmmm. I was told by a ranger at Mt. Diablo that on a clear day you could see Mt. Shasta – do you think . . . ? We couldn’t see quite that far, but it was pretty darned impressive. Also, when we looked the opposite direction, we could see my truck and trailer parked in the lot – the end was in sight.
Off we went. We had the only spook of the ride on this final downhill: there was a large boulder by the side of the trail and Sunny went completely sideways in her effort to avoid it. Sheesh! But I was impressed that she had the energy for it. After avoiding the Lurking Rock, we had an uneventful trip to the parking lot, where there are horse water troughs, so we watered Sunny and George and headed back to MaryBeth’s, after a perfect ride.
It was a great ride, mostly because of the company, but partially due to the wonderful and empty trail. The only person we met was the EBMUD guy, and we checked out the sign-in log – you have to sign in before you ride – and there had been only three other riders in the preceding week. You can do horse camping there, and I think it’s on our list for next Fall, since Pam says there are other nice trails there as well as what we rode. Also, the trail was superbly marked – even I couldn’t get lost – and the trail markers said it was part of the “Pacific to the Crest” trail. The EBMUD guy said they were trying to create a trail all the way from the Bay to the Pacific Crest trail! Again, anybody interested?
Note: Sunny doesn’t get the notion of a non-out-and-back ride. On all the rides described here, she wanted to head for home by turning around right up to the point where she was climbing in the trailer. I guess it makes sense if you can’t read a map, but it’s pretty funny.
So. Those have been our major milestones in the last month, building up to our final goal for the season: participate in a large scale ride where we’re on the trail with a bunch of other horses and we have to demonstrate patience and good trail manners, as well as the ability to get down the trail. That was supposed to be the NATRC ride, so we had to find an alternative.