September 4, 2013

I found a route back into our hill area

Hills!  Wonderful freakin' hills!  876 foot (you people out west don't even laugh at me) hills!!!  It is pretty tricky to get there.  I have to ride down a ravine, up the edge of another with a four foot drop to a ditch on the immediate right, and a knee whacking tree to my left/right depending on which way I'm pointed, then shimmy on up up up... and we are on our way.  There is a widow maker that we have to go under though.  I HATE THOSE THINGS.  If  a wind comes and brings it on down there will be no way back there at all unless I ride the high traffic blacktop road which I probably wouldn't.   We did only about three miles back there tonight and it totally kicked her butt.  So we have got to really get humping up those hills on a regular basis, or I'm not going to have enough horse.  She couldn't trot all the way up the big one, had to break down to a walk and c-r-a-w-l the rest of the way.   We did about ten hills and then walked on home.

On a not so happy note, our woods is being logged and my hand chopped horse trails met up with a bulldozer.  Excuse me while I get a paper bag and hyperventilate.  That has been my conditioning route and now it is a tangle of dirt, and vines, and saplings.  In short, it's a mess.  But with access to the hill side I can swing between it and my other neighbor and still manage 10 miles, it will be slower, but more challenging.  After the logger is done LSEGH is going to try to smooth out the logging road, and if we can do that successfully, get it packed good I'll have a rocking little loop to really start teaching the Spotted Wonder to move on out without the distraction of knee whacking trees.  You have to move like a cat through our woods to keep your knee caps.

1 comment:

  1. You can do a lot with 800' of hill. And Dixie still can't trot up medium/steep hills - a good swingy walk is the best we can do, and it's good enough. Grats on finding a hill!

    ReplyDelete