Summer Weather

Today was so summery feeling and tomorrow and Thursday are supposed to be even warmer! I didn't have any work today so I took the opportunity to go for a trail ride. Jetta was such a pain tacking up, stepping on my foot twice and trying to spook into me and trying to whack me with her giant head. We had to do some ground work to get her out of my bubble before loading on the trailer. Luckily, by that point she had decided to cooperate and she loaded herself on the trailer and off we went.

She was absolutely perfect on the trails though! My foot is throbbing a bit (of course it's the same foot that I sprained my ankle on so it's hurting in multiple ways now) but that was the only bad part of our ride. She was a perfect lady for bridling when we got to the trails and we didn't have any bad spooks or misbehavior.

I didn't let her do her big trot or do any galloping because she got too strong on our last ride, but this time she was great. She kept a nice, reasonable trot the whole time. I put a running martingale on her for the first time ever to see how it helped us out because on the trails, her reaction to me asking her to slow down is to throw her head in the area and continue at the same speed all llama-esque. In the arena however, her reaction to this same request is usually to pull down and try to fall on her forehand. I felt like the martingale helped a lot. It came into play a few times and made it a lot easier for me to remind her to trot like a normal horse instead of a lot of bickering between the two of us on how to trot.

I was super excited to finally find a lookout point that you can see out over the town. So pretty.

I live in such a seriously beautiful place

Future cross country jump?? Branch was about 3' off the ground

We stopped for a bit to take some pictures and as we turned to go came across the first person on the trails of the day, a mountain biker. He made some small talk and then mentioned that a bunch of bikers were coming up the hill. I thanked him for telling me, then headed down, thinking it'd just be a handful or so of other bikers.

Ha. It was more like a herd of mountain bikers. I think it was a class from the university. Jetta can handle a single biker at a time, but never has there been 20 or so bikers heading straight towards her on the trail. But she completely kept her cool. I just clucked to her and she walked past the first half to a little trail on the side where we could stand out of the way until everyone passed. I was super happy with her. See, she can sometimes be a good pony!

Overall, a super good day! Tomorrow I might try to do a jump school on one or both girls and then they're getting baths! They're going to be all shiny squeaky clean.

Gross, sweaty pony after our ride.