Monday, March 12, 2012

Wonderful weekend

Well I'm back from my rides. I had a wonderful weekend. Saturday we all got together and had a "fun ride" which turned into a really great training opportunity for Dream. The first big thing we had to do was cross the river. That was quite interesting. Dream will go across water, but this water was deeper than we normally have in my area and much wider. The river was about 50-75 ft wide I'm guessing and had quite a strong current. Dream at first didn't want to go in, but finally took a major LEAP!! She then tried to gallop across the river, but after a couple strides she realized that it was to much work. So she settled down into a walk.  The rest of the ride was just a bunch of hill work and wonderful views until the last water crossing at the end to get back to camp. Dream did great on the second water crossing going home. I didn't get any photos I completely forgot my camera I'm hoping some of my friends send me a few photos of the rides.

(And just after I posted this, my friend Cindy R. sent me this photo of Dream and I just before we headed out for the competition. )



 Sunday was the competition and we had to go back across the water crossing as the very first obstacle. Dream did much better then since she'd already seen it the day before. I've already forgotten what order they all came in, but all the obstacles were pretty neat and all natural.  We were judged on going downhill, Backing up a slight incline, going through a natural tunnel, going into a "cave" and standing still, and stepping or jumping off a drop down.  The tunnel was really neat because it was literally "carved" out of a thicket of trees.  They cut the tunnel so that you could see the other side, but you were completely covered sides and top by tree limbs. The "cave" wasn't a full cave but more like a small box canyon. It was fairly narrow and a dead end. There wasn't a roof to the cave but Dream didn't want to go in. That was the only obstacle she didn't complete on this ride.  The step down was about a 2 ft drop off basically a mini cliff. It would be similar to a horse walking out of the horse trailer or maybe just slightly taller.   And finally the way back to camp presented us with the last river crossing headed back home. I think Dream got a lot of good water crossing training between the last two ACTHA rides and my fun ride. Dream and I have crossed the Rio Grande 6 times in the past month.  We will be headed out to one more ACTHA ride next weekend and then we have 4 weeks of being home before the next ACTHA ride in April. 

2 comments:

  1. Sounds great! Thanks for the clarification on Topper, I thought I was loosing my marbles for a bit !

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  2. That was a great weekend, and a wonderful ACTHA CTR. I'm glad you were able to be there both days and I hope you'll be at the next ACTHA rides this month and in May down in San Acacia, too. I'll probably be judging both of them, so I'll see you there :)

    ~Lisa

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