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Sadie and I hauled the two youngest mares (FF Evita and Gracia Cantura) and Sadie’s pony, Max, to the March 30 “make-up” Jumpernite show at Donida. I joke that it’s the “Olympics” of schooling shows because the fences are hands down the most decorative and exciting that we jump all year. That makes it an all around terrific experience for young brains. We had a blast and it was a great affirmation of the fact that I would rather spend my time and money supporting shows like that than the giant USEF juggernauts that the regular show circuit has transformed into. I will delve into that rant in a future post, but for now…videos!

This was a really big deal for Sadie and Max. Max has always been a little spooky, and because Sadie has always had her horse, Socks, to show, he’s also received minimal mileage off the farm. So this show, where we were able to haul in on schooling day and really SCHOOL the course (take the back rails of the oxers off, trot everything, then canter everything, then rails back up and canter a full course) was a major lightbulb moment for Max. And watching him jump around the 0.85m (2’9″) classes proved to us all that the pony has more than enough jump!

All in all we had a blast and it was a great reminder of what showing is supposed to be about…..having fun and getting a good gauge of where your horses are at.

Thank you, Jumpernite!!

Well, the hairy raisin has flown the coop. It’s always bittersweet when one of our horses leaves us for a new home. Bitter, of course, because I truly grow to love these horses, and when one hangs around for a couple of years they become a part of the family. But that doesn’t cancel out the excitement and promise of a “happily ever after,” and in this case life with a true horsewoman I have a tremendous amount of respect for.

Sadie was particularly sad about this one, because he has been a fabulous teacher to her with his unique combination of kindness and calmness but still a bit of “go!”

Going back a bit; When Cassie’s breeder sent her to me back in 2012, he and his young daughter painted her feet with lucky charms. I thought it was sweet and meaningful and demonstrated that she was very loved. So I thought this was a great opportunity to do the same for Rasen. So Sadie and I went to the drugstore and bought every fun color we could find, and then set to painting charms that were meaningful and imbued with good luck for his future life.

We painted waves to represent that he has been living on a peninsula (and had often taken a ferry to get to where we were going), hearts (for obvious reasons), a > sign and an infinity sign (which were clipped onto two of our horses this year) as a nod to our winter clipping jobs and also to represent the hope that every day is greater than the last for the rest of time. A few diamonds (because he was such a gem of a horse), a smiley face, and a couple of four-leaf clovers both for good luck and because he was arriving at his new home on St. Patrick’s Day (well, the night before, but close enough!).

We had a lot of laughs and a few tears, but when I tucked Sadie into bed that night she was much happier about his trip down to NorCal than she had been that morning.

I pulled out of my driveway with the trailer in tow at 5am the next morning to meet the shipper, and had the good fortune of working with the best professional hauler I’ve worked with to date. He timed everything around when Rasen’s new owner would be meeting them to make sure she didn’t have to be out on the road at an odd hour. I have so much appreciation for SSH Enterprises! (www.sshequinetransport.com), and they will be my first call from now on!

Rasen arrived in his new home that night, and Cyndy sent me lots of pictures and videos the next day. This one could be titled, “Wait, there’s NO MUD??!!! WAHOO!!”

Cyndy has already determined that he’s not a fan of bananas but that he loves frosted mini wheats, and it’s very clear that he immediately felt like he was home. After the neighbors called him “Raisin,” it was decided that he would henceforth be known as Ross.

The first ride sounds like it went beautifully with Ross checking out his surroundings, but mostly unperturbed by his new location. In a true Cinderella-esque style, all of the tack that Cyndy has fits him perfectly, and how often can you say that? Usually Murphy’s Law dictates that the minute you buy a new horse all sizes must change completely so that you can never share anything. But in this case he fit right in in every way!

So Sadie and I (and the rest of the Flying F Sport Horses family) send on lots of love to and for [the horse formerly known as Rasen] and the rest of the family!

I’ve been in major denial about the seasons this year. I’m not prepared (mentally or physically) for freezing temperatures. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I quite enjoy the rare nights/mornings where we get a solid freeze. What I dislike is preponderance of days where the temperatures hover just above freezing, leaving the mud in the pastures wet and deep.  Those are the days that truly define a “Pacific Northwest winter.”

But I grudgingly had to admit that winter is here (or, coming, rather) this week when we got our first freezing temperatures. All of my horses are currently fuzzy and living in rain sheets, and I decided that transitioning to a heavy blanket would be easier on a cold day than a warm one. So Billy was the first horse attacked by my clippers this year.

As usual, he stayed close to the same color and came out absurdly shiny. He’s been that way ever since I started him on SmartDigest Ultra. I don’t know if that’s supposed to be one of the effects of the supplement, but it sure does the job on Billy!

But I also learned that habits acquired in other areas of life apply to clipping horses. When I clean my house I often think that I understand what it’s like to be a dementia patient (or a 5yo). I start one thing, then get distracted by something else and start that, only to get distracted by something else and start that, occasionally returning to earlier tasks to advance/finish them. If I have lots of time the jobs all get done. If I don’t, I pretty much just make everything  worse. Well, 25% into my clipping job last night I realized that I was clipping the same way:

Start the saddle patch….ooh! I should get his neck….oh, outline the back legs…wait! I should start his butt….no, stomach first…..and so on. Thank goodness I had time to finish it all!

And boy was I relieved to finish last night. Up until the point that I realized that getting one of six done is nothing to celebrate. I have a lot of cold, hairy nights ahead….

Now I’m back off to the barn to start the next victi….er….lucky recipient of a new hairstyle 😉

It’s finally the time of the year where we get to watch the Medal Finals livestreamed from the East Coast and replicate the courses in our ring. We’ve done the Dover Hunt Seat Finals course so far, and next up will be the 2nd round of the Maclay Finals (and maybe the final round as well?).

Here’s last year’s version of the Maclay Finals with (then) 4yo FF Clintaro:

First horse up, 6yo FF Evita, ridden by her “weekend warrior” rider, Maddy. Maddy is a full time lawyer who comes out to ride on the weekends. Evita is her favorite to jump around, and it’s easy to see why!

Next up was Cassie (8yo) around the course as set for the finals (3’6″):

Then we had a little fun with the course. We upped the fences to 1.30m – 1.40m and I had [10yo] Sadie create a “jump-off” style short course out of the medal fences. It was a bit of a tough task, not because of the course (Sadie planned a great one!), but because it was dusk and it was getting darker by the minute. By the time I jumped Evita around *I* was freaking out about the jumps, which were basically shadowy forms in front of us! But Evita, true to her warrior self, had no issues whatsoever.

Cassiana SR

FF Evita

Looking forward to getting the Maclay course set up. I enjoy incorporating the counter canter and trot fences that are always a part of it!

Well shucks.

I had hoped to be really really good through show season at recapping and reflecting on each of the shows we attended. But here I am just checking back in on my blog now.

In my last post I mentioned how thrilled I was to be done with blankets until fall….eek! We’re already there! But I’m going to attempt to go back and forensically reconstruct the summer horseshow by horseshow….or maybe horse by horse. I’d love to say I have a grand plan, but I am definitely not that organized!

I’ll do the really broad recap here, horse by horse, but will add details and videos of each of the equines on my upcoming horseshow posts.

Cassiana SR was the star of the year. One word for the season and for the horse? “Wow!” This mare has been my favorite since the day she showed up on my farm as a coming-2yo in 2012. She stepped up to the 1.40m in Thermal in March and continued her winning ways for our normal season up here. She galloped around the 1.35m (on grass), won her way through the 1.30m (on footing), and took her first stab at packing a junior around the 1.10m Medal classes with absolutely lovely rounds. This mare is the complete package!

FF Evita lived up to her reputation as a warrior of a mare. She spent the summer showing in the 1.20m/1.25m open and YJC classes. She picked up some wins and championships along the way, but more importantly, became much more rideable as the season progressed. And that’s coming from Thermal where she was 12 months under saddle and jumped around the 1.25m before she was anywhere near as broke on the flat as I expect a horse to be at that level! But she proved that she is game to jump literally anything I point her at regardless of whether it *should* seem “too big” or not. Her biggest transformation of the year was learning to “sit” at the base of the jumps rather than charging at them. She’s not the most precocious horse I’ve taken into the jumper ring (that award goes to Cassiana SR!), but once she figures something out she progresses on to the next lesson and never forgets the last. And after this season, I am absolutely confident in saying that this mare is a prospect for the biggest classes. She has the heart of a lion and a jump to match!

FF Bella moved over to the “sold” page toward the end of the spring when she was purchased by a truly lovely family who trains at Magnolia Ridge Stables. And now I have more examples of the picture above than I can count. She managed to pick up TWO or THREE championships at every single show they attended for the rest of the summer. WOW! Talk about a match made in heaven! I absolutely cannot wait to watch Bella and her kid tackle bigger and bigger classes as the seasons roll on. My breeders promised me that Bella was really and truly a one-in-a-million horse, and boy has she proved that each step of the way.

Rasen BHS also moved out on lease to one of the most beautiful facilities in our area. He’s been the perfect caretaker and teacher for his leasee, and has been every bit the gentleman we all know he is. I am looking forward to bringing him home this fall to start preparing for our annual winter trip to Thermal. Can’t wait to show The Big Beautiful Hairy Raisin again!

William L had a shorter season than most years. He broke a hind splint bone on the way down to Thermal in February, as detailed in my Thermal Wrap-Up post. So I opted out of showing him in May. Although he had shown our 3rd week in Thermal, I could feel that his hind end was the tiniest bit NQR from the leg-over-the-trailer-divider incident, and so we spent the spring doing lots of hacking, lots of chiropractic and bodywork, and held off of showing until the end of June. Billy, like the trooper he is, stepped back into the High AO classes in June with a Reserve Championship in the division, and in July with a Championship in the division. And at age 17 and coming off of the injury, that was a terrific way to wrap up the season for him. He is my heart and my champion regardless of placings, but the championships are icing on the cake!

Foxy Socks had a similarly interesting show season this year. Sadie had shown her in the 0.75m and 0.80m jumpers last season with top ribbons and championships every time out. This year we focused more of the season on her medium pony, who needed the experience in the show ring. So veteran (and 22yo) Socks didn’t come out to play until the June/July Tbird. Sadie got to do her first 0.85m classes and came home with top 2 placings in several classes. And then Socks told us something was wrong when she stopped for the first time ever in a class (she then came back around, jumped the jump and finished the jump-off). Thinking at the time that it was an uncharacteristic spook, we tried again the next day with the same result. The second time it would have been a funky distance, and so we made another excuse and dropped her back down to the 0.75m the next morning where she did the same thing for a 3rd time. In hindsight (which is oh so painfully clear), she was telling us something was hurting, and she just couldn’t do the difficult distances for Sadie (but jumped happily and ears forward at every decent distance). But no heat, no obvious lameness, and no swelling left us stymied as to what could have been going on. I turned her back out in her field of mares when we got home, and she resumed her “alpha mare” shenanigans of chasing the other mares away from her food, which resulted in a big fat leg a few days after coming home. Subsequent ultrasound showed a 90% rupture of her check ligament in the RF leg. Going back to the show, our guess is that she strained the ligament there and ruptured it sharking at the other mares after returning home. But adding to the mix was the fact that she’s starting down the Cushing’s path (noticed prior to the show when we had to body clip her in June for the first time ever). Sadly, I had ordered a supplement to add to her diet that hadn’t shown up before we left for Tbird. I’m left wondering if the supplement would have supported her body better and left her less vulnerable to a ligament injury. Moot point, I suppose, as it happened. But now we’re 6 weeks into our rehab work (after 5 weeks off). She’s back to a full 30 minute workout each day, and I know Sadie is looking forward to getting to jump her again.  I feel very fortunate that is was “just” a check ligament injury and didn’t involve her DDFT or Suspensory.  And we all agree that if she needs to retire, boy has she more than earned the honor of retiring here! Though I have a sneaking suspicion that she’ll be a lot happier with a job than without.

Darden Maximus is Sadie’s medium Welsh pony. We joke that he’s a bit of a celebrity because I posted the video of Sadie getting him as a Christmas present on YouTube (video here), which went mildly viral. Sadie and I spend many rainy days reading through the crazy comments, and it’s allowed me to teach her some valuable life lessons about jealousy, spell-checking, grammar, and graciousness toward others…even if they have something YOU really really want. While YouTube is teaching her those lessons, Max is busy teaching the amount of humility that only a spooky pony can teach a kid 😉 

Fortunately, he’s a pretty quick study, and they ended that same week with some lovely rounds and top ribbons. Socks taught Sadie how to look through the ears and gallop forward. Max has taught her how to maintain a connection AND leg! And she’s come out of the season a much better rider for it. She also learned the all important lesson that Comedian, Craig Quartermaine, jokes about below, “Horse girls have this one little pathological quirk, no matter what happens, it’s never the horse’s fault…”:

Final horse wrap-up, my baby mare, Gracia Cantura. “Tori” is a 4yo Holsteiner that I imported as a personal horse alongside one of my sales horse imports. I started her this spring, and quickly learned that she is a “special” horse, and I mean that in every possible way! She has been a bit more difficult than the rest of my youngsters. Part of that is because I bought her as a young foal, so there was no way to know whether she would be simple or less so, though she came from a long line of horses with absolutely stellar temperaments. And she’s not rude or malicious, just pretty certain that I can’t tell her what to do if she doesn’t already want to do that thing that I’m asking her. As such, she doesn’t buck or rear, bolt or do anything else “aggressive.” She just also doesn’t turn exactly when I want her to, or slow down when *I* think it might be appropriate. And it came as a bit of a surprise to me since all of my imports have been so so simple and easy every single step of the way. But that’s because (as noted on my “Got Brains?” page), my primary selector for horses is for my breeders to send me ones they would put their grandmas on. This one came because she’s bred to the nines and absolutely chock full of potential. And my assessment of that element has not changed one bit! I think this may be the most talented jumper I’ve ever ridden……IF we survive the young horse years!

So the young horse classes didn’t go quite as expected, but Tori improved from show to show and from class to class at each of the shows. By the end of the season she was jumping around (….just like the rest of my babies jumped around at their first shows as 4yos! Lol!)

All in all, the season was a success. Every one of the young and/or sales horses (Cassie, Evita, Bella, Tori, Rasen, and Max) made great strides forward in careers, wins, and experience. And the oldsters (Billy and Socks) dealt with setbacks gracefully and should be ready to go at the beginning of next season.

I’m enjoying a couple of “off” months where the horses get to spend more time doing long and low hacks and trail rides (and a lot fewer jumps), and really looking forward to getting everyone going again to prep for Thermal!

I will share videos of each of the horses once I get to my individual wrap-up pages, but will also note that I update the videos on the sales pages regularly, so more updated videos are there as well.

Happy Fall to all!

It was a long winter.

I saw a meme that described the “real” seasons that made me laugh because it’s so, so true:

Except that I would change the “mud season” for Washington to cover everything from winter down to second summer!

But we’ve hit some major milestones in the last week or two.

• the unclipped horses have finished shedding out everything but the fluffy undercoats….giving us a (small) light at the end of a long, hairy tunnel.
• I transitioned all of the blanketed horses to rain sheets yesterday (woohoo! No more blankets until late fall!!!)
• the mud that’s been deep and wet and mucky since September is FINALLY receding to the point that I can find dry (ish) spots to walk on. Woohoo! Transition from mud boots to clogs has begun!!! (and guaranteed that I will lose a clog in the mud in my eagerness to ditch the boots a week or two too soon)
• All of the trees and plants around us are in full, glorious bloom. MAN it’s pretty around here when things start growing again!

I shall conveniently ignore that all of this means that mowing and watering season is almost upon us, because the sun feels to good to worry about the little things!

The horses are all doing great. As I mentioned in my last blog post, the whole crew is back at work and starting to jump up again. The focus has been on 4yo Tori and the start of her show career, and we’re gearing up to haul out to her first (ever) show on Saturday. Fingers crossed that she takes it in stride….the first time out is always a bit nerve wracking for me! But here she is this week, conquering her first parallel oxer (as opposed to the very inviting and friendly crossrail-front oxers I usually set for her):

Evita’s started jumping up again too, and BOY has that mare come a long way in her single year under saddle. Rideable, quiet, and relaxed sum up her approach to anything you throw at her these days!

And, of course, MY MVP (yes yes, I’m a little biased), Sadie 🙂 She started jumping FF Bella this week and I’ve never seen a kid light up quite like she did the moment she realized why the mare has been nicknamed “the robot.”

Day 1:

Day 2:

And I don’t want to reveal identities, so I can’t post videos, but I will share these photos of FF Bella on a trial ride acting like a complete and utter super star (can you say “knees”???!!!)

Unfortunately, I haven’t had anyone around to take pictures or videos of the “big” horses (Cassie and Billy), but they are cruising along schooling at 1.30-1.40m like the troopers they are. I’m really looking forward to getting back into the show ring on both in the next few weeks.

And my final update is on Socks (the horse who may be made of steel?). I mentioned in my blog that she took a puncture wound to her frog, and it was a pretty bleak picture. But the minute that mare started feeling better she put her all into moving around and getting back into a normal routine. Well, this week she got to return to “her” mare herd, and good lord, the chaos and sprung shoes on the not-alpha-mares has been…..well, predictable, but a huge pain in the ass! I guess the silver lining is that I’m getting lots of practice pulling shoes off and putting shoes back on! Socks also got the clearance to return to full flatwork, and is comfortably and happily going around at the walk, trot, and canter every day. I’m so thrilled to have my queen bee back in the hive!

Happy spring to everyone and here’s to sunny days ahead!!!

Well, spring has sure roared into town with deluge after deluge, overwhelming my already muddy pastures and leaving us all feeling like we live in a swamp. 4x the regular rainfall has a way of making everything so dreary!

The horses, however, like to remind me that they are resilient and perfectly content to play the part of little piggies wallowing in the plentiful muck. And I suppose my biceps and triceps are getting stronger courtesy of long currying sessions!

The show horses have all been enjoying some rest and relaxation; still getting conditioned and ridden, but very minimal jumping. Billy, of course, is still recovering from his broken splint bone obtained during the trailer ride down to Thermal, so he’s getting lots of stretchy work. Cassie and Evita both successfully and precociously stepped up to the heights I had hoped they *might* get to by the end of the season, so they’ve been rewarded with lots of trail rides and minimal jumping. And Bella has been working along as usual, just a little bit lighter, and has just started jumping again after a few weeks of a flatwork focus.

That has meant that the focus has been on the home horses; Socks, Rasen, Tori, and Sadie’s ponies.

Socks brought a little excitement into my world a few weeks ago when she stepped on a downed fence board and sustained a puncture wound in her frog. There were several terrifying days with a 3-legged horse where we were coming up with the worst case possibilities as we tried to figure out what was causing the lameness. The discovery of the downed board and the protruding nail, however, answered our questions and helped up locate the hole in her frog. And almost 2 weeks to the day, Socks got tired of acting like a patient and resumed her impatient (verging on cantankerous) attitude, sharing with us her feelings about being cooped up in a stall and small pen. Sadie put her back to work this week, and she is a much happier horse with a little exercise. I’m hoping that we can turn her back out with her mare herd this week.

Rasen BHS stepped into a new program on a lease with a really fabulous gal on the other side of the water. He remains for sale, but I’m giving them a little time to settle in with each other before resuming marketing activities. Word is, though, that he has been an absolute gentleman from day one, and has quickly become a barn favorite with his sweet, goofy personality and happy go lucky stance on everything from stall time to trail rides.

Tori (2014 Castellan x Canturo) has been the real star. She started the spring off with her first ever set of shoes. So with new shoes on board, she’s now entering the “real horse” realm. Her daily program has transitioned from “rides?” to rides!” It’s a lot of fun to watch a horse transform in the first few months under saddle, and I am excited to see where this one goes.

Sadie’s ponies have kicked back into work as well. Here are Sadie and Max jumping the Christmas tree this week:

The forecast is promising a lot of upcoming sun, and I’m sure looking forward to a few nice rides! 🙂

I don’t know how I got so far out from the Coachella horseshow without ever wrapping up how it went for all of the horses. I guess I must have updated individual pages and left my poor blog page lonely and forgotten!

The short story is that Thermal 2018 was a fabulous show. Perfect weather, well-behaved horses, and a lot more progress than I had anticipated prior to departure. As always, there was a little drama along the way, but nothing that dampened the great fun we had! The first mess involved having to buy a new truck 2 days before leaving – geez….I don’t wish that upon my worst enemy! Drama part 2 came in the form of a blown trailer tire in the middle of nowhere and not a single correctly-sized lug wrench in my collection of 6 lug wrenches (thank you random BMX bike person who pulled into the gas station at 3am!). And the final piece came in the form of a horse being on the losing end of a wrestling match with my trailer (see Billy’s section below). But outside of that drama the show went smoothly and was a whole heck of a lot of fun. And it’s a good thing, because boy do you have to pay top dollar to have a little fun in this sport!

So horse by horse:

Cassiana SR aged out of the young horse classes for the first time this year, and I was a little bummed to not have the any age group classes to look forward to. So I planned to show her in the 1.30m AO classes for all 3 weeks, not imagining that she would be ready to step up to the 1.40m so early in the season. She was great during the first week with trips to the jump-off in every class. But a couple of unlucky rails and time faults snagged us each time. Something shifted in her brain for week 2, however, and the mare absolutely stepped it up in the best possible way. She finished with two 2nds,  a 3rd, and a Reserve Championship in 40-horse classes with blazing fast clean jump-offs. As a coming-8yo, I didn’t push her quite as much as I suppose I could have, but we’ll save that for when she’s a little bit more mature. I can say without reservation, “what a mare!”

I was torn about what to do with her during the third week. It was so much fun to be really competitive, but it was also a great set-up for stepping up. Ultimately I decided that stepping into the 1.40m was going to be a lot easier here at a show where she had already been jumping around the courses and the arenas in the weeks prior.  And so we stepped up to the High AO classes in our last week in the desert. Cassie was absolutely phenomenal with lovely rounds and ribbons in the 1.40m High AOs. She had one little “bobble” in the last class that resulted in a rail, and so I stepped her back down to the 1.30m AO class on the last day to end the circuit with an absolutely confident and fun round. And with a high ribbon out of 40+ horses, I would say we accomplished exactly that. I couldn’t be more thrilled with my brave young mare, and couldn’t have asked for a better set-up for the 2018 show season!

FF Evita was a bit of a wild card heading down to the desert this year. She wrapped up the 2017 show season in the 1.10m – 1.20m young horse classes, but very minimal experience due to the fact that she started the season in her first 0.75m classes and had to catch up to her age group through the summer. I didn’t read the prize lists closely enough prior to Coachella, and was surprised to find out that while the YJC 5yo and YJC 7yo classes run at the anticipated “mimimum height” (1.10m and 1.30m respectively), the YJC 6yo classes at Coachella run at the non-minimum height of 1.25m. Go figure! But Evita has been an absolute warrior every step of the way, and so off we went. Day one of week one found us in the 1.10m schooling class set in the GP ring. Evita opted to jump a 1.40m track over those little jumps and so we settled down in the 1.0m ring for the rest of the week. Never did 1.25m seem so far away, lol! But week 2 brought a sense of calm and focus, and so we did 1.0m on day one, 1.15m on day 2, and 1.25m YJC on day 3.

Evita was a bit surprised, no question about it. But she was right there with me every step of the way, and absolutely attacked the course like you can only hope a young horse will do! She was perhaps the most unprepared 6yo at the show, and we had a rail or two in our classes as a result. But at no point did she back off or doubt her ability to get around the courses. No question that she gets to keep her title of ‘warrior” after the courage and heart she displayed over and over again around very large (for her) tracks! Like Cassie, I had hope that she might make it to 1.20m/1.25m by the end of the season, and didn’t expect that she would do it easily within the first few weeks of the year. Now we’ll settle in the next month of schooling with some lessons on how to maintain momentum to a big fence while also figuring out how to sit and wait a little bit. Not a tough lesson, and one that I think she’s already figured out at home. But we’ll see how well it sticks when we head of to Tbird in May.

FF Bella was another wild card. Not because she had anything surprising to offer….after all, I had the word of my Germans that she is a gem of gems. But she hadn’t ever seen a hunter fence, let alone a full, flowered, decorated course in the high pressure environment of a show. Suffice it to say that I now understand why they called her “the robot” in Germany. The below round is her first time ever in that arena and over those fences (we never even hacked in that ring prior to that class) and the mare was just a complete and total machine. Perhaps the highlight of her sensability and intelligence came on the major windstorm day. The wind was blowing so hard that it blew over several portapotties and was blowing jumps down left and right. We had a giant sunflower jump blow ONTO US as we walked into the ring for one of the classes. Good girl Bella simply stepped out of the way and continued walking like she’s accustomed to being attacked by jumps every day, lol! Another jump blew down while we cantered past it (similarly no reaction), and still another blew down as we landed from it. And the worst incident of all? A plastic bag blew into her leg and got stuck as she cantered into a line. Momentarily surprised, she rolled a rail, but jumped the fence and continued down the line like it was no big thing. What a stellar, stellar, stellar brain! That round is the 4th video down (below the jumper round).

In the final week I set up a junior rider to show her in the medal and equitation classes. That unfortunately fell apart due to cross-entry issues. So on a whim I stuck her in the jumper ring, curious to see how she would handle the change from 2 weeks of hunters back to her home ground in the jumper ring. Despite not having schooled in or around the jumper rings all week, Bella rose to the challenge and picked up blue ribbons in all of her classes. It would be tough to find a horse that’s more fun to show. Now that we’re home and have a little time to play around we’ll start bumping up the fence heights to get ready for the 1.20m AO classes at the next show.

William L was supposed to be the “ringer” of the group. At 17 years of age and after 9 years of consistent showing and winning in the 1.40m – 1.50m, the hopes were that he would start off the season strong the the High AO Jumpers as usual. But Murphy’s Law had a little something to say about that and as we neared Palm Springs on our 22 hour drive, he did something that resulted in a leg over a divider and ultimately resulted in a broken hind splint bone. So he was walked off of the [shockingly bloody] trailer and straight into the veterinary clinic for examination and x-rays. To the vet’s surprise, despite a completely mangled leg (underneath a full set of shipping boots), the broken splint bone seemed to be the only notable thing outside of the macerated skin on his cannon bone and the wounds way high up on the inside of his leg, and he seemed to be pretty darn comfortable walking and moving around. The vet dismissed the broken splint bone as “nothing serious” and said that it was possible he could be showing by the end of the week.

We spent a couple of days handwalking and lightly lunging. Then the rest of the first week hacking in the giant warm up rings. He definitely did not fit into the “back to showing by the end of week 1 time line.” Week 2 we stepped back to the jumps and I let him be my guide. For the first few days I would stop jumping as soon as he shifted his weight off of that hind leg on take-off (each day the height that caused the step was a little bit bigger than the day before). By the end of the second week he was schooling 1.40m comfortably. So we gave him that weekend and the first half of the next week off to do some long trail rides and towards the end of week 3 we stepped back into the ring. He had a couple of rails in each class, so I wouldn’t say that he was fully back to normal, but he was clearly happy to be out and felt really good for his first time out for the year. But with all that happened,  we opted out of the Classic on the weekend and left it at the 3 classes, which I was already incredibly grateful to have been able to show in without feeling like I was pushing Billy too hard. Once again he has shown me that he has the heart of a champion. At no point was there even a sliver of doubt in his mind about whether he was capable of doing his job.

So the really short wrap up of our adventure was that we got to enjoy a lot of sunshine and a lot of success! And now for the rest of the season…..