Day 28, 2001 XP

[imgoneriding@worldnet.att.net]

Hi!  I'm actually on my day off now.  I was too tired to do anything on the 
computer yesterday, it was a really long, hard day.  We rode over the 
Wasatch mountains.  We started by having the horses loaded into the 
trailers fully tacked by about 5:10 a.m. so we could go to the 5:20 ride 
meeting to find out what was going on and get our maps.  Then we hauled to 
the start and hung out and let the horse eat because we didn't end up 
starting until 6:45 a.m.  Then we rode all day, doing about 7500' in 
elevation gain (and about the same in loss)....tho my altimeter watch might 
have been wrong that's what it came up with.  Once we finished about 5 
p.m., we hauled and got to the rodeo grounds in Springville at about 6:30 
p.m......so we were up and going for quite awhile.  I have blisters on my 
feet for the first time, because I did a lot of walking and running on all 
the downhill yesterday. The grass was as tall as I was in some spots.

The day started out really nice, we went up the mountain and got onto some 
nice singletrack trail that winded thru the trees and up and down, really 
pretty.  We even saw a moose in a pond (got pictures!), then after being 
out for about 5 hours we made it into the lunch vet check.  Lucky for us, 
Jim Mitchell was there and helped us (I sponsored Kayla again).  That was 
nice.  The horses were in heaven for sure, lots of green grass and clover 
and since we figured on not having any crews all day we had left prepared 
and brought their grain and carrots along with us and everything we needed 
for the entire day.  I even brought my water bottle with a filter on it so 
I could refill from the creeks.

We went up some stuff that was pretty steep, stuff that made all our knees 
quiver <G>.  The kind of stuff most people would say no way could you get a 
horse up that!  Our horses were all great though, Weaver loves mountains 
and is a strong hill horse and Kayla's horse Buzzy just followed right 
along doing a splendid job.  After lunch we continued climbing and went up 
up up and around the mountain and around and then we started going down, 
but also had some more up in between.  Jim Mitchell showed us the contours 
on the topol map and you could see that we were going to have a lot of 
steep downhill as well as the uphill we'd had going to lunch.  I did a lot 
of it on foot, walking thru the really rocky sections (it was nearly all 
rocky), and running wherever it was level enough to do that.  Kayla did the 
best she could, but was a little sore in the knees from all the 
bushwhacking we did on earlier trails. The Duck had warned everybody that 
this trail was every bit as tough as Tevis and not to take any questionable 
horses.  Boy was he ever right!  I felt kind of bad, because on one of the 
steeper rocky sections Weaver slipped and fell down completely.  Luckily I 
was far enough ahead with a long lead line so he didn't slide into me.  He 
got up and held his back leg up and kind of hopped for a minute and I just 
knew he'd be really hurt...<sigh>......so we stopped and rested a minute 
then took it really slow down the very steep parts.......in about a half an 
hour I got back on in a flat spot since he'd been walking normally and he 
wanted to trot and felt totally fine....but I got back off anyway and 
walked him all the rest of the way in to the finish because I was worried 
about him.  Barney couldn't find anything wrong with him, he just had a 
small scratch on that leg but was sound on it.  Looks good today so 
hopefully that didn't hurt him.  He sure had a good day overall though, he 
just loves going down those kind of singletrack mountain trails.

Now this morning Dave is re-setting a lose shoe on Weaver.  I took the 
easyboots off of the horses, they'd been on about another two weeks on both 
of them.  This afternoon I'll glue them back on, I guess it'll be Rocky's 
turn to go tomorrow so I'll do his first then I can do Weav's tomorrow 
after I finish riding.  Their feet look good.

While Dave (my crew) was waiting at the finish line to pick us up he had 
the dogs out in the brush playing and they ran across a great big 
rattlesnake!  He said he was sure glad the dogs came right over to get away 
from it as soon as he called.

I should go work on my photos for the last two days.  I still have photos 
of Fort Bridger to put up, and the ones of all the juniors doing their 
mochilla transfers.  I can't believe we only have 12 more ride days on this 
ride, it seems to have gone by pretty fast.  It'll be hard to go back to 
real life, we'll sure miss everybody.

Looks like breakfast is up!  John is fixing pancakes for everybody, mmm mmmmmm.

Happy XP Trails,

Karen
in Springville, Utah
......only 12 days left!