Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

One of the things that other trail users and land

managers really dump on horseback people for is:

"Horses tear up the trail."

 

The worst offense is considered to be riding

a horse when a trail is wet and muddy.  The

horses' hooves create thousands of little

coffer dams in which water pools and does

not drain.  When the trail surface dries

off, it is pockmarked with these craters

and the bike people and the hiker people

raise the dickens about how awful it is

and that horses should be banned &etc.

 

I made an interesting observation this past

spring.

 

The wet winter made all of the paddocks at

my barn into an unholy mess of mud.  Each

and every step created a hoof crater until

the whole paddock looked like some miniature

Chinese landscape terraced with rice paddies.

I'd spend hours with the shovel digging drainage

canals and puncturing the wall of one

hoof-print-cum-rice-paddy to drain into the

next.

 

Now, here it is mid-May and:

 

 You'd never know that these paddocks had

 been a wet morass just one month ago.

 

And it's the horses themselves who have solved

the problem.  Hooves make coffer dams, and hooves

also knock them down and grind them flat as the

soil dries out.  The tread in the paddock is now

flat, level, compacted dirt.

 

Linda B. Merims

lbm@xxxxxxxxx

Massachusetts, USA