The DVE ride the year was truly a test of endurance for all horse/rider combinations that rode any day, any number of days, any distance, through any weather! Just getting out of bed in the freezing wind and rain each day to ride your horse, was an accomplishment in itself! Hats off to anyone who rode any part of the ride! And hats off to Jackie and her steadfast crew of volunteers! Most folks may have thought we were nuts for doin’ it, and maybe we were, but boy.....it was a great adventure and lots of fun despite the challenging conditions....
O.K. - enough of that stuff and on to the ride details.... at least on the LD, which we both rode every day on the same horses...
My husband Bob and I, our wonderful horses Yahoo! and Dakota, had a GREAT time enduring all these elements - it had its moments, but it was worth it, after driving 6 hours from Carmel Valley and wondering what we were in for....
Day 1 began for us sometime after midnight when we awoke to the sound of pelting rain on the roof of our LQ.... at 5am we got a slight reprieve from it to get our horses fed and grained for the 7am start we were planning...well, unfortunately the rain returned with a vengeance. We watched as other riders toughed it out and saddled their horses in the driving rain.... it didn’t look like much fun to us, so we were thinking of sitting this day out. Poor Jackie, who had never had to deal with RAIN, much less this MUCH RAIN during the many years she’s done the DVE ride, was at her wits end on what to do! It was decided the 50’s would do the LD loop twice, instead of going over the Slate Mountain range, and on to Indian Ranch, as was usually done. The mountains were covered with snow and there was no way she was sending anybody out over them. We watched as the bundled riders headed out at 7am, and it was amazing how many there were! The rain began to let up a bit and we decided our horses would be happier trotting down the trail than standing still in their pens in the nasty wind, rain and cold. We quickly saddled between raindrops and headed out down the trail, and soon the tracks were turning into streams and rivers.....we crossed the highway, rode past the junkyard, past the horse corrals and turned into the wind. This is when the rain really began coming down and we both could feel our feet getting deeper and deeper in the water that was collecting in our boots. Lucky for me, I discovered that my battery powered heated socks still worked in the rain, and I soon had warm water sloshing around my toes! Those suckers worked all 4 days too! I will be e-mailing the manufacturer about these socks to tell them my endurance ride story! Can’t remember everyone we saw that day, but we do remember seeing Dave Rabe trot by, in his shorts, plastic bags wrapped around his feet flapping in the winds.... smiling and just as happy as ever! Amazing man, he is! We also saw Judy Long and Lucy Trumbull riding together, equally sodden as us! Getting back to camp with soaking wet clothing and gear was the biggest bummer of the ride. My new saddle was no longer new.... the sheepskin that covered it weighed near 100 pounds as I removed it and laid it out to dry...Hah! (It remained off my saddle for the rest of the ride). We cranked up the furnace to maximum in our LQ and had everything hanging everywhere to dry.....the weather held off a bit so we could put a few things outside to become "less wet". Bob’s feet were frozen (he didn’t have those battery powered electric socks which I must continue to rave about through this story...). I wrapped him in a down comforter in our 90-degree trailer and left him to "thaw". The weather got worse for a while in the pm and we really felt for those 50 milers that were still out there! But everyone returned safe and sound; most with smiles on their wet, wind-whipped faces and looking like a bunch of drowned rats! But we all were happy and felt good for our accomplishments! Yee Haw! On to Day 2!!!
