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[RC] More musings on Scotsdale and AZ in general - Sisu West RanchWe got back home to "The last best place" last night. We did have to drive about 150 miles of slushy and/or packed snow on I 15 from DuBois ID, to Dillon MT yesterday. The bad news is that this is over a 6870 ft. pass, the good news is that the grade is relatively gentle (below 5%) and the road is relatively straight. We are all glad to be back after a month away. The horses particularly were happy to see their buddies. I expect they spent all night telling them about their trip.Some impressions: 1. Head set. I watched some western pleasure classes. I had thought that a "proper head set" was with the forehead vertical to the ground. These horses were atleast 20 degrees past vertical. Looked as silly to me as the old QH "peanut rollers". I guess that it is just another example of the exadurations inherent in showing 2. Classes. I noticed while I was gone the old "AERC has to many weight classes" argument broke out. The show world has this in spades. In the first place there are many catagories of essentially very similar classes. (English pleasure, park horse etc. Yes I know there are differences, but they are relatively minor) Then you divide up by sex (mares, geldings, stallions), and by age. Then you have professional handlers. Then amature owner to ride. Then divide the amatures up by age (junior, under 39, over 40). Please, do not criticize me if I got some details wrong, but the general conclusion that Scotsdale has enough slightly different classes to make our weight division arguments look silly. 3. Hay. I was very thankful to get back and look at my barn full of good MT grass hay. I paid about $150/ton for mixed alfalfa. Here in the valley, I sell good grass certified weed free for $85/ton. (pure alfalfa <$100/ton). The best stuff I could find appeared to have been baled to wet. It had lots of stems, and clouds of mold when thrown to horses. Now the mold had stopped growing so there was not the visible grey stuff (we used to see in bad hay in the Midwest), just lots of dust. The rest was probably Bermuda grass. Horses did not like the Bermuda. At the rate the farm land around Phoenix is being converted to houses, I suspect the hay will double in price in 10 years, when they can find any. Wendy says that the next time we will only bring 2 horses so we can bring all of our own hay. Sounds like a plan to me. 4. Desert. Most of the trails we rode on were to rocky to let the horses move out. Our hosts no longer do endurance, so they are content to walk their horses, but we were a bit bored after a few weeks. While the various cactii are fun to see, we both agree we like the Owyhee better than the Phoenix area.
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