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Naomi said:

> For those of you still searching for?the right fitting saddle for your
horse, I'd like to recommend the SR Enduro Saddle by Steve Gonzales.? 

[snip]

... but even more so for my heavy Heavyweight husband, Lee, who weights in
at 260 lbs.? Vet's are frequently commenting at rides on how great Lee's
horses' backs look -- especially considering the weight they're carrying.?
His horses haven't had any back soreness issues -- and we credit Steve's
superior saddle for this. 

-------------------------

I'll chime in here - my horse is a problem when it comes to back issues.
Been through all sorts of stuff getting him to carry himself correctly,
getting me to ride correctly, overcoming an injury - the list goes on.
There's a saddle we've used for years - works for a while, then needs to be
tweaked, works for a bit longer, then we had some issues. I finally got fed
up with it, got a different saddle - tried a friend's for a  couple months,
did 2 rides with no problems, thought I had a solution. On the 3rd ride,
Laser got a nasty rub, turned what was supposed to be a 2-day into a 1 day.

It just so happened that Naomi had some books out for sale, and one of them
was on saddle fitting. As I leafed through the book, it came to me that if
Naomi's selling books about this, maybe she'd be a good one to ask. As she
says, Lee's a big guy - I'm not small, but he weighs in about 35# more than
I do. His horse's back looked great after a 2-day 100. It's one thing for a
saddle to work with a rider who's a lightweight or even a middleweight, but
for it to work for a heavyweight rider - and one who does a lot of miles -
that's saying something. There's a couple of other HW riders up here who
also tend to do a lot of rides that are also Steve's customers. I think
there's a lot of saddles that may be perfectly fine for smaller people that
aren't right for me and this horse. 

I was at a ride a few weeks later only about 100 miles from Steve's place,
so I took another day off work and drove down to look at his saddles, talk
to him, and see what he had to say. I showed him the saddle I'd been using
(went back to the one I'd used for years - lesser of the evils), and he told
me exactly what problems I'd been seeing as if he'd been following me
around. Steve's also one heck of a nice guy - took all afternoon with us,
gave us some things to make some of our other saddles work better now, and I
also got to check out how he makes the saddles - as an engineer, they're a
neat design - flexible, but not too flexible. So I ordered one.

I don't have a huge number of rides on the SR yet (275 competition miles),
but so far it has worked flawlessly - perfect sweat pattern, and most
importantly, Laser's done well with it. The real acid test was the last ride
of the year where we did a slow, rocky 75, and ended up taking the whole 18
hours where we had to finish slowly in the dark with no moon. My horse's
back did great.

We will be ordering another saddle from Steve once we have the money to
spare, hopefully in time for next ride season. I'm also very appreciative
that Naomi took the time to help us out when they were busy trying to pack
up and steered me to Steve.




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