Slow Defrost

Things are slowly starting to move again, finally. It helps for me to have a goal. This year, we're going to make another attempt at the Home on the Range ride on March 27th. Hopefully, the new locale will promise less drama and a more reliable ride for years to come. The added bonus is that it's closer to home and so we can likely go and stay overnight Friday and come home Saturday. I still haven't decided if we'll do our first 50 there, but I'll likely just do a 25 and use it as a long training ride before doing our first 50 in June.



I've been out on Jasper several times in the past week and a half, and he's beginning to show me that work ethic I love so much in him. We've been riding out from the house lately and working on not jigging/rushing on the way home. I only had to remind him twice on a particularly bad ride and he's since been excellent. Yesterday, we ventured up to the Mountain since I've been missing it so bad, and it was too slick to do anything except take a few pictures and fall on my butt on the ice while leading Jasper through some real slick stuff. Either way, we were alone and I realized I can point Jasper at literally anything now and he'll jump/wade/pick through it. He's such a pleasure to ride now that he's a "real" endurance horse. Multiple times yesterday (like when I first realized we were on top of a sheet of ice with me in the saddle) I thanked my lucky stars he is such a sensible boy who pays attention to where he puts his feet. He didn't panic once, and stared dumbly down at me when I fell on my butt.





I have other exciting news...Ony had his first lesson last night! My trainer and friend, Lacy, is such a wonderful horseperson. She worked with him for an hour and he improved markedly during that time. She did groundwork exercises and worked with him on focusing his attention on her, moving around her in both directions, and by the end, she could move her body and the rope and get him to move in any direction with his whole body or just his forequarters or hindquarter. Pretty impressive stuff! She thinks we'll be able to start riding him in no time. Yaaay! I can't wait to experience his amazing, floating trot and to have TWO boys to ride!


He started the lesson by refusing to get off the trailer. He got off eventually, though.


You can see how he's resisting at this point--this was really early on.


Later, as you can see. He's softened considerably.