The sun is out and it's actually warmed up to above sixty degrees. We'd been working in the garden all weekend. Sunday morning three guys came to build a little garden wall by our bedroom window. Boy it feels good to get a lot done. While we were working around the garden, I left the horses tied to the trailer, just learning about patience and to just stand still. When the guys all went to lunch, David and I saddled up both horses and rode up the canyon behind the house. (My trailer is full of hay at the moment). I had ponied Prestigious a couple days earlier on the same route, and we'd had to scramble up and around an enormous bank of snow that blocked the canyon from side to side.
Prestigious was calm and easy from the very start. He confidently walked out in front, was not nervous or hurried, he went along just like a nice broke horse. When we got to the snow, we climbed up the steep slope on the right, walking around the snow, going first before Roy. I reached down and stroked his neck "Good Boy Prestigious" I tried to sound like Jaime, with a soft Mexican accent. A little further we found more snow, but this was not as deep, so we walked on through it. I have to say that I have had horses up here that NEVER got used to snow. Prestigious preferred to go around it, but we approached it in a way that looked like we had no other choice. We kept close to Roy, and he braved right up and followed across. He tip toed and hopped the first few times, and then quickly became more used to it. It was perfect because there were lots of places to walk through patches of snow, each one was a little deeper.
By the time we turned around, he was better about going through first and in some places it was about 8 inches deep. When we got back to the big drift, we were behind Roy this time and David chose to go down the other side. We had to cross a little bit of snow and then the lower side was really rough and really steep. It was only about 15-20 feet high, so not a big hill, but it was something he had to think about. We did a little bit of sliding on his rump to get down to the road, and we went happily the rest of the way home.
When we got home, the guys were back at work in the garden, when they saw Lily trot up, they looked up the hill and saw us. They smiled and waved. We unsaddled and instead of putting them in their paddock, we let them graze some of the nice green grass by the creek.
Every now and then he'd pick his head up to me as if to say "what a great day today is!" I rubbed his beautiful forehead, and he closed his eyes, then dropped his head down for some more sweet grass. Such a nice boy. Today showed what a good mind he has. Definitely another "A".
