Sunday ride with a blizzard

Today Ruth picked me up and we went out to Heather's to fetch the trailer. We hauled Otto and Quincy out to Sinwaan's crib and tacked up and left from there. Ruth had a plan for a new route today that would take us down some new roads and be a longer distance. It was pretty cold out so we weren't sure we would make it.

We headed up Forest first, since Otto had some time off, we thought doing a little hill work would be good for everyone. There wasn't snow when we started out but soon into the ride the snow started falling, quickly. There were flakes coming in at us sideways, much like a blizzard. Sinwaan turned his head into it since going along on the edge of the road had the snow hitting him in the right eye. We had planned to turn right onto Froghollow but we didn't really feel like tackling all that snow head-on so we turned left instead and had it at our backs.

From there we went up Locher Rd, which I had never ridden on. We turned onto Stateline Rd and at that corner is the Grape Vine training facility. One of the horses in the paddock got so excited to see us ride by that he galloped along and slid and fell down, not once but twice. We were worried about him and we were just walking by. As we passed the large field adjacent to the indoor arena we saw a lot of horse trailers. We saw a large group of people doing what appeared to be a trail clinic complete with lots of obstacles! Later I learned it was the Mark Bolender clinic.

We turned north on Valley Chapel, then left back onto Froghollow and right on Last Chance and another left on Stovall to head home. Sinwaan led most of the way home, a nice big trot. His hooves have been holding up really well but I am concerned that they are wearing down quickly with all this road riding barefoot.

All told we did 10.1 miles today! I mapped out the other route we would have taken had it not been a blizzard and that would have only been 9.5 miles.