June 19, 2011 Hunterpace

The hunterpace took place this past Sunday, and I waited to post hoping that the other photographer on site would post the pictures, but he hasn't yet, and so I'm going to go ahead and post.

What a great hunterpace it was! It was an absolute blast. All but the last picture are by  Lydia, and I love them :)

Jenny picked Daisy and I up at our house at 9am. We were on the grounds less than a half hour later. The weather was perfect! About 70-75 degrees, not buggy on the trail.  

I was pretty excited to wear a pinny. ;)

We rode in the hunter division, which is described as being ridden at the gait that the terrain calls for, mostly trotting and cantering. We ended up trotting and cantering all of the places with open flat or uphill fields, and walking only in the wooded areas and downhill paths.

I had switched Daisy's snaffle out for a kimberwick, and I'm happy to say she completely respected it this time, unlike our first hunterpace. There were jumps spread out throughout the course. I remember jumping 13 of them, although there might have been more. There were lots of log jumps, and then some more interesting ones. The second one we did was a stone wall. The last time we jumped a stone wall, we took three tries to do it decently, the first time over Daisy had literally crawled her way over it (haha; our first cross country schoooling). This time, she jumped it perfectly! The logs on course were nice; not small jumps at all, but tall and wide. We jumped the majority of them, and I was thrilled with how she handled them. She never refused the entire time, and she didn't knock a hoof anywhere either.

The pic below is of the first jump, taken by photographer Bill Gamble. I think he probably got one more mid-air over the jump, except Skyler (Jenny's mare) was probably blocking us because she freaked out a bit :P oh well. 

On jump in particular was my favorite. It was a tire jump, with lots of different sized tires. The sides of the jump were just a jumble of rusty metal tractor parts. Apparently people chose not to jump it because if their horse were to duck out, they could injure themselves on the tractor parts. I didn't think that far however; I just thought it looked like fun, so Daisy and I jumped it. She was great! She didn't spook at any of it at all, and it was relatively big and such a blast to go over. Gosh, I can't make it up, she's just good at cross country :)

Jenny's mare Sklyer gave us both a pleasant surprise with how well she handled everything. She took everything like an old pro, even went first in front of Daisy to cross a wide stream of water. She kept up with our gallops and was just really good :) It was great to have Jenny along.

Oh, and best of all ---- we placed fourth out of thirty in the division! WHOOT! :)

Until later,