Bar H ride coming up

Chief and Bo are playing and having a good time!

I think the horses like their new haircuts! It has been nice enough to take their blankets off during the day.

Tomorrow we are heading to Perris, CA for the Bar H ride where the horses will get to enjoy sunny and 70′ish degree weather.

It looks like there will be a good turnout for the ride this weekend, especially if the weather turns out to be as nice as is being predicted.

The Bar H ride is a 25/50 on both Saturday and Sunday.  Annie said she’ll be barbequing cheeseburgers on Saturday for lunch!  On Sunday there will be sandwiches.  If anybody out there is available to help with the ride on Saturday and Sunday that would be great.   Or, if somebody is coming to the ride anyway and has time available to volunteer please let Ann or I know.  We could use pulse checkers, timers and food prep help.  Thanks!

So far (knocking on wood), Bo has been moving beautifully with no sign of anything being wrong.  He’s coming along on the trip and we’ll see how it goes.  I’ll mark some trail and do some other work with him before deciding when I’ll try him on an e-ride.

Both horses have good weight. There are definitely no ribs showing on those two! I think they are probably sporting a few extra pounds but that is okay. I’d rather go into spring and summer with a good healthy weight rather than have a horse on the thinner side. These two make it easy for me because all I feed them between rides is hay, and their Horseguard vitamins.

I took a couple photos of Chief’s feet today. It’ll take a few months still for his hooves to grow the rest of the way out and fully recover. In the first two photos you can make out the stress rings.  Basically it was a mild laminitis caused by medication (antibiotics) and stress from the eyelid injury.  Six surgeries.  (sigh)

I’d still like for there to be more frog expansion.  But that will come when the rest of the hoof capsule heals.

You may be able to tell that there is a good amount of sole callous (see the cracks up in the toe area of the sole?). It is interesting how we go from a muddy swampy mess to being dry and now look at how dry the feet look already, and the heels? I wiped off one side of one hoof with a wet hand, so that photo may look a little distorted because of that.  I’ve been trying to keep the hoof wall rounded to relieve the pressure.  Looks like there is some flaring to work on as well.  Some of the funky coloring you see in the sole area is from using Durasole.