Horse Conditioning on Skyline

This is looking southwest toward our little village of Farmington. You can see where I've marked our place. You can just see our trees, and the barn roof.

You can see how the road runs along the crest of the hills.

A little break for all of us before we headed back down the hill.


I'm on Spud, the red dun on the left, leading Junior, the dark bay, on the right. Lily and Juneau are out ahead. Juneau, with all her energy, is usually off in the brush. Lily only leaves the road when it looks like Juneau has found something interesting. They did make a nice double point on a covey of partridge today.

Getting ready to go. Lily is around somewhere.

I'm back from spending all my time getting nets ready for this summer to playing again. In a couple more days I will be done with nets for this year, so I feel like I can get back to the more interesting activities.

This is going to be a horse story for awhile. I'm focusing on getting ready for a pack trip near the first of next month. Part of that will be ongoing conditioning and training. We all need to get use to traveling in a safe, orderly manner, as well as getting our muscles ready for long days on the trail.

My technique is simple. Spend as much time as possible out riding in trail situations. Today we were out for three hours. We need to work up to some 8 to 10 hour trips.

For now I'm taking the dogs along, but I'm still undecided about whether they should go on the real trip.

When we look out of our windows east we see the end of the rolling hills of the palouse and the low tree covered foothills of the northern Rockies. The tree line is about three miles away. Just below the crest of this first row of hills winds Skyline Road, which is a gravel road. It runs between two north/south state highways, one which is in Washington while the other is in Idaho. This road is about 18 miles long running southeast northwest. Seventeen miles of it is an elongated state park.

For the last two days I've been starting at the end closest to our house, and riding out and back. This is also what I did for the Jan. 19th entry.