May 3, 2020
Rhonda Sedgwick Stearns
Hard times on Wyoming’s ‘baldheaded prairies’ in the Nineteen-teens and –twenties spawned entrepreneurs. Women kept chickens and sold eggs; or kept cows and sold milk, cream and butter, maybe even cheese. Where there was timber, ambitious men often cut posts to sell to homesteaders who had fences to build. Some ambitious men found a sense […]
April 30, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
The calf was up and had nursed when I made the evening gather of the springers. He was a giant! He was a Charolais cross and looked to weight in the 120 pound range or more. His mama was one of those short, stout Angus cows that raise a big calf every year, one of […]
April 28, 2020
Lynn Kohr
Halters to Bits. From the ground up we teach our colts to be soft and give to nose pressure with a halter first before we introduce a snaffle. As our colts accept all of our softening ideas with a halter we add the snaffle. We will put a broken in three-piece snaffle on them for […]
April 26, 2020
Jolyn Young
Last week, I saddled my horse for the first time in two years. That seems like a long time off for a lifelong horse lover such as myself to forego riding, and it was. I used to ride horses for the public. I lope three-year-olds for a cutting horse trainer in Texas, and I cowboyed […]
April 24, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
The morning after I got my California mare home, it was still -28 degrees. The night before when we arrived I had put her in the barn with the borrowed blanket on, but had left the stall door open so she could go in and out and get a drink at the tank. She was […]
April 22, 2020
Lynn Kohr
How do horses show their thresholds to humans’ pressure? Their reactions may show up as: bucking, rearing, freezing their feet, running away, shaking heads, being restless, mouthing lead ropes or bits, pawing or all combinations of these. What do we do to combat these behaviors? We teach patience, trust, and tolerance. How do I teach […]
April 20, 2020
Mykal Kirkpatrick
In a perfect world, when people are doing their groundwork with a colt, they have gone through the steps to prepare him to have his feet picked up, handled, and eventually shod. Unfortunately, the horse world is far from perfect, and many times a horse has not been prepared properly, or may just be twitchy […]
April 18, 2020
Jan Swan Wood
Since my major life change and relocation that I spoke of in my opening story for the all new Windy Ridge Chronicles, I have been away from my horses and cattle. It’s been a hard, hard thing to become accustomed to. Last week I went to where my horses are living for now. I hadn’t […]
April 17, 2020
Jolyn Young
Daron Little writes and sings about what he knows: the cowboy lifestyle. He rides and ropes for a living, and he enjoys sharing those experiences with others through his music. “Once in a great while, a songwriter/singer comes along in the Western music realm who gets it…Daron Little has done just that,” wrote Juni Fisher, […]
April 16, 2020
Lynn Kohr
I learned this triangle barrel drill from a fellow barrel horse trainer and good friend, Cody Hyde, from Blackfoot, ID. As he introduced this drill his words have proven very true. This drill works for green horses all the way to finished horses. For me, the power of this triangle barrel drill is it reinforces […]