Race Horse to Ranch Horse: Part 7: She Was No Trail Riding Horse

Posted in: Featured, Horse Training, Ranch Life

In everything I’ve written about Lily over the years, its been easy to share everything good about her, because truly, she was a stellar individual. However, like everything, she had a flaw. It only cropped up in a particular circumstance, but when it did, it took all the fun out of the whole experience.

       For quite a few years I belonged to an all woman group that did a trail ride every September. I’m no trail rider, mind you, but because my sisters were in it and some other ladies I enjoyed, I went for many years. We’d see some different country each year on “The Ride” part of the weekend. There were around 50 members, plus the invited guests, so usually around 70 people on horses. Sadly, that was the only time some of them ever rode, and worse, the only time their horse was ridden too. So, wrecks happened, stupidity was prevalent, and things weren’t always done the way they oughta be.

         Since some of the group seemed to think I was the designated den mother for this bunch, many relied on me to get them out of a jam, take care of their horse’s best interests, and regularly, resaddle a wrongly saddled horse, sometimes halfway through the ride. I’d do a pre-ride inspection of some of their horses to be sure they were saddled and bridled correctly, which was the best time to do such a thing, not after the saddle was under a belly, a horse had run off, or someone was hurt.

          Back to Lily. She absolutely couldn’t deal with the ride. The noise, number of horses, and maybe all that estrogen, got into her ex-race horse head, and she was clinically insane for two days. It was guaranteed she would be horsing, so that really helped, but the level of anxiety she experienced was just terrible. I took her several years, the first time when she was still pretty green, but she never got any better. I finally decided it was too hard on both of us, so I left her at home. But, until I gave up on making a trail riding horse out of her, it was hairy.

          On this particular ride, it was kind of fallish, with a cool day and a breeze, may have even spit a little rain. We were riding through the Slim Buttes in northwestern South Dakota, with our camp on the flat to the south of the bluff that ran east and west for miles. We left camp around 10 a.m. and headed for the face of that bluff. The host of the ride was darned sure a cowboy gal, so the mule deer trail up the near vertical bluff didn’t concern her. It sure did some of the others, so there was a great deal of milling around at the start of the trail. I pointed Lily at it, figuring that if her feet were busy on that trail, her mind would stay busy and focused too, which it mostly did.

         Once all the riders were on top, horses were winded and several needed help getting their saddles reset and adjusted after that steep climb. So, I got off and helped several of them. One gal’s horse I completely unsaddled and started over. In the meantime, the rest of the group had started leaving. So, I stepped back on and Lily was being a total fool, dancing sideways, sometimes backwards, and doing her Lipizzan leaps. The majority of the riders were ahead of us, and they were going mostly single file on cow trails around the tops of some deep cuts and canyons that broke up the southern rim of the buttes.

        I stayed away from most of the others so I wouldn’t cause a wreck with one of their horses, and this seemed to jazz her up worse. Finally, as we went around the head of another canyon, with some of us on the tail end and nearly across the cut from the rest of the riders, Lily completely lost her mind. Jumping in 15 plus foot leaps, she was fighting her head and lunging along toward the canyon edge, and there was absolutely nobody home when I tried to turn her away from it and she was picking up speed. With her head turned back to the side, she leaped way out off the edge of it! It seemed we hung there for just a moment.

        Since I didn’t have a parachute, the only thing I could do was ride it out on her as we were free falling for about 30-40 feet! I wasn’t looking forward to the landing, and it came very quickly. The term “stuck the landing” is used in gymnastics, and it describes what we did perfectly. She had her landing gear down and when we hit the bottom, she went into the sloughy clear to her belly. My feet were in the water of this handy little spring, as she tried to figure out how we’d gotten there. It sure sobered her up.

       Honestly, I think she had blanked completely out just before she went over the edge, but suddenly she was thinking again. I looked up at all the women on their horses who were peering down at us, mouths open, sure just moments before that I would be dead when they looked. I assured them we were okay, then encouraged Lily to waller out of the slough we were in. I didn’t feel very sorry for her, muddy and sweating hard, so I just rode her until I found another deer trail that went up and we climbed up out of there.

      She was still wringy, but not acting quite as crazy as she’d been. Nothing else too horrible happened for the rest of the ride, and Lily focused enough to give a good ranch horse demonstration of how you slide off a bluff on your butt down a deer trail with a 100 foot or more drop off of one side. We’d already proven we could fly, so it didn’t worry me too bad.

      I never took her on another of those trail rides, as it just wasn’t her cup of tea at all. I’d lived through three of them on her by then and figured that three’s the charm. She was so exceptional at everything else, why fry her wiring on something like that? It sure wasn’t fun for either of us, though it was sure exciting for the other gals.

        So, my race horse was a ranch horse supreme, but darned sure not a trail horse with all those other horses and women!

Ranch Horse

Posted in: Featured, Horse Training, Ranch Life


About Jan Swan Wood

Jan was raised on a ranch in far western South Dakota. She grew up horseback working all descriptions of cattle, plus sheep and horses. After leaving home she pursued a post-graduate study of cowboying and dayworking in Nebraska, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota....

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