A little walk (and jump) through the woods

Breezy and I took a little trip to the woods with Wendy and Rain. This was not our usual walk through the woods…

Here’s what Breezy and I usually do:

We halt

We trot

We canter

Tanya, another trainer at Willow Tree, went to an enormous amount of trouble to create a little hunter pace course out in the woods. She cleared the trail, gathered and set up little jumps of logs and brush, and even fastened arrows to the trees to direct riders to the next set of jumps. My trainer, Karin, decided that Breezy was bored with his usual dressage routine and needed a little playtime. She nominated me to take him out to the hunter pace.

I wasn’t sure how he would go, since the last time I jumped him on nice groomed arena footing he unceremoniously dumped me. He was a low-level eventer at some time in his past, so jumping solid obstacles out in the woods would not be exactly foreign to him. Only to me!

Wendy and I headed out and our trip began somewhat ominously. August is the season for the huge flies we have nicknamed “bombers”–they are about an inch long but fortunately fairly slow and clumsy. However, fly spray does absolutely nothing to deter them and their bite is probably the mother of all fly bites. We were persecuted all the way down the lane to the woods, and it continued after we entered. Breezy and I just stepped over the first little jump because his mind was totally on fly defense and not on jumps. He hopped over the second one, and on the third decided to be an overachiever, jumping about three times the necessary height. And so it went for the rest of the trail–a jump, a pause to bat down bombers, another jump, some hippity-hopping around to escape bombers, another jump, a bit of whirling around in the trees to foil bombers…

I think between us Wendy and I actually managed to assassinate five or six of the pesky bombers, but they had so many in reserve that after we went around the course twice I decided to call it a day. It was a fun ride though, and we’re looking forward to doing it again when it’s a little cooler and the flies are (hopefully) gone. No photos of this adventure–too busy batting away flies to bother with a camera.