Riding out in nature under a full moon can be a wondrous experience. It’s quiet, your senses are heightened, and you become fully immersed in the stillness of your environment. Horses have much better night vision than humans and if you can’t see the trail, you just have to loosen the reins, put your full…
Loading a horse that does not want to get on the trailer can be extremely frustrating. You are really excited about going on a trail ride, perhaps you are meeting others and have gotten a late start, and then your horse doesn’t want to load. Erghhh! And of course, when we get tense, it only…
Do you have any idea what your horse experiences in the trailer? Most of us load our horses, drive to our destination, and, as long as we don’t hear kicking and our horse is in one piece at the end, we figure they are just fine. That’s how I always felt. The only signs that…
The Horse Trail Chicks have an annual tradition of spending a week or so with our good friends Elizabeth and Erin riding at the Horse Trails at Otter Creek in northern New York. We always book our cabin at least 12 months in advance. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were not sure if we…
If you’ve ever had a light (or all the lights) go out on your trailer, you know that trouble-shooting it can be really intimidating. You’re smart enough to know that the problem could be the truck wiring, a bad trailer wire, or bad light. But how do you figure out which one of these it…
What could be more fun than trail riding? Going on a multi-day trail riding trip away from home! The Horse Trail Chicks plus two friends recently spent 4 days riding in the amazing Otter Creek Horse Trail System in upstate New York. We were there in 2017 and were so excited to go back. Our…
Kerrie and I saw Lyle Lovett in concert last weekend with several other horse-friends and family. We all got very excited and sang along when he sang “If I Had a Boat.” If you are not familiar with this song, the chorus goes: And if I had a boat I’d go out on the ocean…
Years ago, if you owned one saddle, chances are it would fit most of your horses, at least well enough. But this is no longer the case. What’s changed? For one thing, the variety of horse breeds that people commonly ride has changed. When I was growing up the most popular breeds were thoroughbreds, Arabians,…
If you rode horses as a teenager, you probably could tell stories about the crazy things you did and wonder how you survived. If you are a teenager now, you probably do crazy things on horses and – one day – you will wonder how you survived. For me it was working around horses barefoot,…
