Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Day 3 The enchanted forest!

Ok, so I have campers all week and it is cramping my mustang time! Didn't get as much time with Eclipse but we made the best of it. At Whispering Hills we have what we call the enchanted forest. It contains a variety of spooky obstacles to help further our horses confidence. I took my campers and Eclipse and headed out to the forest for our morning session to see how things would go. The first obstacle would be our wooden bridge and the small ditch it crossed. Definitely, not something he wanted to do with out encouragement. The ditch came first, then the short side of the bridge. Once we got those down it was like he knew the long side of the bridge was next and just went right over. One thing I can say is he has a lot of try. We were off to the next obstacle, the curtain, but first we had to pass all of our woodland creatures. These would be wooden stand ups of various wild animals painted to the nines by past campers. They didn't rattle him too much but he definitely shot them a funny look as he went by! The curtain was more of a puzzle to him then anything else. He didn't understand how to move the shreds of the curtain out of his way, or why he should when he could just go around. With a little encouragement he got it figured out. Our final challenge of the day was the tarp. At first he didn't know what to think of that blue, crinkly, square on the ground. When the going gets tough you call in reinforcements, so i had one of my campers have their tried and true lesson ponies walk over first. This helped him a lot and before to long he would go over both ways on his own.

Our mission was accomplished for this morning so I offered him a drink from the trough and found a nice shady place in the woods to let him spend some time learning to be tied. It will take some time for him to learn to keep his feet still, but it will come. I plan on doing a first ride tomorrow during my morning session with the campers as a special treat. Check in tomorrow to see how it goes.


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