A Just-Spring Hack

Yesssss! Daylight! Temperature weather (high 20s, sunny)! A free afternoon!

We went places. Tristan was happy as a clam to be out, though he was happier to head back to the barn at haying time to the point of quite a bit of jigging, which meant we added 20 minutes to the ride as we trotted away down another short dirt road.

Same view, taken about 6 months apart.

I had been intending to explore a new road today, but after 10 minutes on it, I had been passed by 4 cars, not a single one of which slowed down. Seriously. Whipping by at 20 mph, minimum. Waving cheerily to me. Assholes. Thank God Tristan is very, very chill about such things, but all of the cars were coming at us head-on, and thus guaranteed to be a certain distance away. I did not want to wait around for the car that zoomed out and around us going 20 and kicked up gravel in its wake. So we headed back to our old familiar roads.

Our favorite hill in the distance.

The roads were soft enough to see his hoofprints, and I was especially happy to see him tracking up fully in the trot, stepping in his own hoofprints, and overstepping a teensy bit going up the steep hill at the walk.

This hill is actually much steeper than it looks in the picture.

Handsome boy in the barn driveway. I spent probably 5 minutes trying to
get a good picture of him, but some neighbor was shooting a LOT of guns,
and he kept looking to see where the noise was coming from.

There we go! A bit yak-like, but the hair, it is coming out in clumps.

Overall, we were out for about 60 minutes, and he had a lovely big walk stride the whole time, with perhaps 5 minutes of trotting, and was overall exceptionally well-behaved. He had clearly worked a bit hard but not too hard, and as you can see from his foam was responsive to some softening. He was also straighter than he has often been on the road, and we worked on that: lining up all the parts of his body instead of wandering every which way.

With Daylight Savings (though it is kicking my ass from a sleep perspective) we might even get some weekday hacking in, which will be all to the good for overall fitness and muscle-building.