Trail Adventures: Katy Trail/Rudolf Bennitt

This one is going to be a two-fer, because they were both reasonably short rides and I don't have a ton of media lol. It was a three-day weekend last weekend, and weirdly enough the weather was pretty cooperative for riding each day! The weather forecast for Monday looked dicey all weekend, but it cleared up that morning and I'm SO GLAD we went. Anyway, I'll start with Sunday. 

Me, dragging the horses away from their mud naps to get on the trailer lol. 

The first outing was to the Katy Trail. It was intentionally very low-key, as a friend wanted to put the first trail ride on her OTTB mare. I brought Trigger for another friend, and the fourth horse is in our quartet was our favorite pinto gaited guy who is just such a superstar. The OTTB mare was a complete rockstar - meanwhile my VERY VERY BROKE TRAIL HORSE got spooked by a building and had to walk past it snorting and blowing. Sigh. Trigger added another member of his fan club by being his sweet little self, if a little on the disgusting muddy side haha. We did a little under 4 miles in about an hour. 

We intentionally picked the "boring" direction, since there would be less external stimuli (traffic, houses, dogs, etc), although it had the downside of having to cross the INCREDIBLY SKETCHY BRIDGE. Luckily aside from giving it the hairy eyeball, none of the horses reacted too much. And we lucked out and didn't see a single bicyclist or hiker!

I opted to go very Spanish for this ride lol. 

Our trail group starting pinging Sunday night, but my forecast looked pretty garbage. Thankfully, as happens often in the Midwest, the forecast was suuuuper wrong. So with about an hours notice, five of us tossed horses on various trailers and met up on a spring-like 66 degree and sunny afternoon!

We've been working diligently on Trigger's weight this winter, and apparently the secret to getting him to eat hay is chopping it first. I need to post about my DIY hay chopper (its a mulcher/chipper thing and a complete PITA but the horses love the hay sooooo I suffer), but this was the first time I offered Trigger chopped hay at a trail ride. He absolutely DOVE into the bucket and didn't come up for air until we started riding. Duly noted bud, duly noted. But for a 26-year old who almost knocked me over trying to get on the trailer and then cantered merrily down the trail, I think he's feeling pretty good!

They appear to be clearing/adding new trails at Rudolf Bennitt, which is awesome!

Trigger feeling peppy enough to challenge the leader to walk first, haha. 

Again, rode for about an hour, but we did some stretches of cantering (or in Ruby's case, bucking and leaping over imaginary items on the ground lol), and logged a little closer to 4.5 miles. Unfortunately when we were trying to avoid the gun range in this park, we picked a trail that dead ended in a parking lot, so after doing the loop available and ending up back at our trailers, we opted to just hang out and chat in the sunshine instead of trying to start a new loop. The weather and company were superb <3 I just love our local horse community, we have such a good time no matter what we do, and it's so supportive!

Hauling out every day of the 3-day weekend was a little tiring, but I figured we don't get weather that nice in winter THAT often, so it would be a shame to waste it!