Something scary for Halloween

A habitual bolter or a habitual rearer: which is scarier? It's a tie as far as I'm concerned. But there's something worse: flippers. Sometimes horses rear, lose their balance (especially if the rider pulls on their face), and fall over backwards. That's not flipping. A true flipper does what this horse does (BTW, pay no attention to the "Man dies!" description. It's perfectly obvious no one is even hurt.):

I'd never actually seen a true flipper in action. You can see from body language that both the groom and the jockey have a pretty good idea of what's coming, although it's interesting that the horse never really lays his ears back. Is it possible to rehab a horse that does something like that?

A trip to Sisters

My mother visited a couple weeks ago, and we spent a Saturday driving up to the town of Sisters and back. Sisters the town is located near the Three Sisters mountain peaks. We picked a great time to go; the fall foliage was spectacular. I had no idea there were giant lava fields ninety minutes from my house.

I have to admit the whole idea of living somewhere with volcanoes and lava freaks me out a little. Yet, tornadoes don't, so I am just an irrational person.

Mom and I hiked up to Proxy Falls. Everything was so pretty, and the photographers were out in full force to capture the colors.

This is Mt. Washington, a dormant volcano. The helpful signs at the lookout say that it was heavily eroded by glaciers, and that most of the trees are dead due to a 2003 wildfire.

In other news, I've had an honest-to-goodness breakthrough with Willow. So much of dressage is just slogging away day after day, knowing what you're after but recognizing that the horse doesn't have the same understanding. So you just keep repeating the training over and over, keeping the faith, and suddenly a light bulb appears above your pony's pointy little ears, and dressage happens! More on our breakthrough in a future post.

How to jump

Just do the exact opposite of what this guy is doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opMiCyoRzYM

Sorry to have disappeared for so long! October has been a crazy month. Back to our regularly scheduled programming starting this weekend.