028. Update: XC at Mint Meadows

Instructions

Update with FWE Arctic Reverie, Don’t Make Me, and Edd. First, a huge thank you to Lunie for letting us visit this course, it was a great time and nice as I don’t have an XC course made yet. I brought over 3 horses for the course and they were all very curious on the way here where we were going as we don’t get out and about a lot with them. Edd and Force are already trained in XC, and it’ll be Arctic’s first time. I chose to do Edd and Force first so I could get to know the course before doing it with my horses that haven’t done it before. I started with Edd, and he did the entire thing easily. He slowed down a little on the water jumps but that’s to be expected because he hasn’t done a bunch of those before, but he really went for it on the hills and didn’t even hesitate. He did seem a little nervous when going under the arch, but to be fair with me on top of him my head was almost brushing the top. Next was Force, and she just did the entire course with the air of “I’m far too high and mighty for this boring thing” but I could tell she was having a lot of fun. She even broke into a gallop after the water jumps without me even asking, and where we will be working on listening to your rider more in the future I was glad to see that she was having fun. Last was Arctic. We took things pretty easy and Arctic was dong great until the water crossing where he stopped and refused to move so (after quite a while of gentle persuasion) got him to walk through it slowly, and once he was near the end he sped up to get out of the water, but to be fair he’s only four, almost 5, so it makes sense that new things could scare him a little. We didn’t do any of the water jumps but that’s ok and we can save that for another day. Arctic and I moved back up to a canter and finished the course strong.