Garden of the Gods

I joined Anthony again for a ride out of High Knob. He messaged me that they were riding at 9:30 am and riding to Garden of the Gods. So I hustled over to the barn. I'd left the truck and trailer there all ready to go to save time this morning. I grabbed Lily and..... she was a snot about loading into the trailer again! Gurrrrrr. But, after a few tries she did finally load up and we were off. I got to camp, unloaded Lily, groomed and tacked her up and was ready to ride by 9:15 am. The ride time had been changed to 10:00. That was fine with me. I'd rather wait than be waited for. Lily was quiet and being a good girl. I led her down to Anthony's camp and tied her to his trailer. Anthony was riding Mattie Ross today and I groomed her for him. She is a very pretty mule. We headed out a little after 10:00 am. The original group was only going to be 6 riders. But, before we left camp there were 9 or 10 of us. Lily started out this morning nice a quite and well behaved. A relief after our rough start yesterday. We took the waterline trail to the blue mailbox and out to Cowboy Hideout. We stopped there for a few minutes for everyone to get a change to ride into the box cave. We then went through Rice Hollow. One of my favorite spots. We then rode up to the tee pee and took another short break.

From the Tee Pee we rode over to Knight's of the Golden Circle. We had 3 young men in our group and 1 very pretty young woman. It was fun watching the young men do everything they could to impress her and each other for that matter. They were a lot of fun to ride. One of them rode under the arch at Knights of the Golden Circle and wedged their head against the rock but got out with no serious injury thankfully.  From there we rode over to Garden of the Gods along some pretty rugged trail.

We tied up the mules and horses and had lunch there. Me and two other women took our lunches and went out onto the rocks to sit and eat and enjoy the fantastic view. Two of the young men had to make the jump over to the top of the camel's head. A little scary to watch but they lived to tell about it. We rode back through the canyon where H rock is. We did about 16 miles today and we were out for 7.5 hrs. We did some tough but very fun trails and it was a great ride. Lily was a snot about loading on the trailer to go home. But, eventually she did load and it was a great day.