Puppies and Butterflies

My friend Loretta contacted me to see if I wanted to ride with her today. Well, OF COURSE I DID!! We haven't ridden together since last spring. She has a permanent site at Double M Campground so our plan was to meet there at 9:00 am. I packed a lunch then headed over to the barn early so I could get the mules fed. It was quite cool this morning so I had to rethink my clothing choices when I first stepped outside.  My plan was to ride to Double M by way of Thacker Hollow Rd. Not that I love riding on the road but it's the fastest way to get to the camp, just 1.5 miles from the barn. I got Lily fed, groomed and tacked up. She was definitely feeling her "oats" in this cool weather. She was good about being groomed and saddled but for sure she was a little jazzed up. I had left my helmet in my trailer so I led her from the barn over to my house. As I was passing Sally's place, I saw her out in the field trying to catch one of her horses. I asked if she was going riding and she said yes. So I asked her if she would like to join Loretta and I and again she said yes. It didn't take her long to catch her Paso pony ChiChi and get him saddled up. We headed down the road, Lily slipping on the pavement... another reason I hate riding the road. I use rim shoes on her. They work great on the trails and the rocks out there, but they are NOT good on pavement. We were heading down Thacker Hollow Rd. When we realized that all 3 of Sally's dogs are following us. Her older dog Tippy always goes with us. And one of the young one has gone several times. But the youngest pup has never gone out on the trail. Sally tried to get them to go back but they were determined to follow us. It was a nerve wracking mile to camp for Sally. The two younger dogs are quite shy and when we got to camp, all the people and commotion scared the younger dogs and they all got separated. I headed towards Loretta's camp to let her know we were there and Sally proceeded to round up her dogs. Lily didn't NOT want to ride through the section of camp I had to go through to get to Loretta's site. She didn't do anything bad but she froze up and I could only get her to move forward a few steps at a time. We were most of the way through the "scary" spot when I saw Loretta riding towards me.

 We turned around and went to get Sally. Loretta's mule was not happy about being separated from her stable mate that was back at Loretta's camp site. Lily was not happy about anything at the moment but both mules were holding it together. We didn't not see Sally where I'd last seen her so figured she must have gone up the new camp road. We rode down the short section of road to the new camp road, both mules a bit twitchy but still holding it together and rode up the new camp road to the end.No sign of Sally. I sent her a quick text message to meet us at the top of camp. We headed out a trail at the top of the new road that was new to us to get over to the trails at the top of camp. I did get a message back from Sally that she would meet us there. Loretta's mule was getting more stressed out over riding closer to her pasture mate. Lily was still jazzed up but doing pretty well. No bad behavior. We cut across on an old trail that Loretta knew but it was badly grown in and we were kind of bushwhacking our way though when Sally and ChiChi came in site. Lily had kind of gotten over being separated from him at this point but seeing him again got her excited. We were looking for a way to get to Sally through the brush, Lily got quite mad and stomped her front feet down hard a couple times. But, to my relief, that is all that she did. Sally yelled to us that she was going to ride home because she was worried about the youngest dog.

Loretta and I worked our way though the rest of the overgrown trail and got out to the trails at the top of camp. Loretta's mule, Pepper, really did not want to leave camp. I did not really want to head directly towards home so we headed out the wagon trail. It took a little while for Pepper to decide that it would just be easier to go with the plan. Loretta's patient persistence did eventually convince her though. We rode all out to Black Ridge Rd and crossed over and rode Indian Paint Wall trail to Initial Tree. From there we headed out 150 but took a new trail Loretta had found that I did not know. This took us to trail 005 and out to the River to River trail. We rode the R2R trail to 150 and rode to the Memorial high line where we stopped to have lunch. To this point, Pepper and Lily had not been paying much attention to each other and not taking much comfort in each others company. Lily had been walking out very fast but was behaving well. She expressed her opinion at several trail junctions when she thought I was making a wrong choice but didn't carry on about it. We tied the mules on the high line and climbed up on the memorial rock to have our lunch.

From the Memorial, we took a variety of trails and wandered over to NoNo Rock. And then took a variety of trails to get back to 183 and crossed Black Ridge Rd and rode that back to camp. It seemed the mules had come to some kind of understanding while tied beside each other on the Memorial high line while we had lunch. They seemed to enjoy each other after that and both mule went along great with Pepper taking the lead some of the way. We stopped for a minute at the Red Shoe high line. There were some beautiful butterfly's there of several species. And they were doing things that we can't talk about......

When we got to Double M. I rode down to Loretta's camp to meet her husband. We chatted for a while and then I decided to ride home on the trails. Loretta offered to trailer me home. Or I could have gone back down the paved road, but it was such a beautiful day and I had enough daylight left to make it back by the trails. Even though we'd already done a lot of miles, Lily cruised on home in good spirits. We headed home on 184 and cut down to the creek. Just after crossing the creek, Lily stopped and went on point for something she spotted in the woods. She was not worried, just watching. I looked around and then spotted it. It was quite large, and black and with the way it was running I though for a brief moment it was a bear cub! Even though there are no bears here, that is what it looked like. It was running away from us, but stopped for a second and turned to look at us and that is when I saw that it was a very large and very puffed up skunk! I asked Lily to move on and she did. As we were coming to the top of the hill at T-Lick, Lily stopped and went on point again. This time she had spotted a turkey that ran across the trail in front of us. After the turkey ran by Lily became  very concerned and did not want to move forward at all, even though it was towards home.  I thought there might be more turkeys but that was not so. It took some serious convincing to get Lily moving forward, and at that only a few steps at a time. She was all kinds of snorty by the time we got up into the clearing. She had her eyes and ears glued to the engraved rock at the base of the big tree. It is a light colored rock and the way the setting sun was hitting it made it look like a mule eating monster I guess. Silly mule. Once by it though, she was fine and we headed on home by way of Black's Cabin.

We did 22.15 miles today and were out for 9 hrs. It was a great ride though I am sorry we got separated from Sally. She is always a fun addition to any ride. It is officially the most miles I've ridden with Lily on one day and she did it easily. My previous longest ride was 21....something.... miles and that was the last ride I'd done with Loretta. Lily gets an A on her report card today for being in multiple situations she was not happy about but keeping her head together well enough to keep me safe.