The two Canadian cowgals had gotten themselves involved in a ride that had turned dangerous. Before long it would turn life- threatening! Those were the hazards in "Canada's Real West."
NOTE: Continued from last month's issue of Horse Previews Magazine.
CANADA'S REAL WEST - Part 1
Late that afternoon, they came to a small cabin in a meadow.
"We'll spend the first night here," the guide announced.
The ride hadn't seemed terribly well-organized up to that point, but things were looking up. The cook had arrived with food and everyone's duffel bags.
Alice and Ceci gave their horses a well-earned rub down.
"Where's the hay?" Alice asked.
"There isn't any," came the answer. "You can hobble your horses and let 'em graze ... or just turn 'em loose."
All day long they'd seen half-wild cattle and signs of moose and bear.
"It was like being in a foreign country," Alice later wrote. "People did things differently there."
Alice and Ceci searched the area and found a small, run down corral where they put their horses for the night. The guide and a couple of the men watched with expressionless faces while they policed it for hazards, made their horses as comfortable as possible and then started pulling grass. Despite their best efforts, it took a long while to put together a less-than-adequate meal. They were in a forest, and only sparse grass grew in the shade beneath the canopy of trees.
"You could tell the men were thinking something about those crazy city folks or flatlanders or whatever they called us," Alice wrote. "To them, the horses could look after themselves."
After supper and a sing song, the ladies retired to the cabin, while the men set up a tent. Temperatures were so low that the following day's precipitation would fall in the form of snow and sleet.
"We were just a few feet from a lake," Alice wrote, "It was cold enough that mist hung over the water, and you could see your breath even after brushing your teeth."
During the next few days, memorable experiences came one on the heels of the other, and so did worries. The participants were in the saddle 7 or 8 hours a day, and the horses were dropping weight with alarming speed, largely due to the quantity and quality of available forage.
"It wasn't the distances we were traveling as much as the fact that it just wasn't horse country," Alice wrote, "not by any stretch of the imagination!"
At one point, Soliviar's front legs dropped into a hidden trench in a grassy meadow. One minute he was making time through the grass, and the next his muzzle and shoulders simultaneously hammered into the dirt.
"He went down awfully hard, and I feared he'd broken a leg or badly injured himself," Alice wrote. "He was sore after he was freed, but he could and did carry on."
On a particularly steep climb, Sonica lunged right out of her saddle. She'd lost so much weight that it didn't fit her any more.
"I was riding behind and saw it coming," Alice wrote. "I yelled for Ceci to bail off, and she barely got clear before the saddle slid over her mare's rump. What a good mare! She stood quietly on an the almost vertical mountainside while we undid her tack and resaddled her."
For padding, they borrowed saddle blankets, and another rider loaned them a breast collar. Ceci and Alice both ride in Peruvian saddles, which use cruppers, but these were of no help going uphill.
"I always ride with a breast collar," Alice wrote, "and now, so does Ceci."
That night a tent camp was set up on Anvil Mountain. Nearby there were four poles nailed to four trees in the shape of a square. Everyone else used them for hitching rails, intending to leave their horses tied there for the night. Alice and Ceci didn't like the look of it. Alice made a small corral with a roll of baling twine, and Ceci tied Sonica to a nearby tree.
Clucking their tongues, the other riders watched this strange tenderfoot behavior. Bets were made that Alice's seal brown gelding would be out by morning, but the same campsite was used two nights in a row, and he stayed in his enclosure whenever he was put there.
"We had done well in deciding not to tie to the poles," Alice wrote. "Almost immediately, one horse pulled back, and that started them all fighting to get loose. Things ended up with horses running all over the place, tied to loose poles with nails sticking out."
Soliviar and Sonica watched with the dignity of grandparents observing the antics of grandchildren. Fortunately, the other horses were soon caught, and none was hurt seriously.
The following day, hay was brought up to the camp. Most of the others rode up to a 7,500-foot viewpoint overlooking Taseko Lake, but Alice and Ceci settled for a short ride to explore the area. Aside from that, they stayed in camp, gave Sonica and Soliviar a good grooming and let them eat their fill.
"It was as if we knew the next day would be 'The ride through Hell!'" was how Ceci aptly put it.
Day 6 was by far the most difficult yet. They rode up mountains, through canyons and along the edges of meadows turned to deep, sucking bogs by the endless precipitation. It was hard on horses that had just come from 80+ degrees at sea level. Except for Sonica and Soliviar, the participating horses were all from high altitudes.
Eight hours after the day had started, the horses were scrambling toward the end of a game trail worn into a solid rock mountain face by centuries of use. When the trail entered the meadows, riders breathed a sigh of relief. For miles, the sharp rock had crumbled under their horses' feet, making the footing precarious.
But everyone soon realized that nothing had been gained. They had simply traded one hazard for another. In the bogs, it was no safer. In fact, they soon arrived at that swollen stream with the bottom that felt like quicksand because the horses sunk in without reaching hard bottom.
The first four horses struggled through one at a time, punching holes in the bottom and sinking in without ever finding solid footing. The consequences made the crossing more difficult for those who followed. Then one of the seasoned ranch horses went down with his rider, and Soliviar followed suit. Alice was pinned beneath him, and the two immediately began sinking.
One of the men leapt off his horse and went to her aid. Recognizing a very dangerous situation, he moved fast, sloshing out to where Alice was pinned and dropping to his knees. Immediately he, too, began sinking. Without hesitation he reached under the water and slid his arms beneath her shoulders, shouting for one of the other men to hold him from behind so he could pull without sinking.
For a long while the tug-of-war between man and nature was a stalemate. Then the suction broke, and Alice came free. Soliviar, however, continued to sink. His energy sapped, he just lay there when the men tried to rescue him.
There was no way they could get him free without his help. Several willow branches were cut, and these were used to thrash the seal brown gelding, trying to rally his remaining strength while someone pulled on the halter shank and others lifted him. Suddenly Soliviar gave a great lunge and was up. Two more lunges, and he was clear of the swamp with Alice hanging on to a stirrup.
Two horses, two riders and two rescuers were wet through with icy cold water and chilled to the bone. The group headed to a deserted homestead where the buildings had long since fallen down. With wood ripped from fallen walls, the men built a fire, and one of them dried Alice's socks over the open flame.
With the horses somewhat rested and their riders somewhat drier, the group headed toward that night's camp. They arrived cold, hungry and weary, after eleven hours in the saddle.
As was the guide's habit, the riders left their horses saddled and tied until about 9 PM. The idea was that when they were finally hobbled and turned loose, they'd be too tired and hungry to stray or fight.
"It seemed to work," Alice wrote in her diary, "but I didn't like it!"
The following day was scheduled as the last. In the gloom of night, bodies aching, Alice and Ceci made a decision. In the morning, they'd follow the road the grub truck had used. They wanted to find their way back to the ranch on a surface that had proven firm enough to support a truck.
However, the next day dawned bright and sunny, and there were ample assurances from the other riders that it was a short, easy cross-country ride back to the ranch. Alice and Ceci allowed themselves to be convinced. They saddled up and fell in with the others.
However, the guide's big, tough Rhodesian Ridgeback dog had had enough. He refused to follow and was loaded into the bed of the grub truck.
"I wonder what he knows that we don't," Ceci asked with a grin.
 4th & 5th nights on Anvil Mountain Cook Camp under tarp. We tented here and rested horses. Ride out 11 hours. |
"I think he's just tired," Alice answered, dismissing the subject from her mind.
Not questioning why the dog had chosen this course turned out to be a mistake. The trail back to the ranch passed mostly through a forested area that had been overgrazed. A tangle of exposed tree roots covered the ground, so close together that there was no room for a horse's hoof between them. With every step the horses' pasterns were scraped by the rough roots, making them raw and sore.
Seven hours later, horses and riders were back at the home ranch. Alice and Ceci bathed and put salve on their horse's sore pasterns, rubbed them down, fed and watered them and only then took time for their own needs.
"I had the best, most welcome bath I can ever remember having," Alice wrote. "Then we slept in a comfortable, warm cabin, the same one that had seem primitive and inadequate only a week earlier."
Despite the hardships, the spectacular scenery would never be forgotten, and the camaraderie of other gaited-horse enthusiasts had been a distinct pleasure. Early the next morning, the two bid their new friends a fond farewell and headed for home ... motorized once again.
At the end of that day, they pulled into a boarding stable and asked the owner if he could put up two horses for the night.
"I'm awfully sorry, but we don't have any stalls available," the man responded.
"After we related some of what our horses had been through," Alice wrote, "the mood changed, and couple of a makeshift stalls were set up."
Nearly six years later, Soliviar is 18 years old and still going on long trail rides regularly. Sonica is a few years younger and gets ridden on mountain trails and logging roads throughout each summer, usually 3 to 5 hours every other day.
Alice is still going strong, too. She was 59 years of age when she and Ceci discovered Canada's "real west", and she's only grown younger in the years since.
For further information about Peruvian horses, visit the Internet Web Site of the American Association of Owners and Breeders of Peruvian Paso Horses at: http://www.aaobpph.org
