Between this ride and Vail Lake I started a new diet. I started it as a result of my asthma having become much worse at the beginning of the year. Some time ago, a diet for asthmatics came out which cut out red wheat, dairy, and refined sugars. So I went on this to see what it did for my asthma. My results have been remarkable. A pain I’ve had for something like a decade has disappeared completely. My doctor thought it was my gall bladder but nothing was ever discovered. I’d started pursuing it with a gastroenterologist but dropped it when it became clear my new diet solved the problem. I also promptly dropped ten pounds.
The new diet does create a bit of a problem. It’s difficult to find things that will survive in the saddle bag which fit into the new diet. I’ve done pretty well in that department, finding several gluten-free breakfast and granola-type bar selections which seem to do well. I can’t drink Gatorade anymore, as it uses a wheat product as a sweetener, so I had to find a different electrolyte replacer. So far I’m doing reasonably well on providing my own foods. Foods provided by ride management can be harder to work with. I plan to mostly depend on myself as much as possible.
The ride started at 5am. The starting line was in the heart of down town Virginia City, about a 30 minute ride out of base camp. So I had Hoss saddled at ready to go and mounted up at 4:30am. We rode to the start in the pitch dark. Knowing many riders don’t like the use of head lamps, I kept mine turned to the red setting. It really didn’t do me any good. I couldn’t see much of anything or tell where the road was. I was reliant on Hoss, who was much too hopped up by the energy of ride day to make good decisions.
Once we started and got a little separated from the large body of riders, I turned my head lamp to the white light so I’d have some chance of seeing where we were going. Hoss initially spooked when I switched it over. Once it was on, though, he headed out confidently. It really helps when the rider has an idea where the horse is supposed to be going. We caught up to another rider who slowed down to let us pass. I’d say it was clear she didn’t like the light I was using.
I understand most people do just fine without additional light. I don’t. I need that extra light, or it’s like riding in the pitch black and zero idea where anything is. If Hoss steps off the trail, I won’t know anything about it until he’s headed off down some crazy slope. And, no, I can’t trust him not to do that. If we’re on any kind of switch back, he will head off cross country to catch up with the other horses, and he doesn’t seem to much care about the terrain. So I need the head lamp. I try to be respectful of other riders. I expect the same from them. I try to balance my needs with the preferences of others, and there’s only so far that can go.
As the sky lightened I was able to shut of my head lamp. Which was probably fortunate as we had caught up with other riders on a section of single track trail. We weren’t going any faster than the leaders in that pack, so we were pretty stuck in the group for a time.
It eventually opened up into a nice trail where the faster horses left us behind. Hoss was trying to keep up with a couple of horses that were significantly faster than him on a section of dirt road when they got out of sight. We continued down the road for some time before I realized I hadn’t seen any trail markers in a while. I turned back. When I saw other riders coming toward us, I figured we must be on the right track and turned around again. All of us rode around aimlessly for a while before realizing we must have missed a turn. Heading back up the road, we found the turn. It was marked pretty well if you were coming at it from the wrong direction. I’m not sure why Hoss missed it. Usually he catches that sort of thing. This time he moved confidently on down the wrong way.
Once we were back on track, I noticed I’d lost my cell phone! At this point we were with two other riders. I commented my phone was gone. Lo and behold, one of the riders had seen it on the trail, gotten off and picked it up. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I hadn’t gotten it back – especially since it died less than a week later, forcing me to go to the trouble of replacing the damn thing – but I wasn’t heartbroken to have it back.
Cut off time for the first vet check was 9am, so we needed to really keep our pace up to make it. The first twenty four miles were fairly easy, with trail that was largely trottable, so it wasn’t impossible, but the way the cut off times were split struck me as odd. Four hours for the first twenty four miles, four hours and fifteen minutes for the next fifteen miles, two hours and forty-five minutes for the next twelve miles, five hours for the next twenty five miles, four hours and fifteen minutes for the next sixteen miles, and one hour and fifteen minutes for the last eight miles. That is, of course, assuming one is riding right at the cut off times. A rider would have more time if they were riding ahead of the cut off times.
We made it in to the first vet check well under our cut off time. I had a limited supply of syringe doses of electrolytes to give Hoss on the trail. Between that, and knowing ride management would not be taking anything to the last vet check, I rode all the way to the first vet check without electrolyting Hoss. I figured that was the easiest way to manage him. He would do best skipping a dose early in the ride rather than later. As it was, he took a little longer than usual to come down at the vet check but did just fine. Once he ate his electrolyte bran mash his heart rate regularized and I was happy with how he was looking.
During the first twenty four miles, Hoss had gotten cut in his mouth somewhere. I couldn’t figure out what had gotten bloodied, and even the vet couldn’t find anything. Still I chose to continue on without the bit at all, simply attaching my reins to the sides of his halter. After twenty five miles I was reasonably sure he’d be manageable enough to deal with sans bit.
The second half of the first loop was a bit more challenging, and I began to understand why the cut off times were split up so oddly. We got in to Bailey Canyon and it was a slog. The rocks were large and unstable. About five miles in, Hoss got stuck in the rocks and lost a hind shoe. He wasn’t sore, being at six weeks since I last shod him, so we kept going at a reasonable pace. I knew we’d have to slow down if the ground got hard, so we made time on the soft stuff.
We were once again trotting confidently along when I realized the horses ahead of us weren’t on the ride. I perused my map and decided we’d missed yet another turn. Another rider did catch up to us at this point and we turned around together. The turn we missed was shortly after crossing the road, once again not excessively well marked for the direction we had come at it. I think we’d done an extra mile or more.
We got to the “trot-by” vet check at mile thirty nine with plenty of time left. Hoss was beginning to feel that lost shoe by this point. He showed a little off to the vet at the trot by. After our fifteen minute hold, I gave him a dose of electrolytes and we made our best effort to walk twelve miles in just over four hours.
This sounds like a pretty easy thing to do. Not so much with Hoss. He must have the world’s slowest equine walk. Left to his own devices, he won’t exceed three miles an hour, and prefers something closer to two miles per hour. He’ll trot an easy seven to ten miles per hour, but his walk simply doesn’t match up. To complicate matters, the rest of the loop back to camp was nothing if not rocky and hard. So we really couldn’t trot at all.
A section of this trail is referred to as the “S.O.B.’s.” When we got there, I understood why. Two of the steepest uphill and downhill sections of trail I think I have ever seen. There’s a power line access road near trails I train on here at home that’s similar. It’s just as steep. What it doesn’t have is the loose scree rock. It was clear to me I wasn’t going to be able to safely walk up or down those hills. Hoss was going to have to carry me, lost shoe or not. It took some doing, and he lost a front shoe in the bottom of one of the hills – I expect he stepped on it but didn’t pull it in Bailey Canyon – but we made it through.
We got back to base camp just at 5:00pm, cut off time. I was leading Hoss on the road in to camp. His other hind shoe was loose. I didn’t want to ride him on the paved area because I was afraid he’d be more likely to slip. With half his shoes gone and one nearly off, I had to shoe Hoss before I vetted him through. We had an hour hold. I think I set a personal best record for shoeing a horse.
Once he was shod I took him to the vet and he passed, although I was asked to trot him twice. Not really a surprise. The same vet saw him at Twenty Mule Team and she made me trot him several times there, too. He was his usual obstinate self about the trot out.
We headed back out on the trail at 6:00pm, with less than ten hours of real trail time left to us to complete the last forty nine miles. At Twenty Mule Team, it took Hoss nine hours to complete the last thirty five miles. I knew I had my work cut out for me, and our odds of beating cut off times were slender, but we had to try.
We were the last ones out on the trail. No one left behind us. We got out of the stickiest part before dark, and were climbing a hill some eight miles out of camp when Hoss snatched off a front shoe. He was immediately foot sore, the kind of foot soreness that made him dangerous to ride. He would stumble when he stepped on something unpleasant. At this point we were eight miles and two hours out. In order to make the cut off, we needed to be making a solid five miles an hour or better. We’d made four miles per hour. There was no way we were going to finish. Even if he hadn’t lost the shoe, we probably would not have made cut off. I dismounted, got over my frustration, and began walking back.
There were no glow bars on this part of the trail. We were walking back in an area with multiple turn offs. It was very easy to make wrong turns. I had my head lamp on and was carefully looking at the road for hoof prints. Using hoof prints wasn’t as good a trick as one might think, as the area has multiple herds of wild horses. In the daylight I can easily discern the difference between shod and bare hoof prints, but in the dark it’s not nearly so easy. I had my GPS on the bread-crumb track screen and watched that to get us back. I got off track several times in spite of the GPS. I would head down a road and the track on the GPS wouldn’t diverge until I’d gone some way and we’d have to turn around and track back. I think if I hadn’t had the GPS I might very well have unsaddled Hoss and found myself a reasonably comfortable place to lay down until dawn or someone thought to call me, whichever came first.
A few times I made Hoss pack me up a hill or on the softer sections of the trail where he wasn’t so foot sore. During the times I was riding him he made very clear he knew where he was going. Unfortunately when I was off he didn’t seem to realize we need to go back down the same trail and didn’t indicate to me when I’d made a wrong turn.
Four times I took a fall. The first time was while walking along what I thought was flat road. I couldn’t see the rut in the artificial light of my head lamp. I set my foot on the edge and slipped, falling right on my butt. Twice I slipped on rocks while walking down hill and fell. The fourth time nearly cost Hoss his life. We were walking on a downhill when Hoss decided he had to have a bite to eat, and he had to have it right then. He stopped and whipped his head to the side to snatch at some grass, yanking me right off my feet. It didn’t help Hoss was behaving somewhat like a thousand pound lead weight I had to drag behind me. When he pulled me off my feet, it was all I could do not to just leave him there.
By the time all was said and done, we rolled in to camp about 1:00am. Between all the wrong turns, we added an extra two miles to our trip back. I presented Hoss to the vet, then got him unsaddled and settled in for the night. I crawled in to my tent and sulked my way to sleep.
I’m really hoping our run of bad luck is over now.
