Okay, so these are ponies, but I'm going to count it.
We had the awesome opportunity to spend several days at a "dude ranch" last week with my mom's side of the family. I'll be talking about our trip in a future post once I get my hands on more pictures from other people (my camera wasn't functioning correctly and I had no idea how to go about resetting it... #oops), but for the sake of this specific bucket list post, let me focus on the fact that there were horses galore!
Doug and I got to take horses out on 1.5 hour rides across the southern Utah countryside. We went across fields, through streams and ponds, up hillsides, and over rocky terrain. On one ride, we even got rained/hailed on at the end! Antimony is located in a valley about 40 miles north of Bryce Canyon, and they have a thunderstorm pretty much every other day. (We had a mixture of clear skies with hot sunshine AND cloud-coated skies with rain DAILY... the weather would change throughout the day.) The result: it's green, it's not boiling like Utah County, and we got to see gorgeous country views like this:
Dual riding with the kids wasn't allowed for safety reasons, and you had to be at least 8 years old to go riding on your own horse across the countryside, but the kids DID get to ride ponies around the ranch grounds. Nicole took advantage of every opportunity she had to go on "pony rides" and even got to participate in the relay race portion of our family rodeo. Austin did one loop around the grounds on his pony, and that was all he wanted to do. He seemed a bit apprehensive while riding. He's in a phase where animal noises scare him, so I think he was worried that the pony might whinny at any moment. He seemed rather proud of himself once he dismounted, and kept pointing back at the pony and jabbering away about what he had just accomplished. And, as I indicated before, Nicole LOVED riding on ponies. She's only ever done "merry-go-round-style" pony rides where the ponies all go in a circle around a central wheel, so it was a different experience to ride the pony "free range" style. She even got to ride an actual horse around the grounds on our first day at the ranch. I don't have pictures of that in my possession yet, though.
^^^Nicole participating in our rodeo relay on a full-sized horse, helped by an uncle and great-uncle while a ranch wrangler reaches to take the ladle from her. The relay involved seeing which team could use a ladle to transfer the most water from one bucket to another. It was very tricky because you wanted to go quickly to beat the other team, but bouncing on a trotting horse made the water spill out of the ladle! And you had to be careful not to knock the bucket over when you were bringing your horse around the barrel that the bucket was placed on.
We got to feed some of the horses, and even got to "paint" a couple of them with chalk dipped in water. Since it rains a lot down in Antimony, the chalk just washes off in the next rainstorm. The horses really seemed to enjoy the sensation of getting "chalked"--it was like a bunch of back scratches happening all at once! We got to watch the horses stampede out into the fields to graze at the end of the day, and a foal was born sometime during our last night there, so we got to see a brand-spankin-new baby horse. Horses, horses, horses!
Our trip was more than just horses, of course, but that's for another post. Just enjoy a couple pics I managed to snag of my little humans riding big ponies. Ugh, they're growing up too fast!!!!
And, just for fun... a throwback to the last time I was on a horse... back in college! Aww, Tuf was such a sweetheart.
My "30 Before 30" Bucket List can be found here.
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