So cold!

Over the weekend we had a very cold wind. The fat and fluffy mustang boys got full rations of grain and extra hay. The wind was blowing from the east, which doesn't happen very often and the metal building would have provided perfect shelter, but Echo wasn't going to go anywhere near a building in such high winds. I put his hay and grain in the door way so he could at least get some protection. Wildairo thought the rock wall was just fine and dandy to stop the wind. He also had a log wind break out in the pasture.

Here's a picture Brad took with his cell phone of the horses a few days before when the weather was much nicer. They like to sleep near each other.


The easterly wind blew piles of tumbleweeds into the corrals. I spotted Echo playing with them the next morning and also tasting them. He left some hay in his tub so I wonder if he ate a lot of them because he wasn't very hungry. I've heard that mustangs will eat sagebrush sometimes.. yuck! It sure smell nice though.

Monday and Tuesday we had no wind but it was bitter cold. Brad had to go somewhere three hours from here and he had to stay there overnight, which meant I was rancher girl for awhile. Everything was running ship shape until I walked up to Echo. He had half a tumbleweed caught in his mane and looked a bit silly. Soon as he saw me he bolted. I was wondering what his deal was then it occurred to me, I was wearing a hat, new coat and big black gloves.. I had become the dreaded stranger danger.

He was snorting and racing about stupidly in his tumbleweed hat. He'd canter around the corral, take off down the alley and race around the big corral, then back again. I just followed trying to talk some sense into him. He ran up to Wildairo who was enjoying his breakfast, "Help me, help me, it's after me and it's using our mum's voice". Wildairo told him he was an idiot and turned his back to him in disgust.

I was noticing the hard frozen ground was giving his hooves a lovely trim. His hooves are very thin and trim down very easy, unlike Wildairo's which are almost as hard as our basalt rock. I'd plod behind him as he went from one corral to the other and the funny thing is he lapped me. I was still making my way up the alley and he was racing back down and skidded to a halt when he saw me. This struck me as funny and I just started laughing. He was like, "mum that is you"! He started rubbing his breathing holes all over my face and pulling my hat with his lips. He also was holding my hair, that was sticking out under my hat, in his mouth like he wanted to be reassured it was really my hair under the hat. I only had one baby carrot for him because I had given Wildairo the rest. Wildairo didn't care that I was dressed differently.

It was -6 degrees F (minus 21 degrees C) that night and I was hoping that the power wouldn't go off because I would have been in trouble without Brad here to get things going again.

I watched the documentary called 'The Wild Horse Redemption' on the Sundance channel. It is about a prison in Colorado that has a wild horse training program. The prisoners in the training program each have 90 days to train a wild horse.


It was very interesting to watch. There was one horse called Samson who was being very difficult, but his trainer finally did get to ride him. It's a shame because they said he had a sore hoof and put him into long term holding for the rest of his days. I really loved a dark bay they had trained and adopted to someone. It showed the Border patrol agents from Washington State there picking out their horses from the ones who had been trained.

When the trainers from the prison went into the wild horse pens to pick out suitable horses to train they were mostly looking for big horses because they said that would make the horse more adoptable to the public. I often wonder if they also look at the temperaments and don't even bother with the more reactive horses like Echo. Echo also happens to be rather small so he may have been out of luck if he'd been there.