For three months this summer this was my home. My tent I only slept in, the dinning shelter I only ate in, but here I spent countless hours both joyful and sorrowful. We spent almost all our time leading 4-5 trail rides per day. What free time we were supposed to get was spent feeding, watering, saddling, scooping manure.
Around July 4th several things happened which made life much more difficult. The temperature went from 60's and raining to 120+ with 70-80% humidity, several staff members were caught off-guard and succumbed to various degrees of heat exhaustion. (Oh yeah during the heat advisory which said to take it easy, White Pine built the turtle pond. Only the horses truly observed the warnings.) A storm blew through and took out our tarp rack, (seen above) two posts snapped at ground level, and so for several days that week we had no shade at Horse Corral. This was also the week I contracted anaplasmosis, a rare tick-borne bacteria which kills the red blood cells. For the next month I experienced incredible fatigue, minor to severe dizziness, and almost constant nausea. That is not to say we had no fun at the Horse Corral, once we did nothing for a half-hour while I stalked a deer who wandered into the coral. I was within ten feet of her when she flagged her tail and walked away.
The instant the horses got into the corral they began mowing the knee high grass down to the ground. Combined with the constant rain the corral started to get really muddy, we joked that in order to catch the horses you needed a lifejacket.
|