velessa | Sunday

Sunday it rained intermittently all day long. I was at work, and it was sprinkling off and on up there. usually on rainy days, we have maybe 5 riders total come up to ride in the arena, and we're utterly dead the rest of the day. so usually the trainees have to oil some saddles and groom some horses and then they can use their ride credit to ride in the arena during their shift. but this rainy day was different...first of all, it was only sprinkling so we couldn't close the trails due to rain; it just wasn't wet enough. even so, usually a little water is enough to deter most people from riding. I don't know what was special about this day, but we had ride after ride of people come up! it was very, very strange. we have a sign up sheet for rides where we take down the names of everyone who comes for a ride. there are 25 name slots per page. on a usual rainy day, we would be lucky to get half a page of names. but this time by the end of the day we had 4 1/2 pages filled! we had something like 80 riders! that's not a bad thing, we need the business, but everyone was completely perplexed as to why we had so many people come up in the cold and wet. also the guides were not thrilled because people were coming up spaced out just enough so that as soon as a guide came back with one ride, they would have to go right back out again. that does suck when it happens (part of the reason I hated being a guide after a while!)

something good is that we just got four new horses! yay! we really need more horses because ours have been struggling to keep up with the amount of rides they've had to do since the weather started warming up. two of these new horses will work very well for beginners (Joe and Jackson), one for intermediates (Scout), but one of them will definitely only be for advanced riders/our staff for quite a while (Bailey). he just doesn't know how to do _anything_ and he spooks at everything. fun fun. but they are pretty cute so here are some pics I took of them :)

Bailey Jackson