The Grant County Horse Show

Shirley at Ride a Good Horse asked about Colt's pedigree...so before I forget, here's Colt's link to allbreedpedigree.com. He goes back to Cal Bar, King Fritz, and Sugar Wes on the sire's side and has quite a bit of racing blood on the dam's side going back to Doc's Hotrodder and Black Deck.

The hay is still drying in the field. We tested it yesterday and it's still damp about 1 inch into the top of the bale...making progress!! We'll test again tonight and pray it'll be dry enough to stack. We need to get the water back on the fields...soon!!!

Yesterday's trip up to John Day for the Grant County Horse Show was a fun time...but almost deja vu of last year's competition!!

We left home at 5 AM to be there by 7. At one point during the drive, it got down to 36 degrees with lots of fog going over the summit! It was a beautiful drive though.

As we drive into the fairgrounds, we see that there are puddles of water everywhere!! They had gotten 1 1/2 inches of rain...I'll stop complaining about our 1/2 inch!!

The arena had standing water in it too! As they worked it with the arena groomer, the puddles disappeared, but it was really sloppy in spots. My freshly bathed Colt and his cleaned and polished saddle were splattered with sand/mud within minutes...sigh...

This was more of a cow horse competition, but you could pick and choose which events you wanted to enter. We did all three...cutting, reining, and working cow horse.

We placed second in the cutting and the reining...just like last year...but, I'm not even going to mention the scores. We had a WP judge who didn't know a dang thing about scoring cow horse events...she actually gave an 88 to one of the horses in a cutting class!!! All we could do was laugh...and laugh even harder when we saw the score sheets!

I'm feeling a lot better about picking my cattle out of the herd though. I was last in my class to cut and the cattle had gotten scattered pretty badly in the last two goes. I wasn't sure I could get anything out that would not be a runner, but I was able to get a couple out that hadn't been worked yet in front of me and Colt did his job real well.

The arena had some boggy holes in it, so everyone kept it pretty conservative on their reining runs. But, it was drying out by the time we got to the Working Cow Horse class. You can see Colt slipping a little bit as he tries to circle up the cow.

I went ahead and uploaded the first part of my fence class (the boxing the the run on the fence)...after that part, I was having a total grey hair moment and didn't get the cow circled in both directions and we got a big fat 0...that part is just too embarrassing to post!!!

But, for both Colt's and my second ever attempt at running the fence we did OK. We had a blast and after watching the video over and over, I learned a lot of what NOT to do!!!

Oh...the part I forgot to mention were the cows...for whatever reason, the nice Angus/Herford type heifers that they usually get weren't there. We got to cut and run the fence on Corriente roping heifers...now that was interesting!