Is the Adventure Ending?

~No one can keep me down if I have a mind to get up.~

~Netta Simpson 1902~

When I started blogging in Oct of 2008, I had a lot of stuff to talk about...things that I wanted to explain, so the readers would understand what I was doing. One of those posts was in January 2009.

River Bug Rambler (aka "Colt")

That post told the story of how and why I got Colt, and what we had done since I bought him in November of 2006. It was a LONG post, since it covered a little over 2 years of training and showing.

The day I picked Colt out of the pen of long yearlings. Nov 2006
He wasn't my first choice, but he was the right choice in hind sight.

My Man had to come over to Todd's place to see this new acquisition I'd made! Dec 2006

The first line of that old post read: "This is the story of my adventure...a challenge to myself...to train a horse as a working cow horse."

If you've been following me along, you've probably read quite a few of the 100 posts that I've done on Colt. Of course this is another Colt post...documenting yet another monumental event in his training.

Colt in the bridle.

Tuesday is the first day that I rode Colt without the hackamore under the bridle...no crutch to fall back on. My hand felt almost naked without that wad of reins in my hand. I spent time walking him around the arena just pondering the things we'd done in the past 5 1/2 years.

I remember taking him to that 2 year old Futurity halter class. Our class was the first thing in the morning. But, I spent the rest of the day watching the other horses. The 3 year old class in the snaffle...the 4 year old class in the hackamore...the 5 year old class in the two-rein...and the final stage, the 6 year old class in the bridle (and they had to rope a steer too)...oh my...what had I gotten myself into. Would I ever be able to ride a horse like the fine ranch/cow horses I was seeing...and train it myself?!? I had so much to learn myself...let alone teach it to a green horse! I din't know how to cut a cow, do a spin, or do a flying lead change!

But, here we are. In a very short 20 days, we'll be at the Futurity...the final stage as a 6 year old. We're just going to do the best we can...and have fun while we're at it!!!

What will we do after that? Well, at the time I bought Colt, I had never heard of Mike Bridges and his 5 year Project. And, even though Colt is working pretty good in the bridle, he has a lot of holes. There are a lot of steps that I didn't do (because I didn't know about them...remember, I'm just doing this by the seat of my pants) so, we'll be going back to the hackamore and completing the Project with Mike Bridges; following the steps that he has outlined through years of experience to build a true "California Vaquero Bridle Horse."

I almost quit the Futurity at the two-rein stage because of the 5 year Project, but a friend of mine said I couldn't do that...she wouldn't let me do that. She said that I needed to finish what I set out to do no matter what, and that Colt and I were a team.

Why couldn't I do both? I thought it would be very confusing for Colt and didn't want to screw him all up. But, Colt is a very flexible horse...through all my goof ups in his training...doing something wrong and having to fix it...he's always had the attitude of "OK, we'll just do it this way now." He never argues about it. I've never had such a willing horse in all my life...and probably won't again.

So, Colt and I are coming close to the end of our first "adventure," but we'll just be moving on to the next one!