Pasture Prime

Wow!  I got lost with the time (lack of sunlight doesn't help either).  I kept thinking of all these great blogs, but just couldn't seem to sit still long enough to write them.

Let's backtrack to Thanksgiving:  I hope everyone enjoyed theirs.  We were lucky enough to have most of the kids and grandkids spend lots of time with us - and my mother made it up the mountain, too.  Last week was actually really nice weather - and I still didn't manage to get on either of my horses.  GunDiva and hubby came up on Tues. night last week; I hoped to drag her out for a ride the next day, but alas, she had a book to rewrite and get published.  OK, so Bill and I are now enjoying reading the e-version of "Hunted Lyon" and I have to forgive her for not riding with mom.

Thanksgiving dawned warm and sunny and we ended up with 18 for dinner.  I've decided keeping up with 18 family members is much more time consuming than 18 guests.  There's always so much to catch up on, even though we stay in close touch.  We had the traditional turkey and everyone brought lots of yummy stuff to add to the table!

Friday, most of us went to the Catch the Glow Christmas parade in Estes Park, to start off the holiday season.  It's been a couple of years since I was able to go and we had a grand time, including the traditional pizza at Bob & Tony's prior to the parade.  We didn't even freeze our toes and fingers this year!

We had some fun guests over the weekend and had planned on fixing fence on Sunday afternoon, then moving the horses on Monday.  We spent three and a half hours at it and still had only gotten about half done.  We just hadn't realized all the damage from the winds and flood.  We ended up spending another three hours fencing on Monday and decided to wait until Tuesday to move the horses.  I had not been watching the weather, so when Nebalee called Tuesday morning to ask if we were ready for the big snowstorm, I was caught totally off-guard.  Looking out the window, we decided we had better move the horses right now!  We gathered them up and didn't even feed them breakfast.  Being the great travelers they are, they loaded right up and off we went.  We did take a couple of bales of hay with us, even though they were going to some great pasture.  We had planned on staying in Ft. Collins for the night so we could go to a grandson's Christmas band program.

It wasn't very exciting when we dropped them off this time; since they hadn't had breakfast, they just trotted the short way to the grass and started eating!

We laughed and left them there.  The next day we stopped by to check on them and found one irritated grulla horse and two racing white horses!  There was 10 inches of new snow on the ground and -4 degrees.  I thought maybe they had heard the car and were coming to tell us they wanted to go home.  Ha!  See what I know?  When we got to the gate, Jesse came charging out of the trees, barely stopping at the fenceline.  The look on her face told the story:  something had been in their pen.  We checked the hay and decided they had indeed had help with the hay pile.  The ground was so torn up from their hooves, and the snow was dry and didn't make good prints, so we could only surmise the visitor.  However, while fixing the fences, Bill and I had run across quite a few moose tracks and some fairly fresh moose droppings.  My guess is there might be an unhappy moose thinking we brought in some nasty neighbors!  Look at this face!

Biggify this to see the real dragon face!

That is definitely her "you had better get out of my pen" face.  Washoe chases dogs out of the pen; I think he had a lesson in how to chase bigger game because he was having a great time trying to keep up with Jesse.  Ranger was just 'staying out of the way'!  Bill pulled out an apple for them to share and they calmed right down.  Ranger had to show off his snowy nose.

We checked back again today and found them happily grazing the pasture, even in the deep snow.  Their hay was scattered but hardly eaten.  We called and they came a runnin'.  (We have a really cool video, but after multiple tries, we can't get blogger to load it.)  Fed them a couple oat granola bars, got some good hugs and went on home.  Sure do miss them here, but it is far better for them where they are; they get to run and dig and act like the wild ones they are!
Bionic Cowgirl