Friday, April 27, 2018 – First Ride at Wranglers Camp

Got up early to dialyze Hubby, and downloaded my plan for my ride this afternoon. Got everything wrapped up (including having to retrieve Dottie from the kennel at the main gate, she somehow managed to slip out of both her collar and the new harness I bought for her last week!. Such a slippery girl!), and was saddled up by 1:00. I had double-checked at the gate about dogs being on the trail, and evidently that's fine, as long as they're leashed in the campground, so Lola was able to come with us this time. I headed out the trailhead at the foot of our loop, and promptly missed the opening of the trail I had intended to take. By the time I realized the trail I was looking for didn't run into the trail I was on, I was too far along to turn back, so I kept going, revising my ride as I went. Unfortunately, the trail I was on was only a couple of miles long, and before I knew it, I was heading right back into camp. I looked at my GPS and reckoned that if I followed the utility line for a bit, it should take me to the back end of the original trail I had intended to take, and then I could do it in reverse. Turns out there are a LOT of trails out here that aren't on the trail map, and the one on the utility line quickly became a well traveled path that did, indeed, take me to the trail I wanted. I had no more trouble following the trails and map after that, though I'm a little surprised as how few trail markers they've put in, essentially only at the intersections, which are few and far between. No tree markers, not even a paint splotch occasionally to give one reassurance. If you miss a marker at an intersection, there's very little else to go on. I ended up doing a bit over eight miles, and I have to say, even though I love being on the back of my horse, this was a pretty boring ride. There was maybe a quarter of a mile of single track trails, all the rest were at least ATV width, some were full-on forest roads, and there was even a paved road or two that became part of the horse trail. Not my idea of interesting riding. There was a lot of deep mud made worse by the hundreds of horse hooves that had plowed through them, and there was a honeycomb of alternative trails in many places, all trying to avoid the muck. That didn't last very long, and was replaced by some heavily graveled areas (thank goodness I had put my horse boots on before leaving camp!), and a lot of roads that circled around fields. It felt like I was riding on someone's farm. Not my favorite kind of riding. I'm hoping tomorrow's ride will be a bit more interesting, with maybe some more single track, wooded trails, but I'm not holding my breath. After a beer and dinner, remarkably, after not having a cell signal all day, it suddenly popped into one bar of 4G if it was left sitting in a chair outside, enough to start up Netflix and watch a few more Longmires before the battery on my phone crapped out. That was it, bedtime!!

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