Today we had decided to try to finish off as many of the other trails as we could today, with an eye toward putting together a good color-coded map for this place. The one provided by the Forest service is terrible, with no trail colors mentioned, no legend, no trail lengths, not even close to being accurate in terms of where the trails actually were, so I decided I would create a new one and give it to Kathy for their future use. We headed out the red North trail, which we skipped on Wednesday because the day was getting too long, and that was truly a nice trail, mostly wooded, narrow single track, had to be careful not to brush against trees which were really crowding the trail. There was a lesser used shortcut that we got turned around on, going straight when we should have cut right, but we soon got back on track. Again, the trails were much more twisty than usual, and lots of climbs, some quite steep, would have been nice to have a few more switch-backs, but the terrain really makes that difficult. After completing the Red North trail, and took the Blue trail straight out until we hit the Green North trail, which was also quite nice, then finally hitting the Blue Trail again, which we took north so that we could go all the way to the "Dragon's Head." If you look at the map, the park is sort of shaped like a dragon looking east, so the farthest point is the Dragon's Head in the northeast corner. Once we picked up the Blue Trail, it opened right up into a field, and normally we would have done a fabulous gallop through there, but the horses were already pretty tired from all the climbing, so a bit of a canter was the best they could muster. We circled the Dragon's Head, then when the Blue trail hit the Green trail again, we followed that again. We soon met back up with the Blue trail, and stopped for a lunch break, then headed back west again, picking up the Green south trail, which soon became our very favorite trail in the forest, which is saying a lot because they all had a lot of nice qualities. Once we completed the Green trail, we made a beeline home on the Blue trail, with a total of 13 miles today! It was much more of a workout than a typical 13 mile ride, though, this is a GREAT place if you want to really condition your horse, especially if you're running endurance races. Trails had a few rocky sections, but not too bad, not enough for me to put boots on Apollo, though Hubby put them on his mare, mostly because his haven't been falling off like mine have lately. We really like this place, and had it not been for this group ride this week, I doubt we would have had much company here at all, which the ranger Justin said as much. Got the horses back on their lines and dragged ourselves up the hill to the RV, where we all crashed for the evening. The dogs flopped down and didn't move all night! A great workout for all!
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