This weekend was a rare one. Matt wasn’t milking and I wasn’t doing animal chores. Neither of us had any obligations or plans, our weekly farm work didn’t flow into the weekend, and Matt’s ever-ringing cell phone was blissfully quiet. It was a perfect weekend for fun with horses.
On Saturday morning, Matt hitched Pat and Pearl and hooked them up to the bobsled. We loaded some wood scraps from our barn renovation project onto the sled for deposit on the burn pile—so maybe a little bit of weekly farm work did flow into the weekend, but when you’re gliding over snow through an open pasture and the horses are being just totally perfect, it’s really hard to feel like you’re working.
I was surprised by the bobsled. It’s a barebones thing and people mover—just runners and decking. We sat on a well-placed hay bale and that was the fanciest thing about the operation. But the motion was incredible. We got the horses going at a trot through snow up to their knees, and I couldn’t stop smiling. It was like a magic carpet, or riding a broomstick, but it was real, there was no trick, and it came along with the promise of a future of crisp weekend bobsled rides.
After we dumped the wood onto the burn pile, we turned around and headed to Beef Hill, the wide, north-facing slope where we grazed the beef herd this summer. When we got there, Tim, driving Bear and Duke, was pulling some friends up the hill on a toboggan. A dozen friends and neighbors were there, toting sleds, snowshoes, skis, and tractor inner tubes, taking advantage of our very first horse drawn sledding adventure.
A few days before, someone had come up with the idea of having the horses run in a loop—they would pull people up the hill, the people would sled down, and the horses would meet them at the bottom to pull them back up for another run, eliminating the hardest part of sledding, the walk back up the hill.
It worked like a dream. It was good, hard work for the horses, I got a face full of snow on a blockbuster toboggan ride, we drank hot chocolate and caught up with friends we hadn’t seen in a while. It was some serious fun, and just like the bobsled ride, there was the feeling that this was just the first time.
Gillian
On Saturday morning, Matt hitched Pat and Pearl and hooked them up to the bobsled. We loaded some wood scraps from our barn renovation project onto the sled for deposit on the burn pile—so maybe a little bit of weekly farm work did flow into the weekend, but when you’re gliding over snow through an open pasture and the horses are being just totally perfect, it’s really hard to feel like you’re working.
I was surprised by the bobsled. It’s a barebones thing and people mover—just runners and decking. We sat on a well-placed hay bale and that was the fanciest thing about the operation. But the motion was incredible. We got the horses going at a trot through snow up to their knees, and I couldn’t stop smiling. It was like a magic carpet, or riding a broomstick, but it was real, there was no trick, and it came along with the promise of a future of crisp weekend bobsled rides.
After we dumped the wood onto the burn pile, we turned around and headed to Beef Hill, the wide, north-facing slope where we grazed the beef herd this summer. When we got there, Tim, driving Bear and Duke, was pulling some friends up the hill on a toboggan. A dozen friends and neighbors were there, toting sleds, snowshoes, skis, and tractor inner tubes, taking advantage of our very first horse drawn sledding adventure.
A few days before, someone had come up with the idea of having the horses run in a loop—they would pull people up the hill, the people would sled down, and the horses would meet them at the bottom to pull them back up for another run, eliminating the hardest part of sledding, the walk back up the hill.
It worked like a dream. It was good, hard work for the horses, I got a face full of snow on a blockbuster toboggan ride, we drank hot chocolate and caught up with friends we hadn’t seen in a while. It was some serious fun, and just like the bobsled ride, there was the feeling that this was just the first time.
Gillian
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