One of the commonly asked questions is if I ride the horses. The short answer is sometimes. We have some horses that cannot be ridden due to health issues, not having worked through traumatic histories, or not having been trained to ride yet. Others are rideable, and when we have the time to ride them, yes we do.
How It All Began
I was born into a horse family. We lived on a farm in northern Missouri until I was about 4 or 5 and then moved to a farm in Jefferson County. My parents had me riding horses literally since the time I could sit up. We rode trails as a family and showed our horses in horse shows. We drove a team with a wagon in local parades. Oh, and my first job at 15 years old was as a trail guide at Valley Mount Ranch. We were about as horsey as it gets.
What Does It Look Like Today?
This is a very inelegant photo of Skye and me taken just a couple days ago. Neither of us looks cute as we were simply doing a little R+ training session where I am training Skye to ride with a neck rope instead of a bridle or halter. It's pretty darn fun. I wasn't thinking about posting at the time, so both of us look a hot mess, but the session went very well. Skye loves R+ training. Most of the horses really love it, and you can teach almost any skill using this method.
I am currently completing an R+ training with Mustang Maddy, so I'm sure I'll do a blog post on that soon if you have questions about R+ training. If you're one of our monthly donors (you can find the monthly members tab on this website), you can see me training Shoshone Moon using this technique in the private FaceBook Group for Raising Hope members. It's amazing!! But of course, we didn't get as far as riding-training before Shoshone got sick.
So yes, I ride. I was quite good in my youth. Now at 55, I don't bounce as well as I once did, so falling off is less humorous. So I just don't do that anymore!! Please let me know if you would like to hear more about the riding escapades of my youth; otherwise I won't bore you with the details. Check out our Monthly Membership Group and the cool perks. We'd love to have you as a team member.
Much love, Kit