Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Life is an Adventure, or, Little Horse Mountain

Life is an adventure. Whatever we do, it will be fun. Those are the takeaways from our trip to Little Horse Mountain, even though some  of it was not so fun for Spot and me.

Evening views

Mt Shasta

Sheep in the exhaust field

Sunset at Little Horse Mountain

Nursery handler walks to the post on Friday

Nursery field on Monday

Nursery handler and dog walking their sheep to exhaust on Monday

At the pen in Nursery

Cooling off after Nursery

Ember

JJ
It was so neat to watch the Nursery dogs. I love seeing the green dogs when they are just starting their sheepdog trial career. The foundations are there but the experiences need to be filled in....so exciting!

Ryme and I sorted sheep out of the exhaust to drive back up the field for afternoon runs on Sunday. Photo by Gloria A.

Ryme and Nell push hot and slow moving sheep through the field back up to setout. A long walk. Photo by Gloria A.
Ryme had a great day on Sunday. We sorted a bunch of the ewes out of the exhaust, leaving some behind to graze and with Gloria and Nell's help, we walked them all the way back up the field to setout for the afternoon runs. By this time it was hot out and the grass was pretty tall. It was hard to push them and I was glad that we had the two dogs. Ryme acted like he was far younger than his eight years and worked like a champ. When another handler came on a quad bike to pick us up, Ryme ran with the bike like a two year old. He had a blast! He looked so happy. This made me happy. :)

Spot seemed anxious and confused and we had two RTs in his trial runs. We will be taking an indefinite period of time away from trials, and go back to as much "real" work as we can find, and just rebuild what we had. He seems affected by the negative experiences  at the trials, so it will take some time to get his attitude back. It is all puzzling but I just keep telling myself, Life is an Adventure.

Aside from that, this is always a great trial to go to and help with, and a lot of fun. The sportsmanship level is high and the gathering of great handlers is a wonderful place to be, amongst over-the-top hospitality and a high level of very competent trialling laced with a lot of good sense of humor.  Everybody pitches in, to make it happen.

Whatever we do, it will be fun. Life is an adventure.

2 comments:

Amy Coapman said...

It was such a happy surprise to see you at LHM, Billy! Thanks so much for helping out - it was really neat to see you, Ryme, Gloria and Nell push those sloggy sheep back up to setout. Hopefully we'll get together again before too long.

Kathy said...

Billy, yes, life is an adventure and a journey. Our boys have challenged us, but they want to work for us and we keep working with them as we both learn together with them.