This past week our "Rusty" has once again gone under the saddle and had a couple of nice workouts with trainer Travis Webster.
Travis has found Rusty to be a very quick learner, a most co-operative stallion to work with. We feel that it is all in the genes... as Rusty is the get of AHA Western Pleasure Riding ChampionFire An Ice.
We have been working with Travis for the past three or four years and found his work to be worthy of handling our McKuster Ranch, LLC horses. Travis is an accredited Josh Lyons natural horse trainer, and he continues to connect with Josh and John Lyons a couple or few times a year and helps them with their horse training clinics across the USA. We like Travis' work because we have never found him to "push" our horses around by force or use of any brutality. We feel quite fortunate to have Travis' talent and ability living in our Walla Walla River neighborhood.
This past Sunday and Monday, we had an appointment with Travis to come out and follow-up with his saddle work training and Rusty handling.
During these training sessions I was able to make a series of 2-minute videos of the progression of their working together. I have now uploaded Lesson 103 through 110 videos of this series to YouTube™ - follow this link to see McKusterRanch's Channel. I still have a few more videos to work on to complete this series. My plans are to continue this video library of Travis' and Rusty's work as they progress together throughout the summer. My objective at this point in time is to be riding in Rusty's well tuned saddle myself by Labor Day '09. Hope you will be sure to come back to see that YouTube™ video when it is published.
This week began with a most beautiful Sunday -Mother's Day- Kittee and I had coffee...
and read the morning's newspaper on the lawn, while watching 4-6-8, then 10 horses relaxing -flagged out flat- in their pasture.Kinda funny... the look on her face. Monday, a couple of folks came with Travis to watch him working with Rusty. The young woman asked me why a couple of horses were flat on the ground? I told her it appeared they were dead.
Humm, I quickly recanted, and told her they were very relaxed, asleep, and that the day before there were ten horses flagged out flat in their pasture.
Watching our very pregnant Goldie, she is one girl that is having a hard time finding a position to lay down in and get relaxed. She is now due to foal in about a month, and we are looking forward to that event.
After a Sunday breakfast of coffee, apple bread-French Toast, with sausage, we proceeded to clean out the basement, barn and loaded the "stuff" into the horse trailer and made a run to the dump, stopping for lunch while passing through Athena... Oregon Territory that is.The rest of this past week has been Kittee and I getting up each day between 5-5:15 a.m. having our coffee, a quick breakfast and heading for work. Busy, busy, busy... Kittee at her office until 5 or 6 p.m., myself making my school bus runs and working the veggie garden until time to go to my 7:00 meetings (M-F City Council, Northwest Quarter Horse, BM Flycasters, this week).
Last evening, (after making the last tilling of our garden) while I was in Pendleton at our fly fishing club meeting, Kittee and Tammy tore apart our bathroom shower stall. Tammy is a commercial ceramic tile setter...
and Kittee was tired of the old stuff. Hopefully all this work with be finished by next weekend, when my Mom is due to arrive in town, and we have a Pendleton family BBQ planned to be held here at the ranch. Hummm.
Plans for this coming weekend is calling for beautiful spring weather - pure sunshine and temperatures around 80°. I have a Walla Walla fly fishing club meeting on Saturday, Kittee will be staying close to home/horses, having a lady friend coming over for a ranch visit, and we will be horseback riding most of the day on Sunday... 'tis the season.
This is all the news I have to share for now. Today we are having morning spring showers with sunbreaks; so I am heading for the garden to finish planting seeds and potatoes as we have passed the last frost/safe period for our garden growing season.
♫ Happy Trails to you, until we meet again ♫
That's Life around McKuster Ranch...
Dale
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