ADRENALINE RUSH - AHA stallion

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 Champion
Fire 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.

Un lugar sequro para los caballos.

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

Adrenaline Rush

Stardate 111607

Took my wife on a little day trip to Bend, OR today to see a horse. While there we got a real Adrenaline Rush out of our ride.It was a year and a half ago, after we purchased Goldie, that we were introduced (by word of mouth) to Adrenaline Rush and his pedigree. We were really hoping to find a Purebred Arabian stallion, chestnut in body color with flaxen mane and tail to breed with our palomino mare. However, he was far away in Bend, and the situation just didn't work out. All this time I have kept talking to Goldie about Adrenaline Rush, and hoping someday we might get to meet him.

Today started quite early as we planned to leave the ranch at 7:00 a.m. after feeding horses and loading the car for our day trip. Fueled up in Pendleton and made a bee line for Bend, about 280 miles from home through the high Oregon desert. It was a most pleasant day for travel, as it was mostly overcast, warm air, with an occasional shower along the way. As we were traveling to Bend, Kittee was reading aloud the new book we had bought this past week - The Stallion by James P. McCall, Ph.D. It was most interesting reading while at the same time put the fear of God's most noble four legged creature in our mind. We got to the Double J Ranch just in time for our 1:30 p.m. appointment with Jean and David Straight (Adrenaline Rush's owners) and the vet, Dr. "Charlie", to do a vet check of "Rusty".

Everything went well, and halfway through the vet examination we took Rusty out to the round pen, gave him a few laps of warmup, and watched his moves.

What a horse....






After the round pen workout Jean, David, Kittee and I surrounded Rusty and adored him with pets and apple cookies. Like his sire, Fire An Ice, Rusty is a most well mannered stallion. He is a very easy handler, and has the beauty of a purebred with Arabian legend *Bask++ showing twice on his AHA registration front page, on his sire and dam side.

















Here we had the opportunity to see how Rusty flies.


















Rusty is a self-longeing horse, and very showy with his long flaxen mane and tail flowing in the breeze of his movements. He is a seven year old, full of vim and vigor as we watched him making 5 of these flying leaps during his playtime in the round pen today.

We were just thrilled to be in the presence of such a very mild-mannered stallion that had the wonderful horseality, (nothing like the horror stories we had just read about) characteristics, and the handsome looks of the Arabian horse breed that we had been looking for. He is not a pencil- nosed Arabian, and we feel he should make a great sire for our palomino quarab Goldie's foals.

Before we left, David walked Rusty out to the mare's paddock and we witnessed his mild manner around the mares and his deep gruntal voice neighing to the mares.


Well, to top this story off...
before we left the Double J Ranch, Kittee pulled out the McKuster Ranch checkbook and made a deposit to buy Rusty for our ranch stallion.

This is a big move for us, but we feel that we are going in the right direction. We plan to have our stallion's domain constructed in a month or two, and be able to have Rusty at home for our 2008 breeding season.

After being thrilled by this Adrenaline Rush exposure, we faced the long trip back to the ranch, but first we had to make a dinner stop at McGrath's Fish House in Bend. WOW!! what a treat for the palate. Kittee made the long drive back home, as I was quite tired since I have been awake since 1:30 a.m. --- must be the excitement of a year and a half wait to meet Rusty. We got back to the ranch around 10:30 p.m. to feed our herd, make this blog post and get to bed by midnight.

You can now find the expanded and updated Adrenaline Rush webpage at http://mckuster-ranch.com/AdrenalineRush.html

What a day... in the life at McKuster Ranch --- Dale & Kittee