High above Treeline

Updrafts of warm winds whispered against sun-hot skin. The smell of horse sweat and leather. And mountains caressed with green and brown velvet textures that were outlined with cobalt blue highliner. Backcountry days like this you treasure for the memory of visual overload. Of views that start way down on the Jumping Pound Creek and then through thickly forested slopes of pines - lodgepole, jack and higher rarer examples of limber and whitebark. Tiny spruces as finally the trail goes into sub-alpine meadows that are what's known as 'kruppelholz' or 'crippled wood'. They may look like baby trees but are mature, sometimes ancient specimens. Hikers and mountain bikers had left their footprints and tracks but all, on this fragile terrain, were meticulously and carefuly on the trails here, sometimes of shale powder. And, once we heaved (on foot I was puffing like a steam train and personally producing enough steam myself, grin, at that........) to the summits, my, the panoramas up here are........well, simply, you can see for miles onto every terrain going. And the quiet. Absolute total aching silence through the trees, and even atop the ridgelines only mere whispers of wind. An incredible day along the Jumping Pound Summit Trail.

The Fox and Caroline and Little Elbow

Here's a few pics of the now go-to mountain horse The Fox. He's twelve now with literally thousands of hours under his cinch and flashy as ever with all those uncountable spots (!). An endurance girlfriend was asking the other day about sharing her horse with other riders and my take is, I don't. Kind of like sharing husbands really, they just don't come back the same. But, as one of about four people who've ridden him over his lifetime and to show the exception to the rule, here's the gelding with an English girlfriend and just amazing stalwart suppporter over years as we hit 'The Perfect Day' (mind, unlike Lou Reed no heroin needed, grin) at the Little Elbow. He liked the fact she wasn't as bossy as I am and, eeargh, lighter too. A true horsewoman she asked how he liked to be ridden, and about twenty seconds later we were splashing through the Little Elbow River heading out

- I don't know if I would be so trusting on a strange horse, in a different country and riding THROUGH different terrain to England's countryside and bridleways.