The Royal Anarchist endurance ride was held just outside of Osooyos, BC and offered a variety of rides, including 25, 35, 50 and 75 mile distances. It was mostly rolling hills with some elevation in the third loop. Great footing and a nice area! Thanks so much for a fun ride!! (For more information on endurance riding in British Columbia check out the ERABC website)

25 mile 1st: Fred Voglmaier & My Dance
35 mile 1st: Kerri-Jo Stewart & Darginka
50 mile 1st: Dennis Summers & OMR Tsunami, the first junior was Trystan Macleod on Zorros Seabiscuit, who has only ridden a few times!
75 mile 1st: 1. Elroy Karius & Apache Eclypse:

Kelsey Kimbler & Junior CAHR

Darginka and I now have 334 LD competition miles from these last two seasons! This ride was the first time we got As on gut sounds. I love having so many great experienced people around and Dr. Roxy Bell was here! She figured that the decreased gut sounds were due to a lack of electrolytes and so we dosed before the ride and twice during the ride. I’m thinking about every ten miles works for Darginka. I’d still like to try the Pro CMC & Performance Pak 100 – I’ll have to plan next spring when we go down to the US for a ride!

ERABC put on a day clinic with several seminars that was excellent:

My favourite vet, Dr. Roxy Bell, spoke about electrolytes and cooling, which was of course a great talk. She has observed that the most efficient way to cool a horse is to continually poor cold water all over the horse. That’s what we’ve been doing but for the last couple rides I stopped to scrape off the water before pouring again. Now I’ll just keep pouring until the water is cool under her belly!

Kate Coady did some beautiful leg wrapping. What she said about the importance of wrapping made total sense and I’m going to start wrapping after rides. I’ll work on that over the winter and we’ll do it for the rides next year. I’m not sure about wrapping for trailering but for sure I’m getting travel boots at least!

I dragged my most awesome crew Steven to the trot out demo, also by Kate. Steven then went on to trot out my mare better than myself! He also got CRIs of 40-40 midway and 44-44 at the end. They are both just nice and relaxed and show well together.

Carl Fudge of Sturgeon Creek Arabians talked about conformation. He used the traditional model utilized by Dr. Deb Bennet. What I found really cool is that they breed my favourite Arabian horse lines descending from the Russian race winners. If I hadn’t gotten into Tekes I would have bought one of his horses.