On the Road Again...

The view from our trailers in Winnemucca....plenty of snow still on the mountains...


Ok, so maybe I got a little behind with the posting... was a tad busy the last little bit. But now, we can continue our journey :)
We left Dr.Jen's after a morning of re-arranging, health paper exams, and stocking up on feed. Bound for new territory (driving I-80 through Nevada and beyond), our next stop was going to be Winnemucca, Nv. We had heard they have a nice fairgrounds facility with good bathrooms, showers, the works. Sounded good! And our friend Laney was going to meet us there so we could caravan the rest of the trip together. Leaving Palo Cedro, we headed down Hwy 44 in the shadow of Mt. Lassen. Always a pretty drive, this takes you to Hwy 395 and then into Susanville, CA.
I actually grew up part of my childhood in Susanville...2nd through 5th grade I think. It was a great place to be a kid, if you liked the outdoors. Winters you could go sledding and play in the snow (lots of skiing close by in the Sierras too), and summers were spent in trees and roaming the surrounding forests and mountains. Swimming up at Eagle Lake was always fun as well.
Our house was at the time on one of the edges of town and backed onto either logging or forest service land or something. I spent many days wandering along deer paths finding secret places to play (a favorite of mine was an old helicopter pad likely used by fire fighters, with a view to die for on the top of a ridge, as well as a boulder heap on the hills overlooking my house, that I could climb around in), and of course hanging out in the pasture below the house.
I didn't have my own horses til I got into college, so was forever begging and pleading for a horse of my own, or even just riding lessons...anything! Well, since those pleas went unheard, I found my own horses...down in that pasture. I'd spend hours down there after climbing through the barbed wire fencing, tracking down the horses (big pastures) and then petting them, watching them, following them..... and yes.... riding them :) These were young years, before knowing about liability laws or the like. No one in the surrounding houses laid claim to the ponies (the land was rented out) and no one was watching anyway...least no one ever came out and yelled at me :). So I would bring some rope down to the pasture and tie it around the horses' heads and climb aboard native-style...often getting dumped as the horse took off running down the pasture. But sometimes they would tolerate me on their backs, and we'd stroll around the pasture, me wallowing in the pure bliss of being able to ride. Occasionally I'd even rope a friend or two into the adventures I had, but usually I was on my own, exploring for hours, or playing in the pasture, with dark my only time limit and my imagination the only limit to what I could do. These early years formed my adventuresome spirit, and partly is why I so love endurance riding now. Combining hours and hours of hanging out with horses, and exploring new places... what could be better?! :) And this is one of the reasons I was so excited about XP...one, giant, adventure exploring the country with my pony :)
So anyway, every time I drive through Susanville, I go back in my memories...one of these days I want to go back with a horse, and see if I can track down some of my old trails that I hiked, that would have been even more fun with horses... But for now, onward...395 all the way to Reno, Nv.
Then onto I-80, and once through Fernley, we go into the great unknown. But it wasn't all too horrid. It took a few hours or so of driving, and a minor detour (the directions on how to get there were somewhat unclear...several Hwy exits led to the fairgrounds and Laney had gone one way, while my GPS was telling me another... but we found them), we pulled in and circled around until we found Laney's rig. Whoo hoo!
Parked next to Laney (we learned later to look for that blue water tank when trying to find her rig in our XP camps :)...) The horses are in the corrals in front of us.

We pulled out the horses and let them run around a small arena near the barns, then took them over to the covered pipe corral area that Laney had picked out. Set up the ponies with food and water, checked in with the camp host, and after dinner, it was already time to crash into bed.

Oliver in his corral...what a PIG...sighhh...

Joy and Eowyn in theirs. Joy definitely wins the cleanliness award :)

The next morning, while getting all packed up, we heard the news...EHV-1 (a respiratory virus that can cause illness, and sometimes even death in horses) was on a roll through the horse world. Oh great...now we had to figure out how that would change our travel plans (no more fairgrounds for sure...would borders stay open? Would the ride still go on??!!), but since we were already underway, we figured we would just keep heading east until we heard otherwise from the Duck. No use panicking just yet :) But I started to look up other options for our overnight stays, that were way off the beaten path and not likely to have had many, if any, horses there recently. Things like RV parks, little B+B horse hotels, etc...
For this drive day, we had planned on getting to Elko, Nv where the brand inspection office was. For those of you (like I was....Ca doesn't do brand inspections) unfamiliar with it, many states require a permanent proof of ownership on a horse. Registration papers and bills of sales do not suffice. So they give out a picture ID, kinda like a driver's license, for the horse, that lists the owner and all the horse's info on it. I think it used to come from the times when livestock (horses counted at the time) were all branded, so you could tell who owned them by what brand they had...well, now a picture ID does the trick instead. Once done, it is good for the lifetime of that horse, so long as it doesn't change owners. Most other states will then recognize this proof of ownership, and is an important thing to have on a horse, if you travel across state borders a lot. Why CA and a few other states don't do this, I haven't a clue, but we had to get one if we wanted to get across all the borders, and if random inspections happened along the way. So off to Elko we went, and after an hour or so of paperwork, taking pictures, and the like, we were handed our temporary (permanent ones came in the mail some weeks later) NV brand inspections on all our horses.
Down the road we continued (it's surprising how fast I-80 drives... way easy and mostly flat out there, good roads, not a ton of traffic..) and heading for our next overnight stop. A fellow endurance rider, Janet Tipton (who does wonderful work with captured BLM mustangs and rides a cute little one at e-rides as well), offered us her place as an overnight, in Utah not too far out of Salt Lake City.
On the way to Janet's...There had been a lot of flooding in many states, and Utah was not left out. That fencline to the right is a normal barbed wire fence...basically totally covered! The road was just barely up over the water....

We managed to pull into her place not too much before sunset either, and set up camp in her front yard (well away from her horses, just in case we picked up something at the fairgrounds, which since we were no where next to other horses, nor in stalls, should not be an issue...but you never know). We were originally going to stay an extra day here to rest the horses, but with summer thunderstorms soaking the ponies, decided to head on down the road. But it was a wonderful stopover... Thanks Janet! :)
Eowyn's first night on the hie-tie on the XP trail. She really seemed to do well on the ties. Eating and sleeping and just hanging out with no issues. Good pony :)

In fact, all the ponies did well on the ties, both ours and Laney's and many of the camp horses. I think this is one of the better horse containment systems around (though we still liked setting up a hot fence corral for them on weekend camps, to give them a bigger area to roam around in...).

Next: Utah and Wyoming...Rain, snow, and more...