We are spending a good amount of our time cleaning up the farm before the ground unfreezes and becomes too soft for the tractors. We are cleaning brush out of Peacock Park, the pines in Wheelocks, and in the trees next to the Cape Cod House. Similar to work duty during summer camp, we haul the brush onto the trailer, drive to the bonfire, dump the load, and begin again! Doing brush is one of our favorite jobs. In line with the philosophies here, we love getting our hands dirty and doing some springtime cleaning of the farm.
Tag Archives | horse farm
With the new stable almost complete, one of our last steps is to move the tack into the tack rooms. While it may sound difficult, moving over 50 saddles is actually the easiest part of the work. In contrast, measuring out the saddle racks in our new tack rooms and making sure each is in the right place is the hardest part. During morning tacking up times, we may have to arrange the set up a bit differently this year, something we will experiment with during our first few sessions of Camp. With our horses still in the same field and ready to be ridden, the campers, counselors, instructors, and other staff will be adjusting to a new barn location.
With 8 girls here to join us for Winter Camp week, we are reminiscing on memories from previous summers, sharing laughs, and sledding as much as possible. The horses are loving the extra attention, and anticipating summer camp 2017 when they will be surrounded by even more devoted campers. We snowshoed around the overlooks on the trails that we ride on, and the trails were a winterized beautiful while the overlooks were spectacular with the crisp air. We will continue the sledding, the horse grooming, and the laughing for the remainder of the week.
As the pressure began to change, the ponies ate a little extra hay and grain before the storm. Once the storm was upon us, the snow began to fall at a rapid pace and the wind began whipping the flakes around us, it certainly felt like a blizzard. Watching the horses endure the cold, we were reminded of why we are a summer riding camp, these conditions were not good for any amount of horseback riding. Soon, there was a fresh blanket of snow and the horses were off frolicking with their friends. The snow was fluffy, the footing was great, and the horses were playing. It was a splendid afternoon. Watching the horses enjoy their freedom and play with their friends is by far our favorite pastime. We are only in existence now for the horses and the girls that come each year to love each of them. As we bundled up each time we stepped outside, and we were reminded of the ruggedness and durability of each of our spectacular horses.
We wouldn’t be able to function as a working horse farm without our tractors, and we wouldn’t be a riding camp without our horses. Almost all of our tractors (they are all Ford in this picture) are winterized and not used until all of our Road’s End Farm family comes back for the summer! In the summer months, we will put a few of these to good use for work duty to make sure we have clean trails for our daily trail riding. If your a previous camper reading this, I’m sure you have memories of throwing brush onto the flatbed trailer and building our famous bonfire! Thank you for all of your hard work and we look forward to many more brush loads during Summer 2017!
