Vacation: Horse Ride and Louis CK

Despite being a last minute decision for what is one of the more popular activities in Garden of the Gods and despite all the rain, we managed to get in a horse ride.  Our timing was almost perfect because on the way back out of the park it started to sprinkle and that was the sprinkle that turned into several days of parking lot-flooding rain.  Have you noticed a theme yet related to our vacation.  Rain.

Eryn loved the horse ride even though the shorter ride isn't a lot of time on the horse, particularly when you factor in the in-town riding on roads out to the park and back.

Here's Eryn on Whinnie.  Big smile!  Eryn, not the horse.  She learned that different horses have different bowel-voiding preferences.  Some like to walk while taking a dump.  Some like to stop.  Some like you to get up in the stirrups while stopped to relieve pressure.  Important skills when the apocalypse kicks in and you want to be The Postman.  They didn't explain that part in the book or the movie.  Get a horse that can void on the run - it'll potentially save you from the bad guys during a chase.



In the park.  You can see some of the washed out nature showing that the rain didn't start just because we showed up. It had been going on for a while.  A few places, like 7 Falls, were closed down due to flooding damage.


My horse, red.  Not the horse butt.  The horse ears.  He was afraid of flapping rain jackets/ponchos.  Nice, eh?  Given all the rain.  I wore my pullover and decided I'd just get wet if it came to that.  Our guide told us that he had always heard Red was afraid of flapping ponchos but hadn't realized how bad it was until a guy tried to change his poncho on him a week or so earlier despite the warning and Red had totally freaked out.


Beautiful place to go for a horse ride.  I wished we had done the longer ride despite the impending rain.


Eryn had the back of the team (if you don't include the guide).  Nice place to be if you wanted to hear the history tour portion of the ride.


Here you can appreciate the clouds.  Supposedly you're able to see Pikes Peak on clear days.  We never saw Pikes Peak unless we were on it and turning around because I have ethical issues with paying private costs to see the top of a mountain when I can go to Rocky Mountain National Park and pay the people to see the mountains.  I noticed on the tourist web sites that I'm not the only one to have made that decision.


Eryn with some of the Garden of the Gods rocks in the background.


As an interesting aside, I met this guy who may or may not be Louis CK.  He's got enough young girls of the appropriate ages to be convincing.  My sister is convinced it's him.  She thinks I'm holding out on her when I say he's a dad from Oklahoma who moved to Colorado, as though I'm protecting his known desire not to have people invading his space and going all paparazzi on him.  She'll just have to believe what she believes.


Some live action footage of riding in the Garden on Red.



And an over-the-shoulder video of Eryn.  Literally.  I found trying to use a handheld camera to record behind me while riding a horse to be particularly difficult.  I should have been wearing the bike camera Ming got me.  I bet it works equally well on horses as long as I don't try to mount it to them.

Shaving Cut, Remix

Given that just below my nose bled for over two hours this morning, despite having chapstick in my pocket, I'm going to disavow all the advice in that last post.  It went on despite twenty minutes of ice, twenty minutes of pressure several times, and the chapstick trick.  I hear Sank's recommendation about the styptic, but I suspect that wouldn't have done the trick either.  It went on so long I googled, "Is it possible to become a hemophiliac?"

Fortunately, that's not likely.  But I did find the potential root of the problem over on reddit.  There's a consensus that the number of blood vessels in the face, coupled with the lack of jagged edges on a small razor cut, inhibit clotting.

While reading through the thread, I got to this comment, "Yah it's actually a pretty common thing in equine medicine too. Horses have a tendency to injure themselves, especially the faces and especially the eyelids which get ripped off quite a bit. Every one of those bleeds like hell and makes you freak out that your patient/pet is going to die but isn't really all that severe (sans the last one)."

I thought, wtf.  I've never seen a horse with its eyelid ripped off.  But then my horse experience is limited to the horses at my grandmother's house, which included Goober, who later came to live at our house.  Fortunately, someone else had the same surprise and asked, to paraphrase, "wtf?"

The response: "It's not an every day occurrence but it's not exactly rare either. As for how it happens, it depends. They can catch it on a fence screw, or on the feed bucket, or a piece of barbed wire, or pretty much anything. Once it's caught the horse flips the fuck out (as they're prone to do) and then jerks their head away, thus ripping off the eye lid.  That's one of the reasons it's always a good idea to train your horse NOT to freak out whenever it's bound up (as much as possible). That and them walking through barbed wire that's gotten blown down/knocked down. If you teach your horse to be OK with having stuff wrapped around its legs (kind of like sacking-out), then it won't jerk away from the barbed wire (thus digging it deeper into their flesh), but rather stay put (since trying to walk off would be painful) until you can help.

Which led to my favorite question, "O.o how do they survive in the wild?"

Which of course had a very cogent answer, "To be fair in the wild there aren't feed buckets and barbed wire."

Touche'.

This was backed up by a picture of a horse with a ripped eyelid.  I know...I didn't warn you, it's gross, and it probably isn't what you were expecting at the end of a post about shaving cuts.  But now you know not to panic horses unless you're a mean fucker, and why they don't have their own haunted houses at Halloween.