Between the ears of a bay Arabian on a mountain forest trail covered with snow. Aspen tree trunks to the left and thick spruce trees ahead.
Photo of me and Zil, facing left, almost side view. Zil is a bay Arabian mare. Her head is turned slightly away from the viewer and her ears aren’t the most enthusiastically set. Her mane is shaggy with no bridle path cut. She looks tiny beneath me at the angle of this photo. I’m 105 lbs, a totally appropriate size person I promise. I appear to be a huge woman sitting straight in a heavy plaid shirt and a brown hat with a pale hatband braided from the tail hair of my first horse. Behind us the land drops to a beautiful ice-covered creek flowing through a spruce woodland with patchy snow in thick fallow foliage.
Looking upstream over Priest Creek where the sun hits it more. A red dirt slope, quite undercut by high water from riotous spring runoff, has spruce trees stepping down to the creekside. The creek is greenish and has some snow and ice. Beyond, thick spruce forest.
Between the ears of a bay mare rises the icy bed of a forest trail. I say icy bed because it’s old, well used and trodden deeply into the earth, with the result that it collects the snow and water like a stream. There’s no snow to either side, but the trail itself is a path of slushy ice. The higher we climbed the more was like that and the less circumventable it became. We turned back when it looked to get dangerous.
We got up there … ‘twas a race to see what’d stop us first: icy footing or a down tree. We probly weren’t gunna die but def a non-zero chance.
And: behold the glorious *Bask great-granddaughter in her Shetland Pony guise.
#trailride #trailhorse #arabianhorse #betweentheears #horsesky #forest
