Wednesday, July 24, 2013 - First Ride Day at Forestville SP

After waking up early, I was out feeding the horses when the ranger came by to first tell me that one of my packages had arrived, and secondly to tell me we couldn't highline the horses. Even though we had used tree saver straps, the rule is no high-lining (and, in his words, "I am the rule and it's not open for discussion,") because he claimed it caused too much damage. It was okay if we wanted to put up a portable electric fence around the hitching post, but otherwise the horses would have to stay tied to the hitching post. Can you imagine? If I tied horses to a hitching post for 10 days and nights in most places in the country, I could get arrested for animal abuse! Well, even though I kept a smile on my face the whole time, I was very annoyed, because the location of the hitching post was quite close to the tent, and even though there was little danger of the horses trampling the tent, it was certainly close enough for the proximity stray manure to be uncomfortably close, unless we tied them so tightly they couldn't move around to the other side, in which case they'd hardly be able to move. We considered moving the tent, but there really wasn't anyplace else as ideal, so we left it, trying to figure out an alternative. We've never had a portable fence, and even though there may have been a few places where it would have been handy, it never seemed worth the considerable investment and space to carry one. Nor am I convinced Apollo would stay inside it, he's a Houdini when it comes to escaping from containment. Anyway, we decided to consider our options further later on. Meanwhile, in the afternoon we headed out for our first ride, anxious to see what the trails were like here. We decided to first go down the historic site of Forestville, since Hubby may not be able to ride again this week, and he was interested in seeing it. As we headed out the trails, we were happy to see that the gravel we had been warned about on the trails was mostly pea gravel on top, so the boots were sufficient to protect the horses' front feet quite reasonably adequately. We rode about 5.2 miles in all, take the most direct route to Forestville from the campground, past the site of the old distillery (which closed down after the Civil War due to the imposition of an alcohol tax-typical government job destruction), then down to the town, or not really a town, just a store and a couple of out buildings. The sign said it's only open from Thursday-Sunday, and I think I read where they have folks in pioneer costume doing pioneer things, so that might be fun over the weekend. I also read that they're having a Civil War Encampment reenactment this weekend, so that will be interesting to come back again. Next we headed out to the south loop, making several water crossings, missing one turn, backtracking then climbing the hill to come back to the camp on the opposite end from where we left. We actually rode about 2/3 of the park, and were still only gone about 2 hours. Not as big a park as I thought, but will still serve the purpose quite nicely. The woods here are close and often eerie, but the trails are wide and very well traveled, with horse manure about every 10-20 yards for most of the journey, although we didn't meet any other riders on the trail. Put the horses back up on the hitching rail, did our chores and settled down for the evening.