Hello all, Another story about my barefooted mustang and her competitive trail rides. I got up early on Friday morning, finished loading the truck and trailer and headed out to Pugatory ski area for a competitive trail ride. That was some incredible views and a really nice ride. I took the little Mustang mare again and she did really good. That ride was physically hard because of the altitude. we went from about 7000 ft up to over 10,000 ft during the first day ride. There was not a lot of rocks and her barefeet really impressed a few people. This time she was not the only barefooted horse. Another lady (Judy Mason) had her horse barefooted, but she had him in the horsesneakers for protection. We did discuss a bit about the barefooted trims and she really wanted to check out my mares feet. It seems that she has a bit of trouble still with her horse being just a bit off is she takes his feet down as far as the Strasser guidelines are and still be competitive, so she leaves him a bit long. Then there was another lady also interested in transiting her horse to barefooted. It looks like we have some good reactions from just going out and showing people that these horses can do anything that their shod horse can do. Next ride I think Im going to try taking my mule also as a training for her to be nice and stand tied and get used to the activitiy because I want to start working her also into the CTR's and showing people that white feet are not really all that soft.


Well after my competitive trail ride this last weekend, I can tell you that the unnecessary excess material of the frog will just slough right on off of there with exercise. My mare had a huge area of frog at the beginning of the ride that I had not trimmed off and it was lower(higher) then the walls at the start of the ride, but by the end of the second 20 mile ride there was a lot of sloughing that had occured and the frogs were very smooth and flat and definately not above the hoof wall. Before the ride I didn't trim because I did not know how rocky the area would be. And the mares feet are so hard that soaking and the Hoof Marvel stuff does not help. Her frogs were like hard plastic to trim before the ride, but on the ride, all the unnecessary material just fell right out of there leaving a nice flat frog with not much in the way of a cleft in the middle