Think Fast!

Today I had a serious “think fast” moment, and realized just how much I love that my job has these moments, and keeps me on my toes.

One of the afternoon activities here at camp is afternoon trail ride and the access point to one of the trails is directly through the horse pasture.  Usually, this is never an issue because we bring in all of the horses from the pasture while the trail rides are going on.  This afternoon, however, the horses were let out into the pasture before two of the trail rides had returned.

At around 4:30 in the afternoon, I heard over the walkie talkie (our main form of communication at camp) that the trail ride needed some help, so I headed across camp to the pasture.  As I was running up to the trail ride, I could see that they were attempting to exit the pasture on horse back back while other horses were grazing.  This would not have been an issue except that one of the horses saw the opened gate, took advantage of the opportunity to exit the pasture & run into camp.

It all happened so fast.  I saw Feather (the horse) charge out of the pasture, so I grabbed an extra lead line that was tied around the neck of one of the trail ride horses (I love slip knots).  At this point Feather was coming my way, so I ran at him, took my lead line in both hands and threw the loop up in the air attempting to get it around his neck.  By some miracle, the lead line landed around his nose and I wrangled him to a stop.  Feather was still in a frenzy and my heart was beating so hard, but I had got him, phewf.

With a little more help, we got the trail rides out of the pasture gate and put Feather back into the pasture to graze for the night.  And I think that I can finally say I’ve earned my roping rights as a cowgirl – and now I have a good idea of how I would act in a crisis situation.  It’s never a dull day at the ranch.

xoxo SLo