Got Eggs?

We [finally] do!

Well, those chickens finally started laying eggs. How nice of them to do it on Easter Sunday!

I found the first two eggs in the coop this evening when we went down to feed the horses. One, in the nest, was in perfect condition. The other, on the floor of the coop, was broken and had to be thrown away.

I’m not surprised about the one on the floor. After all, imagine that you’re a chicken, minding your own business day after day for the first four or five months of your life. One day, you feel a little weird. You squat down, have a nasty little pain in your rear end, and — voila! There’s an egg where you squatted! Well that looks almost just like the golf ball in the wooden thing with all the cosy wood shavings. Maybe that’s where you should go next time you start feeling like you need to drop one of these things. So they learn to lay their eggs in the nests.

EggsThese first two eggs were both small. In the photo, my chicken’s egg is on the right and a store-bought Grade A Extra Large egg is on the left. I expect them to get larger over time. In about a month, they should be full size, somewhere between Large and Extra Large.

They’re also green. Yes, green. I bought Araucana chickens, which lay colored eggs. They’re sometimes called the Easter Egg chickens and it just happens to be a coincidence that the first eggs they laid appeared on Easter Sunday.

I expect that all nine hens will be laying by the end of this week. The estimated production is 6-8 eggs per day. I’ve been saving egg cartons and will soon be giving out eggs to anyone who comes to the door.

After all, how many eggs do you think Mike, Jack the Dog, Alex the Bird, and I can eat?

Dusting Off the Horses

Mike and I take a ride in the desert.

Since I’ve begun flying, I’ve not only been neglecting my motorcycles, but I’ve been ignoring my horses.

Mike and I have two horses. While I know that might seem like a big deal to the folks living in cities who are reading this, it isn’t a big deal at all when you live in Wickenburg, AZ. Much of the property here is “horse property” — that means that property where you’re allowed to have horses. We have 2-1/2 acres of “horse property” and wonderful trails in the desert are only minutes away by horseback.

Our horses spend most of their time in a one-acre corral down in Cemetery Wash, where they have plenty of room to walk around or stretch out in the sun. But they spend most of their time standing by the water trough, napping. Except near dinner time when Cherokee, my Paint Quarter Horse, decides it’s important to pace in the same path over and over until we feed him and his buddy Jake.

Some of my neighbors have horses, too. It’s easy and not terribly expensive. Hay costs $8-$10/bale here and a bale can last a horse 4-5 days. The only other major expense when you board your horse at home is shoeing — figure $55 per horse every 6 to 8 weeks. Cherokee, because of all his pacing, needs new shoes every 6 weeks; Jake could go 8 weeks, but we get them shod together to save our farrier the bother of making two separate trips.

Our horses get fed twice a day. We feed them in the morning before we go to work and in the evening, usually right before dinner. They make horse poop (of course) and we use an ATV with a sort of drag trailer behind it to break up the poop. It dries up in this hot, dry air and doesn’t even really smell. When the wash flows, it takes all the broken up poop downstream where it probably makes a really good fertilizer.

They don’t need a barn. This is the Arizona desert. The coldest it ever gets is in the high 20s, and that’s only at night during the coldest months — December and sometimes January. They grow heavy winter coats that shed (like a dog’s) in the spring. They’re shedding now; every time we brush them a bunch of hair comes off. We let the hair fall to the ground where we brush them and birds come around and pick it up to use it for their nests.

The horses do need a shade to keep them out of the hot sun. And plenty of fresh water — about 15-25 gallons per day per horse, depending on how hot it is. We have a hose running down to their yard and attached to a water trough that automatically keeps the same water level all the time. Easy.

So it really isn’t much of an expense or a bother to have horses living at home with you.

We’re fortunate to have miles and miles of riding trails in the empty desert behind our house. Our house doesn’t border state land, but the house behind us does. To get to the trails, we either ride up the unpaved road from our house to our “next door” neighbor’s house and go through the gate there or just ride down Cemetery Wash. So we can saddle up at the tiny feed barn we have halfway up the driveway to our house and ride out from there. Easy.

Since I started flying, I have a lot less time to do things like go horseback riding. Still, every once in a while, Mike talks me into it or there’s a ride with the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association that I can participate in. And I’m always glad to be back in the saddle again.

Today, we had a nice, leisurely, Easter Sunday ride from our house, down the wash, through the slot canyon, and out into the state land adjoining Rancho de los Caballeros. Los Cab (as the locals call it) is our best “dude ranch” and it has miles and miles of maintained trails out in the State and BLM land. We were out for about 2 hours and took a bunch of different trails we hadn’t been on in a long time. I had my old GPS turned on and tracking the trail we rode — I’m making a map of the trails out there using the GPS — you can see our path on a topo map (courtesy of Terrabrowser software) below.

Trail Ride Topo

Our house is just below the W in Wash.

Oh, and if you want to see how it looks from a satellite in orbit around the planet, look at this:

Trail Ride Photo

The ride was 4.3 miles long and we were moving for about an hour and a half of that time. We ran into two other trail ride groups (from Los Cab) while we were out there.

Today was an incredible day. High 70s, light breeze, not a single cloud in the sky. What more could you ask for on Easter Sunday? The ride was just long enough to be enjoyable without being tiring for either us or the horses. I think we all enjoyed it.

When we got back, we hosed the horses off good. Jake took it like the ranch horse he is (or was) while Cherokee wiggled around, pretending he didn’t like it. They both rolled down in the sand, getting all dirty all over again, when we brought them down to their corral at the end of the ride.

A nice way to spend the morning. Makes me wish I could find time to do it more often.

A Glimpse of the Edge of Nowhere

Where I live.

The other day, Mike took his mom and I for a ride in his plane. I sat in the back seat with my 7-piglet digital camera and took some photos of the Wickenburg area from the air.

My Home at the Edge of NowhereThis is a photo of my house, taken from the southeast at about 2,000 feet above ground level (AGL to us pilot types). I circled my house so you could see it. So when I say that I live at the edge of nowhere, I’m not kidding. Our “neighborhood” stretches off to the northwest from our house. Most homes out there are on about 1.6 acres of land. Our immediate neighbors have 2.5 (like us) or 5 or even 10 acres. It’s a nice arrangement with plenty of spacing between us. No need to close the blinds at night. Lots of privacy. Space for our horses and chickens.

It bothers me that so many developers are trying to squeeze high density housing into Wickenburg’s available land. Most of the folks I know who came to Wickenburg five or more years ago (like us) came here because of the wide open spaces and loosely packed housing. It’s a quality of life thing. If you want to live on top of your neighbors, you can do that in any major U.S. city. Leave the outlying areas — the towns on the edge of nowhere — for the folks who don’t want their roof inches away from their neighbors’.

Of course, when a developer’s only motivation is squeezing as many dollars out of an acre of land as possible, he’s not likely to respect the wishes of the people who lived in the area before he came along and snatched up all the vacant land.

And what do the developers care about the quality of life when they’re not living in the urban sprawl they’ve created?

But it’s a crime when the elected officials of a town go along with the developer’s plans, despite the wishes of the people that voted them into office.

Silly me. I thought we lived in a democracy.

10.6 Miles on Horseback

Four of us join Mike on his annual ride to Wickenburg Mountain.

Every winter, Mike takes Jake, his horse, on a ride to Wickenburg Mountain. Altough this mountain is only about 3 miles as the crow flies from our house, there’s no trail that goes right to it. Instead, you have to pick your way along a maze of trails that go up and over or around about a dozen ridges.

Wickenburg Mountain is not named Wickenburg Mountain on any map I have. I don’t know where Mike got that name for it. Someone probably called it that and Mike remembered the name. If you’re looking at a topo map for Wickenburg, it’s the 2977-foot peak at the north end of the Vulture Mountains, south of Turtleback Wash.

I don’t usually go with Mike on this ride. He’s out most of the day and he always brings back stories of bushwhacking through the desert. While there isn’t much bush to whack in the desert, riding off trails (which is what I mean here) can often take you to the edge of cliffs that even horses can’t climb down. I don’t enjoy putting my somewhat neurotic horse through that kind of experience, especially with me on his back.

But yesterday, he’d invited Janet and Steve, who were visiting from Colorado, and Hans, who has recently gotten over a broken ankle suffered when his horse fell on him. I thought it would be nice riding with a small group of friends, so I went along for the ride, too.

Also along for the ride were Jack the Dog and Janet and Steve’s two dogs, Tasha and Maggie. And when my neighbor’s dog, Trixie, saw us leaving, she decided to join us, too. Tasha wasn’t too happy about that and kept attacking her, but after a while, they calmed down and tolerated each other nicely.

We started out from our house, taking the trail beside my neighbor’s property that would take us into the state land south of our house. We rode familiar trails that dropped us into a tributary of Turtleback Wash, where a Jeep trail ran.

The ride up to that point had been pleasant, following trails we knew. It was a lightly overcast day, cool and comfortable. We saw some mule deer, which gave Jack something to chase. As I rode, I began stripping off a few outer layers. My horse was behaving well — which means he was behaving like most other horses, for a change. He was even trotting nicely when we trotted. And he hadn’t bitten the butt of the horse in front of us yet, either.

From the Jeep road, things got iffy. The road ran mostly northeast to southwest, but we needed to go southeast. But we followed the road southwest, looking for a trail or road that would branch off to the left. Steve was leading at that point and he led us right by a possible trail. I’d seen it but didn’t think it was a trail. It turned out to be an old mining road. We followed it in the right direction, climbing a steep hill. We paused near the top to rest the horses and give the dogs some water. Then we continued and, moments later, the road ended.

Dang.

Mike led and the bushwhacking began. We rode over steep, rocky terrain, past nasy cacti and thorny trees. We climbed, we descended. At one point, we reached what I thought was the edge of a cliff. But Mike steered Jake down it and Jake, the good horse that he is, just went. We followed.

Eventually, we ended up on another Jeep road in another wash. We could see Wickenburg Mountain and it was much closer. We even saw a string of four horses and riders coming down one of its old mining roads. But there were more hills to climb over or around. Fortunately, there were also a lot of roads. The trick was to pick the right ones.

We did pretty well. At one point, we rode up a steep piece of road and I heard Hans say, “Oh no. That looks like the kind of place we fell.” He was referring to his recent horse accident, when he tried to walk his horse up a steep hill and his horse slipped back and fell on him, breaking Hans’s angle and chipping numerous bones in the horse’s foot. We hurried up the hill and I was comforted to hear him right behind me.

Wickenburg Mountain Lunch SpotWe reached the base of the mountain and climbed on another road. About two thirds of the way up, on a road that wound past the front of the mountain’s peak, we stopped for lunch. We tied the horses to bushes along the road; they were so tired, they didn’t seem interested in moving. Then we sat down on the rocky slope, opened up our lunch bags, and ate.

Tasha and Trixie had a huge fight right behind my back, nearly knocking me over, but they broke it up when Mike squirted them with his water bottle. Then they settled down and rested. Jack the dog was smart and hung out in the shade.

Jake on Wickenburg MountainOur lunch spot had incredible views of Wickenburg several miles to the north and east of us. But for some reason, I didn’t take any of those pictures. I did get one of Jake with the town in the background, far in the distance. But most of the rest of the photos I took were for wickenburg-az.com, my so-called “labor of love,” which features random header images. To get just the right image, the photo needs to have something on the left and nothing much on the top right. Go to the site and keep refreshing the page to get an idea of what I’m looking for. The image changes on every page, every time it’s refreshed. There are about 20 images now and one blank image that I’m trying to remove.

(But Larry doesn’t want to read about this. I’m starting to talk too much about computers. Sorry, Larry.)

The back side of Wickenburg MountainAfter lunch, we mounted up again and continued on a trail that led to the back side of Wickenburg Mountain. The trail climbed up through beautiful Sonoran desert to a saddle between the mountain’s peak and a lesser outcropping. This is where I took my favorite photo of the day — this vertical shot of the peak’s side and some saguaro cacti. I was very surprised to see a fence and drag gate up there. Mike dismounted and handled the gate for us and we all squeezed through. On the other side of the fence was just a tiny bit of level ground before the land dropped off on a steep downhill slope. There was a trail and Mike led the way down it.

We wound around the back of the mountain and joined up on some old mining roads again. We followed those back toward the main Jeep road. And that’s where we made our wrong turn. If we’d gone right, we would have hooked back up with Turtleback Wash and, from there, we could have found easy trails back to our house. But we went left, following the Jeep road back toward where we’d bushwacked down the mountainside.

How do I know all this? It isn’t because I have an excellent sense of direction and keen eye for landmarks. My sense of direction is good but my eye for landmarks sucks. That’s one of the reasons I had my GPS with me. And my GPS has a moving map with the local topo maps loaded in. I could see exactly where we were and exactly where we needed to go to avoid bushwhacking.

But Mike wasn’t interested in any of that. “We’re not in a hurry,” he told me.

Well, I wasn’t in a hurry, but I was interested in getting home. Especially since most of our water was gone and I was worried about Janet’s dogs, who seemed to have some trouble keeping up.

So we went left down the road. There was a gate across the road and Mike opened it so we could all go through. And we continued along the wash while the hills rose ever taller on both sides of us. Soon, we were riding into a narrow canyon. And then the canyon ended with a steep rocky cliff carved out by the force of water over thousands of years.

Dead end.

Flume in a Dead End CanyonWe paused there to give the dogs more water and explore the cliff face. There was a neat shelf where you could imagine water gathering in a pool after coming down a flume. (This photo doesn’t do the place justice.) The horses got goofy in the narrow area and Steve’s horse almost ran off. So we mounted up and backtracked, looking for a place where we could — dare I say it? — bushwhack over the ridges to the north.

So the bushwhacking began again. This time, the hills were steeper and, for some reason I can’t comprehend, we managed to get separated. Steve was the first to get down to the wash on the other side. Hans made it soon afterward. Then Mike and I, together. Janet was trapped on top of the ridge, unable to find a safe way down. I think the problem was that none of the ways down looked safe and Janet just happened to be a lot more cautious than the rest of us. So Steve rode back up and she followed him back down.

More bushwhacking. I really don’t like it. Cherokee, my horse, managed to cut his nose on a tree or something, so he wound up with a bloody nose. Janet’s dogs were definitely trailing behind. We stopped to give them water again and pretty much finished off all the water. We’d been out for about five hours.

We finally climbed onto a ridge and saw a familiar Jeep trail ahead of us. A few moments later, we were on the trail. We took turns leading the way. Soon, we were coming back through the gate by my neighbor’s house.

We unsaddled the horses and hosed ours down. (Cherokee hates getting hosed, but he really needed it. Of course, he got us back by rolling in horse manure right after his “bath.”) Hans and his horse hurried home while Janet and Steve put their horses in one of our corrals and joined us up at the house for drinks. Trixie went home. Janet’s dogs were walking on very sore feet. They admitted to us that their dogs had become “couch potatoes.” Our dog, Jack, was obviously tired, but didn’t seem quite as sore.

According to my GPS, we’d travelled 10.6 miles in about 3-1/2 hours of riding with about 1-1/2 hours of non-movement time. (I figure that Jack the Dog and Trixie must have covered at least 50% more distance.) Our average speed was 3 MPH; our top speed (on a gallop, I suppose) was just over 10 MPH.

This morning, it was me who was sore. You don’t realize how many muscles you use when you ride a horse. I think I can feel every one of mine.

Land of the Sun Endurance Ride

I mark horse butts and time in the riders.

Yesterday was the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association’s annual Land of the Sun Endurance Ride. And, for the fourth year in a row, I was one of about 80 volunteers enlisted to help out and make the event run smoothly.

For those of you who don’t know what an endurance ride is, our endurance ride is a 25- or 50-mile horseback ride over trails in the Wickenburg area. Endurance riders — people who actually like to cover that many miles on horseback — come from all over the southwest to participate.

The trails are created or maintained and then marked with ribbons by volunteers organized by Robin Ollendick and Nancy Halsey, who manage the whole thing. There are two loops, each of which are 25 miles long. The 25-milers do one loop and the 50-milers do both. There are vet checks, water stops, and check points along the way. There’s food and beverages for riders and horses at the vet checks and riders are required to spend a certain minimum amount of time at each one to ensure the health and well-being of their horses. There are drag riders who follow the last group out and remove the ribbons.

It’s a big deal and a great western event. This year, we started out with 148 riders. A few were pulled early on or on the trail for various reasons — for example, a problem with a horses’s gait or a horse “tying up” — but the vast majority finished their courses.

As a volunteer, I had three official jobs.

The first, on Friday, was to use “paint sticks” to mark numbers on horse butts. Each horse had a number and the number had to be visible by the folks at the check points so each rider could be tracked through the course. We used yellow, pink, or green markers to put the numbers on. The markers are similar to Cray-pas — soft crayon-like markers I used as a kid. But they’re fat — at least an inch and a quarter in diameter — and they’re a pain in the butt (no pun intended) to get off your skin and out from under your nails.

My second job was to make the vegetarian bean soup I make every year for the lunch stop. A lot of the riders are vegetarians and it seems that most other people put some kind of meat in their soups or chilis. I make it without any meat at all. The flavor comes from the root vegetables I include — onions, carrots, turnips, parsnips — as well as celery and leeks. I got it cooking in our camper, which we parked at the rodeo grounds (It’s for sale and we wanted to show it off to potential buyers.), on Saturday and it was ready just in time for lunch.

My third job was to work with Janet, timing in the riders. The first 50-milers, who had left at about 7:00 AM (before dawn!), started showing up at 9:45 AM. That’s 25 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes. On horseback. Janet wrote down numbers and times on a clipboard while I handed out check in slips with numbers and times. The 50-milers were required to wait for a hour after their horses “pulsed down” before leaving on their second loop. The 25 milers didn’t get check in slips, but they did get champagne. By 1:30, the 50-milers were coming back from their second loop. Janet and I were relieved at 2 PM, when all the excitement was pretty much over.

I didn’t take any pictures yesterday. I was too busy with my jobs. But if Janet sends photos of the winners, I’ll insert them here.

The big surprise: the winner for the 25-milers was a rider on a mule!