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RE: [RC] Horse with a bleeding mouth - trail - Rae CallawayInteresting how differently people can view the trail based on their own location. I read "Million Pines ride" and pictured it to be similar to the forests that I ride in, which are mostly single track, but moving off the trail into the woods is an easy thing to do. Kat - you ride in a more mountainous area, right? So, your view of single track trail would consist of drop offs on the sides? Rae -----Original Message----- From: ridecamp-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ridecamp-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of k s swigart Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 10:47 PM To: ridecamp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [RC] Horse with a bleeding mouth Molly said: 40 miles out, one of the girls I was riding with pointed ?out that my horse's mouth was bleeding.? Of course ?I freaked out and dismounted to find out what was ?wrong.? Because we were on a single-track trail, I ?pulled over and announced to the folks behind me ?that they could pass.? Three or four riders went around, ?but the two girls that I had ridden with all day stayed ?with me.? As these other riders were passing, one of ?them commented that, "There's nothing you can do ?about it now, anyway"- For me, a telling part of this story is the"we were on a single-track trail" and "two girls...stayed with me." If I were in a situation where somebody pointed out that my horse's mouth was bleeding, before I stopped and had another two riders stop with me, I would make sure that it was a safe and convenient place to stop and that my stopping wasn't likely to cause more problems on the trail than blood coming from my horse's mouth might. I have NO idea what the conditions of the trail were other than "single-track."? If there was a safe place to pull over so that everybody else in the ride wouldn't have to go off trail to get around me (i.e. if I didn't cause a traffic jam), then I would probably pull over and stop. However, I wouldn't consider blood coming from my horse's mouth to be a red alert emergency such that I couldn't continue on if I needed to find a better place to get off trail to check it out.? Because, indeed, my horse is probably not going to die of whatever the cause, and my horse's condition is probably not going to be significantly negatively impacted if I continue on for a bit and make sure that I am well out of everybody's way before I stop. There are some drop dead red alert emergencies for which I must stop immediately even if it does cause a traffic jam on a single track trail, but this doesn't sound like one of them...so whether I could have done anything about it "now" anyway is a very valid question to ask IF by stopping I am possibly causing an unsafe or inconsiderate trail situation.? If I am going to stop in the middle of a single track trail and make people either go around me or wait for me, then it really ought to be for a good reason and it would need to be?for something that I could actually do something about by stopping. A?number of years ago early in the Eastern High Sierra Classic the person I was riding with had a tack malfunction and the girth ended up around her horse's flank and the saddle on the horse's ass--yes it was a single track trail, yes there were lots of peole behind us,?even so?we stopped and got off the trail into the bushes (we didn't make people go around us we let them have the trail) and repaired the saddle problem...because we COULD repair the saddle problem and because if we didn't do it right away we might have had one hell of a rodeo.? I certainly, however, would not have stopped there to check on some blood on my horse's mouth, or even a gash on my horse's leg.? It just WASN'T the kind of place that was a good place to stop if you had people behind you.? And we did have to ride on a little bit before stopping in order to find a place where we COULD get off the trail into the bushes instead of "over the edge." I have NO idea what the place referred to in the original post was like (except that it was described as a single track trail), but I can definitely say that there are some places that are not good places to stop to check on why your horse's mouth is bleeding.? So this might have been one of them.? If it were, then asking myself if there is anything I can do about the condition anyway is a perfectly reasonable question to ask myself before stopping. kat Orange County, Calif. :) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. 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