From Karen Tellef.  I am a casual CMO-er, my first one being in the 90s. One of my favorite partners is my friend Jeanne. My buckskin Morgan Raz and her black Morgan Mocha are perfectly matched. I was excited to see a CMO at Stoney Run Park in Indiana. I used to condition my last horse there for endurance rides, and Jeanne was excited to try a new place to her.

As the ride manager handed us the maps, I bragged to Jeanne how well I knew the trails and to leave navigating to me. I didn’t need a map to get around this park!  At SR there is only one trailhead so everyone started the same, and we started next to last. Altho I had never seen a map of the park, I located the parking lot at the top and told her we needed to look for markers 4, 5 and 6 on the first straight bit of trail.

Jeanne and I aren’t the best CMO-ers by any means, but still we couldn’t believe that we didn’t find any of the clues for 4, 5 or 6, not a one! We stopped our horses, examined the maps.  Uh oh, there’s 2 parking lots on the map. The people lot was at the top, the horse lot was at the bottom.  We should’ve been looking for markers 1, 2 and 3.  That’s okay, I told her, we have to come back this way anyway so we’ll find them on the way back.  We just lost a bunch of time, that’s all.

Feeling cocky (how stupid was that?) I told her I knew a shortcut along the park road that would take us a different way from where the others probably went. As we trotted along we came across a dozen vehicles parked on the side of the road. There were people standing around with dogs on leashes.  Dogs that, seeing the horses, were now going crazy.  Dogs were in crates in the back of pickups and were hurling themselves against the bars and howling.  Luckily our horses didn’t mind one bit as we had to walk past them.  We asked what was going on, and they said they were a group who was training their “cadaver dogs” in the woods.  I warned them about the horse event going on.

Surely that was the last dramatic moment, right?  Wrong.  But for now we were back on the trail, finding markers and getting plates.  We next came across my favorite part of SR, a straight grassy trail along a beautiful wildflower prairie. We cantered our horses to make time, and I was thrilled how wonderfully my horse was acting in this new-to-him park.  I asked Jeanne if we could walk so I could take pictures of the pretty meadow.  I dropped the reins on Raz’s neck, tugging my phone out of my tights’ pocket and WHAM Exit Stage Left by Raz.  I hovered over the trail in the air as Raz took a beeline left into the meadow, galloping.  What caused that?  A small piece of rolled-up metal fence was buried in the grass on the right side of the trail, barely visible.  Raz stopped in the meadow, proceeding to eat the tall beautiful flowers.  It looked so lovely I would’ve taken a picture of him if I wasn’t so ticked off.  He didn’t take off, but he didn’t come to me either.  Trudging thru the tall grass to fetch him, then trying to find something to mount on.  

You know what? This blog post is long enough as it is.  Stay tuned for Part 2 in a couple weeks, where truly the most bizarre thing happened as we were heading back to camp searching for clues 1, 2 and 3 that we missed the first time.