Hope you enjoy the story as much as we enjoyed the ride and we invite you to tag along in one of the Haidook Experiences opened to the public.

I can’t stress enough the importance of proper clothing and gear. Both for riders and horses, the tack and clothes are determinant for well-being and safety. In riding, comfort translates directly into safety, especially for the horses. I have two simple arguments for this: during this ride, the total temperature difference was more than 20 degrees Celsius and we found snow on one of the mountain sides, when coming down from the peak.

Choosing the right gear also translated in less equipment overall, reducing both the total weight distributed on each horse and the amount of inventory we had to pack and manage.

I tried a new set of long sleeves T-shirts and felt amazingly well. I highly recommend smart investment in gear. It will save a lot of body energy and mental focus, which will be better use in enjoying the ride and making smart decisions along the way.

We only have so much attention and mental energy to spare. If we use a lot of it for many small decision, we will have less when the big decisions are needed. Physical (dis)comfort takes a lot of mental focus away from the upper layers and into the small but essential details like body temperature.

Working in a lot of outdoors horse assisted education seminars I’ve had the opportunity to observe this, live, unfolding right in front of me or directly inside me. For anyone to pay attention to their emotional or cognitive processes, we all need to be in a somewhat comfortable state of body-mind. Too cold, too windy, too hot and off our attention goes from deep internal conversations to the more urgent survival-type of decision. Again, in riding, good decisions may be needed for safety matters, for the horse or for the rider.

Luckily for me, as I’ve already said in one of the previous chapters, I had Steward as a great teacher on energy conservation, which was made possible by the good choices we made when preparing for this ride.

Hope you enjoy the story as much as we enjoyed the ride and we invite you to tag along in one of the Haidook Experiences opened to the public.

We carried equipment for the potential task of chopping down some fallen branches. We could have done better for what we found along the way was somewhat challenging. The forest road was often occupied for long segment with full-size trees fallen exactly perpendicular. In this sentence, “full size trees” means trees more than 30m high, fallen directly on the road.

We went over them, underneath them, around them. Some of the passing took more time than we estimated because we could not cut much, or we were able to cut some of the wood but not that fast.

We learnt a very specific lesson about tools: next time we need more and bigger. “Suitable” tends to have more than one axis of definition. Availability is a function of time and location but when it lacks the capacity, the availability becomes void of its usefulness.

Now, the interesting question to ask our-selves is: what is the right “amount” of tools to have when exploring tracks like these. Too much would increase the weigh on every horse, and we don’t want that. To little ends up eating time and shortening the actual distance we can cover during daylight.

Secondly, we also need to take into consideration the skills of using the tools of the people on the team. The real value of the tools comes from actually using them, not just having them available. It comes down to factoring in the most suitable options for the people on that particular ride and then choosing one of them. Following that, we’ll have a full ride’s time to deal with the consequences of our choices.