Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Trail Riding at High Bridge Trail State Park--6/30/14

The weather forecast was for 84 degrees and low humidity--and that's about as good as it gets this time of year in central Virginia--so we loaded up the horse trailer and headed south to Prospect for a ride at High Bridge.

High Bridge Trail State Park is a rails-to-trail project that resulted in a 31 mile long trail running from Pamplin to Rice. The centerpiece of the trail is the actual High Bridge, located about 3 miles from Farmville. The River Road parking lot is the closest to the bridge itself, and is the one we used when we walked this trail some time ago and saw the bridge itself. Since we were bringing horses, our choices were a lot in Farmville proper that I knew was fairly small, or going to Prospect. I hoped the Prospect lot would be larger and more empty. As it turned out there were no other cars at all, and the lot had a driveway at either end, making it perfect for the horse trailer.

It had been awhile since we'd been riding, so we were all very excited. We unloaded, tacked up, and headed out.






The best thing about High Bridge Trail, and the reason I wanted to ride it, is the flat, level, pea gravel footing. It's like riding along a perfect little dirt road but without any big gravel to hurt Apache's unshod feet. She seemed to like the footing just fine, and Max loved it. He wanted to canter the whole way. I let him have plenty of opportunities to go a bit and we had a wonderful time doing it.







 



The downside of this being a rails-to-trails trail is that there is zero shade. 84 is pretty hot when there's not a single bit of shade to be had. By the end of the ride it was getting uncomfortably warm.




 

There were a couple of places where we had to cross roads, and I was pretty nervous at first. Everyone did well, thankfully, even Flower, who had to skirt the white lines on the road. Silly pony.

The only scary-ish thing that happened was when J got Flower too close to Dave and Apache and then turned Flower's butt into them. Needless to say, evil pony kicked Apache and made her jerk sideways. Dave was a little scared but stayed on, so I was proud of him.

We enjoyed our ride, despite the heat. I would say this is a better trail for fall and spring, but it was worth the drive!

 

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