Size matters- blades and fallen trees (horse-riding journal 10)

25 iunie 2019 InExperiențe și observații 1 Comment

This is a journal-like exercise pertaining to a 14 h horse-back trail ride, in a region of hills and mountains, between 800 m and 2300 m altitude,  a total of 58 km, in spring time, in a team of 14 individuals: 7 riders and 7 horses.

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.

Here is the sixth “chapter”. The previous one can be found here  https://madalinavintu.ro/2019/05/01/proper-gearclothing-horse-riding-journal-9/   The next will follow shortly.

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.

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