Northern Horse Blog

Northern Horse Road Trip

Marilyn and I just returned from a road trip to Dawson Creek where we visited family. The short video above was shot through the windshield in the Fraser Canyon near the junction of the Fraser and the Thompson rivers. More video of our trip is available on my youtube channel if you’re interested.

Dawson Creek definitely counts as northern horse territory. It is mile zero on the famous Alaska Highway. The milepost is right in the center of town, and Marilyn’s father is the one who made it years ago. Unfortunately it had been replaced by a christmas tree for the season so I couldn’t get a picture of it.

Although this was not specifically a horse trip there were lots of horses in evidence, especially when we got beyond the Fraser Canyon and up into the rangeland of the Chilcotin area.

Know what? Even though we saw lots of horses standing around in fields or playing in the snow, we didn’t see a single blanket. Not one. Sure they were all well-haired. Some were really fuzzy bears, but none of them appeared to be cold or uncomfortable. This just goes to show that my contention about blankets being more for the owners than for the horses is fundamentally correct.

On the other hand, it probably isn’t wise to do what one young girl at our barn did recently, ie give your horse a cold water bath in the middle of winter and then stick him away in an unheated stall. She got away with it, so maybe it isn’t so bad. Seemed somewhat foolhardy to me.

By the way, not blanketing doesn’t mean ignoring or not caring for horses in the snow. Examples of that are in the links that follow.

Tough Economy Leads to Abandoned Horses

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Technorati Tags: Alaska Highway, Chilcotin, Dawson Creek, Dawson Creek British Columbia, Fraser Canyon, horse blanket, horse care, northern horse

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Tags: Alaska Highway, Chilcotin, Dawson Creek, Dawson Creek British Columbia, Fraser Canyon, horse blanket, horse care, northern horse

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sema 07/12/2009 05:06 AM 1 point
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I live in Europe (11 years UK, 8 years France, moving to Germany) and I'm amazed at how hardy the horses in Northern BC are. We did a trip out there last year and stayed 2 weeks at an Appaloosa ranch outside Prince George. Still snow on the ground and the mares were foaling in the fields. No stalls, not even a windbreak. The owner put down straw and hoped that the foals would lie on the straw area rather than on the ground wet from melting snow. All the foals survived (except a few that were taken by wild animals later on). Absolutely amazing. Over here, we confine mom and foal to a warm stall, give the foal an injection within hours of birth and have a vet on standby, and still the foal sometimes dies. We were so impressed, we bought one of his stallions and shipped it over here to France.

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