photos from August 26 - 29, 2020
Jackson has been working with Bella this summer and the results have been nothing short of amazing. Bella is our horse that basically got 'put on the back burner' several years ago. You see Bella arrived at our farm as a yearling filly and the plan was that Jackson would learn how to train a horse from the ground up using Bella. Funny thing was, not too terribly long after Bella's arrival at Willis Creek Ranch, Jackson met a beautiful young girl named Brianna and somehow learning to train Bella completely left Jackson's mind! ha!
Flash forward (maybe not flash... but several years later!) to this summer and Jackson decided it was time to make up for lost time. Although Bella had been handled and had some basic work done in her training over the years, the focus had never been on her. You don't typically try to start an unbroke 9 year old horse, but Jackson took on the challenge. And he has done marvelously well! Not only has he gotten Bella back into good shape, she is really responding to his training. I couldn't believe it when he started riding her under saddle. She may well turn out to be one of our better horses!
It has been such a joy to watch Jackson this summer as he has worked hard and learned so much about training horses. Of course, he does benefit from having the literal best horse trainer I have ever known/seen/heard about in his own Dad, but Jackson has taken the initiative to make it all his own. Another pure joy is watching Jackson, Marvin, and Jonathan spending lots of time together out here at Willis Creek Ranch. Riding, training, working, planning, laughing and making memories. What truly precious time.
A common training technique is for someone to ride another (well broke) horse alongside as you begin to ride a newly trained horse under saddle. So Marvin or Jonathan will take turns riding Shadow when Jackson is riding Bella. First they were both inside the octagonal pen.
Then Jonathan (or Marvin) would ride Shadow outside of the pen while Jackson rode Bella inside and did some work with her. Knowing at any time she could feel the comfort of having Shadow still close by.
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Jonathan riding Shadow, Jackson on Bella
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Jonathan rode away a bit to see how Bella would do...
you can see Marvin watching all from the patio. :)
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Jonathan and Shadow take a quick cruise around the house...
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He will always be the true horse whisperer.
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Jonathan and Shadow returning...
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Then another day... this time with Marvin riding Shadow.
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getting Bella to canter
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| Jackson will ride Shadow to the barn while leading Bella |
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Marvin will get the gate :)
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Bella did great today!
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Thankful.
Even though I have a gazillion photos in this post, there are more! Here is a link to a complete album of photos from these few days.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/williscreekranch/albums/72157716137027637
And here are two videos with snippets from the days.
