Growing a Small and Remote GMO
by Patricia A. Stuart
USDF Connection, January 2006
Trucks and SUV’s line a road shadowed by the heaped-up ranges of the Absaroka Mountains. Inside a ranch-style house, a group of dressage riders sit down for an annual meeting. They expect the process to be as digestible as the meal they have just consumed. It is. The 2004 president is reelected with a unanimous vote, and the rest of the agenda us dealt with just as expeditiously leaving plenty of time for socializing before it is necessary to dig into a huge pile of parkas. Then, boots must be sorted, dishes covered and stowed, and engines warmed for long trips home across northern Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin, a spectacular, isolated, geographically hostile area as large as some states. And, beyond it is the largest roadless wilderness in the continental United States.
This is the home of a small USDF GMO, the Heart Mountain Dressage Club.
In the past few years, the HMDC’s members have grown accustomed to pleasant meetings, to uniformity of opinion, time turning them into a homogenous lot. The current HMDC is one hundred percent female, most of the women having jobs and children, plus their own pastures, barns, horses, trucks, trailers, and arenas. A few have indoor arenas, too. None of them own schoolmasters but hope to grow with their horses. For the majority, first level is an ambition, intro and training level a satisfactory reality for the foreseeable future.
It wasn’t always this way. “We’ve been through a lot, and it’s changed us,” one of the local instructors, Marina Murray, said during a discussion of the club’s early traumas.
Geographic isolation explains much about the HMDC ‘s development and its current composition. In 1989, the founding year, there weren’t many English riders in the region even though the equine population outnumbered humans three to one.
IN THE LARGEST ROADLESS WILDERNESS AREA OF THE LOWER UNITED STATES, HORSE ENTHUSIASTS CAME TOGETHER
“The name of the club was an accident,” Verlane Desgrange explained when I joined the group. Verlane is a saddle maker and a brilliant artist in leather. “At first,” she told me, “we were thinking of calling it the Heart Mountain English Riding Club. Then someone said that dressage sounded better. No one objected, so that’s how it started.”
“Did anyone know anything about dressage?”
She laughed. “I think everyone could spell it … maybe.”
The founding membership included a handful of Arab breeders, some gaited horse owners, a number of 4-H instructors, jumpers, a couple of former Pony Clubbers, and a coterie of mule riders. It was male and female, and Western riders were welcome. But with the name came the game.
The newly formed HMDC became enthusiastic about non-competitive dressage schooling shows. Stock saddles creaked around the arena in what was called Cowboy Dressage; actual dressage saddles were rare, and earnings from these “fun” days went toward building a full set of stadium jumps.
Its origins held the germs of conflict ... an identity crisis faced the group.
It was a beginning that contained the germs of conflict. Was this a social/riding club, an eventing group, one supporting jumpers, or USDF GMO material? The years between 1994 and 1998 were to be traumatic, the HMDC’s problems magnified by isolation, long winters, conflicting interests, and internal diversity. Volunteerism burn-out plagued the group. Personalities clashed, members left. At the same time new people, attracted by the beauty of the area and the life style, moved in, stamped their own interests on the group, and the club as it is today took shape.
Schooling shows, once an HMDC staple, now occur on a less strenuous schedule – spring, summer, and fall. For several years, the group tried its hand at managing a recognized show. These were impressively well run and popular. “In the end, though,” one of the show managers told me, “we all just burned out.”
“But we still try to offer as much as we can,” Deb Hayber told me last year as she rang up a purchase in her Horse Creek shop. “That’s why we’ve added breed classes to our schooling shows.” Her point was that the HMDC is responding to the growing number of warmbloods in the area. Where there were none in 1993, Belgian, Dutch, Irish, Trakehner, and Lusitano foals will hit the ground in 2005, and the HMDC intends to support them.
We still try to offer as much as we can.
Likewise, the HMDC enthusiastically votes stipends for those who want to continue their riding education outside the area or for members who make the regional finals. While the latter might sound a bit strange, showing for those living in the Big Horn Basin is a challenge. In the summer of 2005, there will be exactly three recognized shows within a seven-hour drive (Billings, Riverton, and Bozeman – check a map), and only Billings can be managed in one day. Bozeman and Riverton mean three-days. Anything else, becomes a four-day or more project.
Rider education is high on the HMDC’s list of priorities. Currently, the most popular club program is a monthly horse management session called a MMM for Mid-Month Motivator. For the most part this is a sharing of knowledge among club members. Those with particular skills – grooming, lunging, trailer safety, horseshoeing, whatever – put on mini-clinics for their colleagues. “I always learn something,” one of the members said, currying mats of hair off her horse as she spoke and sneezing wisps from her face. “And it’s a chance to catch up on what everyone’s doing.”
The opportunities to learn and grow are endless ....
Clinics appear in the HMDC calendar several times a year, although debate about their actual utility is on-going. Still, everyone enjoys splurging on an occasional lesson with an outside clinician. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to discard half-chaps and pull out high boots, to thin manes and use extra dollops of Cowboy Magic on horse tails, to enter the arena, and strut a bit (or not) in front of a peer group of auditors and the clinician.
Dressage lessons provide a more universal educational opportunity. “The range of riding skills is extreme, so it takes some inventiveness to find the right lesson mix,” Barbie Bell, another of the local instructors, says. On any given day she might end up teaching someone who has just taken up dressage after years on a Western saddle or, and this is not unusual, a rider who wants to learn dressage in a Western saddle.
What it's all about.
However experienced or fresh to the sport, pursuing dressage in this spectacular outpost isn’t easy. In addition to the normal juggling of homes, jobs, children, farm work, and other commitments comes the challenge of geography. This means handling large trucks, dealing with long and heavy trailers, surviving killer storms (to be avoided wherever possible), and negotiating mountain roads. And that just gets the rider to a lesson or a schooling show.
For what? The prospect that some of these riders will ever see a Grand Prix horse in the flesh is the dream, the goal and reality less ambitious.
On a sunny winter day, snowfields across the tops of the Big Horn Mountains make a blinding display against a sky as blue and pollution-free as the star field on an American flag. Under this backdrop, F-250 Fords with Featherlights, Cumins’ diesels pulling Circle J stock trailers, one-ton GMCs attached to steel Titans roll along an otherwise empty road, turning north toward the Pryor Mountains and into Lou Kennedy’s Crooked Creek Ranch. They’re out for an afternoon of dressage. A small herd of deer drift past the parked trailers, getting only scant notice as horses are unloaded, their nostrils sniffing a breeze blowing off the neighboring wild horse reserve. Busy soon with saddles and boots, the women dish out carrot treats, call greetings, exchange comments about the last storm, the next foal, a faulty transmission, a new farrier. Someone laughs, and the sound carries, a banner of sound in the clear air.
And this is what it’s all about: happy horses, riders, and fellowship