I’d like to introduce myself

In 1986 my parents, a diesel mechanic and a breakfast waitress, had me. I weighed a resounding three pounds at birth. I won a lot of battles as a small child - I lived, I did normal kid things. I also was cursed with a lazy eye, making me the target of children who were less than kind at school. School was challenging and things in our household were never calm. We moved in and out of various rental apartments for most of my young life. Family life wasn’t super consistent either - we lived with a great aunt for a bit, spent six months in foster care at one point and lived with my older sister and her family for a bit of time as well.

Things were never calm, but my mother did one thing right in that time frame - she introduced me to horses. In 1990 I began riding western, hitting the trails with my mother and her Appaloosa horses. I found the calm in my life quickly - it turned out it was at the barn.

At age seven, still super young, I met a trainer who focused kids like me and in Arabian horses. At her day camp I met my first Arabian and my first tiny cross rail. I remember feeling the air on my face and the horse leaving the ground ever so slightly. My mother had signed me up as a western rider - but the trainer saw my giddy expression and evaluated the giggles - I was in the wrong saddle for sure. A tack change was imminent. I went from my mother’s trail riding buddy to a full fledged hunter-jumper rider, and I loved every last second of it.

But I also started another love affair there, and that was one with Arabians. As I went up the ranks with a horse purchased for me by my mother after we had stumbled into some money - an Appendix Quarter Horse named Jack who was my best friend and saw me through every hardship and joy from the time I was 12 to when I unfortunately lost him on the year I had turned 27 - I had changed farms. We had moved, again, and this farm, while wonderful, was pretty biased against the Arabians I had originally grown up with. I was young, and impressionable, and so I started to believe that I needed a Thoroughbred or a Warmblood to do the discipline I loved.

I love a good Thoroughbred to this day, as well as a good Warmblood. But I found I missed the intuitive little Arabians - and one of my most skilled jumpers was a National Show Horse my mother purchased on one of her whims. They also held up better - my friends with Arabians from the original barn had horses sound and still working in their 20’s and even 30’s, my friends at work at the hunter barns were spending tens of thousands of dollars to keep their 6-12 year old Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods sound - and the money didn’t even guarantee a good fix all of the time.

There are so many reasons and variables for that - age started, wear and tear, genetics, conformation, environment, animal husbandry. And there are some Arabians out there today with all of those same issues - but today I focus my farm on the Arabian sport horse. The one I grew up with, with bone and substance and durability. Today I surround myself with the horses introduced to me by one of the best trainers I ever knew, as well as a couple Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses. Because lets face it, I love them too.

I strive to provide my lesson students with the same thing I was provided with - a calm in the storm of life and time with horses, because horses don’t judge. My goal is to always have my guests leave the barn feeling better about themselves than they did. That’s the job of a horse farm in this modern world.

At times it is the horse who needs some calm in this modern world - and I strive to include that in the training cases I take on - pictured above is me with my Arabian mare, Mtn. View Desert Star. Star was 14 years old and basically un-handled when I brought her home to my farm. She was was in for so many firsts, from being separated from her mother and leaving her birth home to having her feet handled and being required to lead. Over the last few years she has learned how to be a real working horse - she now goes under saddle and does all of the needed things without any sedation of any kind.

Calm and consistent handling without feeling a need to rush or bully goes a long way, especially with such an intuitive creature. When I first met Star she didn’t want me anywhere near her, pinned her ears and even bit and kicked out. These days I have a hard time getting pictures of her because she wants to be close to her people.

Calm, consistency. That’s what makes people and horses comfortable and confident. That’s our philosophy here.