Another horse motel, another disappointment. 32 acres of trails and access to mountain trails from facility was an exaggeration at best.
In order to access the mountain trails, you were required to ride along a dusty canal road and it is easily a one hour ride before you actually get to the mountains (30-45 minutes if you trailer to a trailhead).
There are some trails behind the facility on their 32 acres - very little shade and not all that pretty. However, the trails were soft dirt, so it was an easy ride.
Maryann provided us this 20 quart bucket to hold water for our horses.
I scavenged around the property and put these water buckets in the stalls which hold closer to 10 gallons. Horses drink 10-12 gallons of water per day. The small pail that was provided was only enough water to cover half a day's worth of water. If people don't drink enough water, we can get sick. If horses don't drink enough water, they can die. Temperatures here were in the high 80s.
It may sound like we are being whiny, but it stresses us out when we think our horses' health is being threatened.
The horses each have a 10' x 10' stall. Not a lot of space compared to those palatial pastures they have experienced, but shavings were provided, so they had some soft bedding.
Plus, it was pretty cool inside the big barn and they were in shade.
In the horse motel ad, it says hay is available for sale. However, all the horses here were being fed pressed alfalfa pellets, no forage. I didn't see any hay barn at all. Our horses were fed grass hay/alfalfa 2-string bales which we purchased from Valor Stables.
For some reason, the Smart Truck Route app I use on my cell phone took us on a winding tour of new housing developments. Maybe someone paid the app to do that in order to sell some houses? I have no idea, but we switched to Google Maps in frustration and then were directed correctly to the stables.
We parked next to the barn, so we were close to the horses. There was electricity and water for the trailer. The electric was a standard 110 connection, so we tripped the circuit breaker a couple of times running our air conditioning. The water pump had a leak, so we just used it to fill up the tank in our trailer as we didn't want to waste a bunch of water.
We have figured out that a 30A connection works best for our trailer, but we have adapters so we can use a standard household connection, 30A or 50A.
Oak Hills is a vaulting barn. Every afternoon a bunch of little girls come into the ranch and practice gymnastics on horseback. We would have watched, but we would have had to haul out our lounge chairs and sit in the sun in 80 degree heat. Instead, we opted to hide in our trailer in the air conditioning. Some days I feel like a cranky old lady.
Heading to Green River, Utah today, but it appears temperatures will continue to be in the high 80s. I was expecting it to be cooler this time of year. This is our second visit to Green River. We stopped there on our first horse trip to Bryce Canyon about ten years ago. We have fond memories of Green River, so I am hoping our next stop will be better.
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