I know there was a thread about this a while back, but I’ve searched & haven’t found it. I’m just interested to hear what people have paid to build their gallop tracks. I know it depends on topography, soils, size, etc, so please fill me in on what your experiences are. Thanks!
Ugh, I was contemplating one here on my property…figured it would be a good way to maximize the use of a small property that’s heavily wooded. 4.5 acres. Unfortunately my topography, layout and ground conditions make it next to impossible. It would have had a couple serious butt-building steep hills…but it would also have to encompass a long stretch of driveway and require moving existing fencing making paddocks even smaller (I like jumping but didn’t want to have to jump in and out of paddocks, LOL) and removing mature trees and adding drainage. So my rough cost estimate was pretty high…around $12,000. :eek: Yeah…didn’t do it. But that cost is excessively high due to the property it would go on.
Low spots can be tough because you’ll have a swamp crappy footing spot after rain/snow melt. Those areas need to be raised a bit and/or drainage added in.
My cousin has a track that is basically a machine width around a field.
Topnotch location, wonderful footing an drainage, He has to take the traktor down there now and then and rake it.
It cost him (rather the owner of the field) the cost of crops he loses every year.
Another individual spend a lot of money trucking in sand - one good flood and all was gone.
Hills are not a bad thing, or smallish turns, it helps the horse sort out his feet.
how much you have to spend depends on the work involved: removing trees (and roots) is expensive, having to fix drainage issues will cost you as well as fixing up the footing.
The fella who bought our training farm paid (I heard) three quarters of a mill to enlarge our previously existing hogfuel track, and change it to sand. So there is your upper end parameter.
If you are making a galloping track for event or show horses, ups and downs and sharper corners are fine. If for race training, the track should be close to level, corners need to be even and smooth, and banked. Depending on the type of land you own, (sand or gravel base vs clay), and the weather (monsoon rains or dry climate), you may need to do very little to the footing, other than blaze a path through wooded areas, and make sure the rocks and boggy spots are fixed up.
If there is any problem with weather or ground, removing the grass/turf/topsoil to the lower layer of subsurface, and replacing with a known footing (sand or hogfuel) is often done, as well as adding drainage of ditches along the inside and outside rails, and drainage culverts under the track in low spots. If you need to do this, it is starting to get more expensive. Some people simply dump hogfuel on top of the grass in an attempt to avoid costs, but this results in the requirement of replacing the footing as it breaks down, either cleaning it right up before replacing, or building it deeper and deeper over the years (this is a nightmare for many reasons, but people do it).
The other option is whether you are going to fence it or not. If green racehorse babies are galloping on it, it probably needs fencing to contain the inevitable loose horses that occur. If well broke older horses in non racing disciplines, probably can get away with not fencing it.
Timely topic! I am planning to double fence and have a track along the outside edge of my new place, which is 20 acres and currently pretty heavily wooded. We started last weekend clearing along an old cross-fence line with a chainsaw and brush cutter and will keep working until we can get the tractor and brush hog in there.
It’s going to be long slow work. Luckily DH thinks driving the tractor is fun!
Can someone who’s done it comment on what you used to get the tree roots out of the track? DH is thinking box blade with the teeth down to rip them and/or disc plow to slice them.
Tree roots would have to be pretty small to get them out with the teeth on a box blade. I’ve tried that and it just broke the teeth off.
I hired a guy with a D6 that had a root rake on the front. If you copy and paste my location into Google Earth, you can see where ours is pretty easily. It’s up and down hills and has some sharp turns in it. It’s about a mile and a half long if you include the inside loops and it took the D6 two days to do it. I just had him push the brush up into piles out to the side as he needed to. Several years later, the piles have rotted down and you can’t even tell where they are after I did some leveling into the woods with the tractor.
The finish after that was done with my 70 hp tractor and spare time. It took a couple of years for it have good grass growing on it but we had a dry summer in there.
The only real problem is when you go galloping around one of the sharp turns and there’s a herd of deer standing there!
I wish I had Tom King’s gallop track!
We do have one, though. It is a bit more than a third of a mile around. It has banked corners and sand footing. Think of a square with rounded corners. The track is about 30 ft wide, mostly flat. It is dry here so the track is usable all but a couple of weeks a year. It used to have a 400 yrd straightaway when were racing QHs, but we let that go to grass and it is now in the jump field.
We found a contractor who had a new-to-this-brand machine operator who needed some practice time in the earthmover before hitting the real job on the highway, so we got the heavy work done for the cost of the fuel for the earthmover. I suppose there could have been a beer(s) for the operator/student at the end of the project, also.
We have to add some sand on the uphill sides of the banked turns every couple of years. The track gets harrowed everyday and the sand eventually ends up gravitating to the low edge.
We didn’t have trees, we had giant sagebrush that had to be pulled out and burned. The earthmover did a great job of it.
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just my 2 cents!
Or you can do the “poor mans” track by spreading your broken down manure/bedding on a track in a field over & over again. And over time it breaks down into a quite usable track. Used wood shavings work the best. A lot of steeeplechase trainers around here have these for trotting horses & conditioning when the ground is frozen thru the winter. You can start with a gravel dust base first. The materials after that are free! :winkgrin:
Just need to avoid low spots and use a site w/good drainage.
Can I just say, I love this thread. All sorts of great ideas for my someday farm, though I’m sure my someday husband/handyman will not be thrilled…
Thanks for the posts, everyone! I noticed that no-one’s talking about costs though…
My DH & I wheel - measured the prospective track around the property (I was just humoring him, I really don’t think it’s possible w/our terrain.) It would come to @ 1/2 mile. But it’s mostly through woods, very very rocky woods! & 1 section is steep ledge-like. He says it would be ‘easy’ - just like creating a logging road. Truck in some gravel (that’s alot of gravel, dear!), throw on some stone dust, and - presto! I’ll never have to leave home with my pony to condition again!!
Sounds like a plan to me. I loved conditioning over the roads in the forest.
FWIW even racers can be conditioned that way, you can always truck in to breeze on a real track.
Flipper…first off Good For YOu for conditioning your horses!!! Way too many people do not condition horses…they think a quick lunge, then 30 minutes in a ring is getting a horse in shape. Horses need cardio. So do riders. Conditioning rides do that. :yes:
Second…does DH have the heavy equipment needed to smooth the proposed track? To remove rocks/boulders, take down trees and destump if needed, etc. If he does have it and can do that part…that goes a bit in reducing costs.
After that you have to walk that trail after rain a few times and pay close attention to the run off and puddling and ground conditions. That way you can figure out if/where you need a swayle or drainage pipe added. And where you’ll need to build up the height to keep it dry.
Then measure width x length x average depth you want the footing. Add extra for the areas needing building up. Check with your local quarries for current prices on the footings you want to use and also ask them to include delivery prices and ask them how much each square yard weighs. (they price by the ton, not the square yard. But the calculator below figures it out by square yard)
That should help a lot in figuring out cost. The footing is what costs the most. I just priced out current costs for finishing my outdoor ring…ouch. ($10k for 80x180)
I would probably prefer a conditioning track…on the wider than average size…over a ring. Hell, I’d get more use out of it. A decent one can have jumps on it too.
PS…don’t forget to check overhead branches. Figure out the height of top of your helmet when you’re mounted on your tallest horse and then add a couple extra feet…then debranch the areas that might try unhorsing you. :winkgrin:
On ours, after the dozer was finished, I went over the whole thing with a 5 1/2’ tiller behind the tractor (Agri-Supply made for max 35hp tractor but pulled more than it was ever intended to be with my 70 hp and still working fine). It has a flap on the back of it just like the walk behind garden tillers. I chained the flap up.
With the flap up, any root or rock or old beer can gets tossed up in the air, letting it land on or near the top as the tines stir through the dirt.
Then I went over it with a Harley Rake angled all the way.
A Harley Rake is small roller with 4-6" spikes on it that rotates the opposite way from the tractor direction. It keeps throwing anything it hits out in front of the counter-rotating roller while it leaves an amazingly smooth seed bed for grass. You can angle it, which windrows all the junk out to one side, and keep moving junk over until you get to an edge or use some method to pick it all up.
I windrowed it all to one side and after letting it sit there and all the dirt settle for a while, the front-end loader was used to pick it up and pile it into the woods off the track.
Fortunately, on that side of our road, which is on a ridge, the ground is very sandy and had very few rocks in it.
We did have some holes show up 3 or 4 years later where small pine stumps were cut off by the equipment below ground level. Small pine stumps will rot away and seemingly overnight, leave hoof sized holes. After one head over heals spill, horse and rider ( that’s how I found the holes under the grass-no injuries to either me or horse), I decided to fill all the holes. Now it’s in pretty good shape.
Ugh, rotten stump holes! I had a huge hole dug years ago and a buttload of large stumps dumped in and buried. When the work was being done the ground got wet and chewed up and a stump must have fallen out of the bucket and gotten buried when everything was graded later.
Fast forward 3-3.5 years later…walking down to the barn one afternoon to hay the horses and both are standing staring at the ground…noses down. Get closer and I can’t figure out what the black circle on the ground is. Get even closer…sink hole! About 4.5 feet deep, round and about 2 x 2’ in size. :eek: Scared the poop out of me finding it in the paddock! Fenced that section off immediately and then had it filled/packed/filled/packed etc.
Stupid stumps.
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I know this is an old post, but wanted to bring some life back to it. I’m working on building a gallop track around a field. I’m get suck on how to determine the proper arc for the corners. We’d like to be a able to gallop a comfortable corner up to Prelim level speed eventually. Can anyone give me some advice on figuring that out? The field dimensions are approx. 300 ft x 500 ft.
