OMG - love these! The cliffs would scare the poop outta me too! I love the one about the leaves! I don’t have trees here either and if we ride by them and they rustle, my horse looks at them like they are aliens landing on the roof.
Stepping on a yellow jacket nest. Both of us got stung but my mare was really good about it, she just started doing tiny little bucks in place to let me know what was happening.
[QUOTE=sorrelfilly721;7063129]
OK - what the heck is a LARPer???[/QUOTE]
Live Action Role Play, so basically they were a bunch of adult men, dressed like they were from the middle ages with swords and shields and armor pretending that they were battling one another. LOL!
years ago, we got the bright idea to ride during a full moon one winter’s night. the full moon on fresh snow felt like we were riding on a sunny day. we decided to ride over to an animal research area a few miles away. we knew they had dogs and some other mammals but when we rounded the corner and came upon an ostrich in full plummage staring at us. well, i thought my horse was going to turn into a rocket ship. he started out doing his version of a paso fino prance but at warped speed. the turn and spin was right out of a cartoon. luckily, i stayed in the saddle. by the time we (the ostrich and horses and riders) realized what was going on, we were 1/2 way home. thinking back, i’m glad i was a young agile rider and not the scaredy cat feeble rider i am now.
Riding into the start of a paint ball battle being held illegally in a county park. The trails are narrow, twisty and there’s heavy brush on either side, so you can’t see more than 1-2’ to either side or more than 10-20’ feet ahead of you.
So I’m going along, minding my own business, completely unaware, and then the shooting starts. Took me a few miles to get my mare pulled up.
Today, I was on a hack with a young mare and an older gelding and I was on my 20-year old mare. Approached a field of dairy cows alongside the road we were riding on. Cows were quietly ambling in the opposite direction, so all was good. Then one cow got curious, did a 180, and bounded up to the fence to check us out. I saw it running across the field towards us and thought, “Uh-oh.” My horse and the young mare spooked. Young mare’s rider started panicking and jumped off (not what I would have done, but hey ho). She had a running martingale on, thus she couldn’t pull the reins over the horse’s head, so I’m sure this made life interesting for her but I didn’t care at this point because my old girl was spooking and spinning like a mad thing. I was trying to keep her out of the ditch and the barbed wire fence on the side of the road. The gelding and young mare were about 50 meters in front of us at this point and my mare kept spooking us back the way we came, away from them. I put loads of leg on my mare to get her forward. And I was shouting, “Forward, forward, forward, get in front of the fking leg for fck’s sake,” which I’m sure amused the Land Rover driver who had to wait out these histrionics. After all, I always tell my riding students that getting your horse in front of the leg solves a lot of problems. We got a few steps of a brilliant passage that would have put Valegro to shame, and then she tanked off, past the other two. So I got forward. But with no chance of stopping till we got past the field of cows. At least she’s sensible enough to listen to brakes once you’re beyond the scary thing, so she did stop when we got to the next (empty) field. We waited for the other two. The youngster was pretty wound up. Lassie riding her was upset and angry at her horse (which happens when things don’t go well for her) and spent the remainder of the ride in a strop. She said it hadn’t been easy to hang onto her horse when I shot past. I bet. I apologised, but said that when 1200lbs of draft cross decides that she’s going to make a run for it, there’s not a lot you can do. The old gelding had a look on his face like, “What’s with all these hysterical women? Jeeze.”
Bloody cows. My horse is fine with the ones who ignore you, but when they come charging up the fence to say hi, she has a meltdown.
That’s the only thing that really panics her. Bikes, motorcycles, children on go karts, it’s all fine. We even passed through a paintball course a few years ago (oops). Our companion on that ride was totally freaked, standing up on her hind legs. My horse jigged and pranced a little bit, but got through it more or less fine.
That said, I hope I don’t meet an ostrich.
[QUOTE=tabula rashah;7063355]
Live Action Role Play, so basically they were a bunch of adult men, dressed like they were from the middle ages with swords and shields and armor pretending that they were battling one another. LOL![/QUOTE]
OMG I woulda died laughing…
[QUOTE=Caol Ila;7063595]
I apologised, but said that when 1200lbs of draft cross decides that she’s going to make a run for it, there’s not a lot you can do. [/QUOTE]
Ain’t that the truth!? I took my friend’s Belgian/Perch cross to a show and they shot off sprinklers 100’ in the air in the ring above us. He bolted across the ring like a runaway freight train. Boyfriend actually took our pic and said it was really cool how I was galloping him across the ring LOL. Yeah, like that was MY idea 
Makes you realize how kind and gentle they really are. I think my horse is perfectly well aware that if she really wants to bog off, she can bog off. And the little piece of metal in her mouth isn’t going to do a damned thing. Luckily, in 99% of situations, she chooses not to.
First - riding up to a pond to let the horses drift in a bit, when a flock of ducks came flying up out of the bullrushes. Thankfully our horses are level headed (and lazy), so they galloped 4 steps maybe, then stopped and said “whew that was a close one wasn’t it?”
Second - out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farm fields, trees and trails, when a truck comes flying up over a hill and stops to ask if we’ve seen 3 goats go flying by. Apparently, very exciting for the horses…probably a good thing we didn’t see the goats or this would have been another story.
My story isn’t so much as something scary that I SAW. But it was a scary, weird thing that happened suddenly to myself and my horse.
I was living in Eagle Valley in NE Oregon. I had a TB cross paint who was tall, athletic and a real joker. He did love to run and buck at the same time. He could be running like crazy up front while his hind end was flinging skywards so high that his tail would wack me in the chest over my shoulder. So in this part of Oregon it’s dry and you had to have irrigation water to grow grass or alfalfa. The irrigation was mostly done by ditch. There were really big deep ditches that fed smaller ditches that fed smaller ditches. So all the hay and pastures fields had ditches adjacent to them. In the cold winters the ditches are mostly dry and empty.
The snow in that area is powder and the winds will blow the snow around. This particular valley was not directly up against the mountains so the snow usually only got around 18" deep but it blew around and often FILLED THE DITCHES.
In the winter I was hard put to find areas to ride that wasn’t too deep in snow. The gravel roads with packed icy snow were rideable if you walked or had borium on a shod horse. I like to go ride the lanes along the hay fields that got packed down by ranchers on their tractors. I was riding old Paint (Rocky) along one of these lanes. Walk, trot, d@%! don’t gallop and off we went bucking down that lane. I pulled him to the left into deeper snow to slow him down. The bottom fell out!
My horse just disappeared out from under me. One second my butt was slapping leather then just air. I dropped and dropped in whiteness. I was up to my neck in snow, swallowing snow, drowning in snow. Something moved under me and my horse surfaced and plunged around just in front of me. He clawed and plunged and climbed out of the big, deep, snow filled ditch we had dropped into. In his play and goofiness he had jumped into a really big ditch hidden by snow.
Rocky lunged out of the ditch while I was stuck with just my head above the snow line and my feet NOT touching bottom. THAT was scary. I got my arms up and out of the snow and began to swim/claw towards the surface then bellycrawled toward the edge of the ditch. For a minute there I thought I may be stuck like in quicksand. His Spottedness had reached the lane and walked away from me for about 100 feet. Then he waited for me to get my lazy butt out of the ditch and catch up. Oh, my dog who always accompanied these rides and often instigated the bucking sprees was laughing and enjoying the whole darn thing. Thank God for insulated snowmobile suits!
Bonnie
Let’s see…I’ve had deer jump out in front of us, ducks fly up from an irrigation ditch next to us, coyote crossing our path, horses running along the trail, just last weekend we had a bear run out in front of us on the trail, dogs, bikers, hikers, people with stroller . . . oh yea, llamas with backpacks on . . . but probably the weirdest thing I saw was a spaceman.
Yes, a spaceman. A man in a space suit with a bubble helmet on. We don’t live too far from an AFB and they were up in the forest doing a training exercise. And yes, I saw a spaceman.
Oh gosh, that would have been last fall, a few weeks after hurricane sandy. The Big Horse and I were moseying along the edge of a field one afternoon. Very quiet, calm day; no wind whatsoever.
All of a sudden, about 25 feet away, this huge (100+ ft) tree comes crashing down in the woods out of nowhere - I guess it had died/rotted from all the flooding and just happened to to fall at that moment??
Scared the %^&$@! out of both of us. Poor Dalton spun and bolted so fast (mind you, up until then, the worst I had ever gotten out of him was a 180 degree spin when a fawn jumped out of the bushes, but he quickly came to his senses and got over it) that he had run 30 yards in the other direction with me yelping [I]"HOLY SHT!!!"[/I], before I even started to pull him up. Needless to say, we went back and continued our ride but it was short-lived, since that pretty much fried both of our brains for the day :eek:
I think for my horse it was the llama. In the middle of the woods. They were hand walking it and when they saw us coming down the trail, they moved off into the trees. Unfortunately it started jumping around and our horses went nuts. Can’t really blame them. LOL
There was a flasher in our riding park a few years back - but it wasn’t me that got the scare, someone else.
Can’t think really - probably a bear that caused a short bolt.
Talking about llamas - a herd of them came trotting up to the fence on a trail ride - my mare - swear to God - galloped backwards.
I can’t recall anything that has spooked my horse. I have been spooked on more than one occasion - the worst was a flying squirrel that nearly hit me. I didn’t even know we had them here. Baby turkeys right under my horses freaked me out a bit. We’ve ridden up to an oil well, pumping away, as well as bison - oh, and hikers carrying oxygen tanks (there’s a scuba spot on the trail). Not much bugs Jet, but I am a bit spooky, I guess.
The worst for me personally was a tree falling next to the trail we were on; luckily it fell parallel to the trail not in our direction. Two horses but just got the 180 and freeze reaction.
A good friend was riding on our trail system (linked private properties) and came across an older male landowner weed-eating, completely nude. His property, after all, but I can’t see where nude weed-eating would be a good idea under any circumstances!
For both the mare and I it was the Backhoe lurking in the kudzu. Riding along thru the tunnel of blooming kudzu (which, BTW, smells amazing!) and WHAM… there it was in all it’s scary yellowness. Mare squatted and spun like a reiner (which for a porckchop of a draft-cross is pretty awesome). I hung on and managed to get her stopped & turned her back to said Lurking Backhoe. Think we must have stood there shaking for a good 10 minutes before she acquiesced to my request for Forward, hence how I got the picture. God bless that mare, she did it!
Actually turned out to be a good thing, because it prepped her/me for the next week’s spookable the other direction on the trail: A pile driver. It was going full blast, smoke and all. I think the terror just made her freeze… never did freak out, just stood there shaking and starting at IT.
After that, the crane didn’t even get blinked at 
Scariest thing we’ve run into was a kite that someone had lost. It had a long tail and fishing line for a string. The fishing line somehow hooked to Murphy’s hind shoe so when we got a ways past it (and hit the end of the line) the kite started flying along behind us. I noticed it about the same time as Murphy. He tried to bolt but I got him spinning instead. When he finally stopped the kite was plastered against the side of his head covering one eye. The fishing line went over his neck, across my leg, and was wrapped several times around both hind legs. My friend was able to dismount her horse (who was having a serious spook himself) and cut us loose. I then flew the kite on a short piece of string the remaining mile back to the trailer. Murphy was actually ok with that unless the kite’s tail hit him in the flank.
