my job

Okay, this is actually a section of a letter that I just finished writing... But I figured I would post it here just to give you all an idea of what exactly I do every day.

Here's an average day at work:

Work starts at 6:00 a.m. I hitch a ride into work with some of my housemates. We put hay and grain out in the outdoor stalls, and then open the gate to the 'dude horses' pasture. The dude horses pile on out and find themselves a stall and start munching away. While they're busy eating, we go along and put a halter on each horse (they know what's going on and very politely lift up their heads and poke them into the halters). At the same time as they're being haltered up, someone else is going along and setting the horse's saddle on the wall beside him (they're all geldings). Once they're all haltered, we brush them all down: this is a really quick brushing and takes less than a minute per horse---basically, we concentrate on the saddle area and ignore the rest unless he's caked in mud. Then, we saddle them up.

Once the dude horses are saddled, we grab a halter and head over to the guide horse corral. There, Booner, the foreman, assigns each of us our horse for the day. Usually, I wind up with Chief, a big appaloosa. I share Chief with another girl, though, so sometimes she has him and I wind up with another horse... Sometimes that horse is a guide horse, and sometimes it's a dude horse that just got in from a winter in the back country and that they want to test out before they send back to the dude pen.

As soon as I've saddled my horse and made sure he has food, I hop back in the car and head back to staff accom. Usually, it's around 6:45 at this point...

I have to be back at work again at 8:00. Once we roll in again at 8:00, we grab the dude horses and take them over to their pen. Usually, we grab three or four of them at a time, to make things go a bit faster. Once they're in the pen, we take their halters off and bridle them. Then, we do the same for our own horses.

And then, our day begins! Rides start at 9:00 and leave every hour on the hour. From the main stables, we offer every thing from one hour to three hour rides. We also offer half day rides, full day rides, breakfast rides and steak fry rides... Everything up to six day rides, actually.

I'm only doing the one to three hour rides right now, with the occasional steak fry thrown in there. On average, I usually spend between 5 and 7 hours in the saddle, but that'll probably go up in number once the busy season starts. The other day, I came in from a ride and went straight back out on another without my feet ever touching ground.

When I'm not guiding, I'm usually doing barn chores. That involves a lot of shovelling manure (we can't have the paying customers seeing horse poop). I've also helped fix a few fences and have learned how to hook up and drive the draft horses, which means I can now drive the shit wagon over to the manure pile... The joy!

I'm usually out of the stables by around 6:30... 8:30 if I go on the steak fry.

Of course, that's just my day if I'm at the main stables.

Sometimes, I'm stationed over at our other location by the Fairmont. If that happens, my day starts pretty much the same, but I have to be back from breakfast by 7:45, so that we can tie the horses together and guide a string over them over to the 'Spray River Corrals' as it's called. The Corrals are pretty fun... because we don't have a foreman there watching over us and no barn to clean, we tend to spend the time not guiding playing card games or napping. We only offer two trails there, a one hour and a three hour, but both are very cool and involve a lot of river fording and mountain climbing.

Anyhow, that's my summer job for you... I wrote my 'guide test' today, which means I will soon be officially guiding, as opposed to just kind of tagging along on the rides.