Posts Tagged ‘icy conditions’
Icy Mess
Let me start by saying that I think climate change sucks royally to the maximum extreme. We have not been blessed with a complete switch to a warmer environment as a result of the trapped greenhouse gasses but instead are suffering a ridiculous mishmash of our old winter weather interspersed with springtime-type rain throughout December, January, and now February.
Conditions for the horses yesterday morning were pretty dreary but they were incredibly stoic about enduring the insult of freezing rain.
It was tricky navigating the slipperiness as I made my way down to the barn. The two chestnuts were down under the willow tree, just standing in the rain. Mix and Swings were up under the overhang, just standing.
None of them looked cold and none of the multiple offerings of hay had been exhausted overnight. There also wasn’t the usual ridiculous amount of manure under the overhang that needed to be picked up.
I raked up any scraps of hay and tossed them on the slipperiest-looking spots. Even if that tossed hay freezes on the ground, it still offers improved footing for the horses.
This is a good shot revealing a view of Mia’s opinion about the weather:
Actually, she had gobbled up all her feed before the others had finished theirs and came over to the gate to see if I had anything else to offer.
By the afternoon feeding, after the precipitation had stopped falling and the accumulated ice had melted from most of the tree branches, the horses actually looked dry. I don’t know how they do it without sunshine or blow dryers, but it does wonders for showing how well they cope with the elements.
Horses seem to convey an understanding that bad weather is a temporary situation that can be outlasted with sheer will and steadfast patience. I have a bad habit of focusing my curiosity on how much worse it could possibly get outside while they are blocking out the misery by looking forward to how great it’s going to feel when the warm rays of sunshine finally return.
We are all hoping that moment happens today since our forecast is teasing the possibility it might.
I would like to work on focusing my attention on how much better the weather could possibly get outside.
.
.
Injury Assessment
During one period of my career, I volunteered to be a medical first responder to incidents that might occur in the workplace. The company paid for my training to become a certified first responder. One of my motivations for learning advanced first-aid skills was having two young children I was responsible for at home. They would invite friends over for all manner of child’s play which increased the pressure of responsibility I felt, as it also increased the opportunities for someone to get hurt.
If a freak accident were to occur, say something poked in an eye, I learned not to pull it out and some ways to protect the area. Thank goodness I never needed to respond to anything that serious, in terms of injury. Knowing what to do helped ease some of my anxiety over being responsible for someone else’s well-being.
In the workplace, I had the support of many other responders to share the decision-making process when situations arose and I relied on them heavily. In one case where I was the main person tending to an ankle injury at the racquetball courts, I misread the woman’s level of distress and assumed a sprain. After seeing her doctor, she reported there was a broken bone.
I’ve never trusted my interpretation of other people’s symptoms since. It gets even harder when the patient can’t talk because they are a horse. Mia’s behavior tells me she isn’t hurting too badly but she has an ugly-looking abrasion on the back of one of her front feet. My first suspicion was that she scraped it on the icy crust of the snow in the paddocks.
I saw her out beyond the wicked polished ice trying to navigate the deeper snow with Light. In that case, she was limping and favoring it. Once she got back under the overhang, it didn’t look like it bothered her much at all. Our support from This Old Horse stopped by last night to look at it, clean it, and spray on a protective shield, similar to the NewSkin I apply to my hands.
Mia, the most skittish of the four horses, went a little crazy at the sound of the spray can with the metal ball inside. She headed down the hay path toward the waterer and then just kept on going over the slippery ice, through the gate, and out into the hay field. As I was walking down with a lead rope to retrieve her, she headed back toward me, at a full sprint!
Mia stopped right where I was standing. I clipped on the lead, and we walked up under the overhang where Mia stood perfectly while Johanne lifted her hoof to treat the wound.
The wound looks just as fresh and angry this morning as it did yesterday. I am not confident about assessing how serious it could be. Thankfully, Johanne volunteered to return to check on it at noon.
I still don’t like being responsible for someone else’s well-being.
.
.
Disastrous Footing
One of the things that make rain in February so awful is the aftermath. Any snow that has been packed down by driving, walking, or horse activity turns into a wobbly polished surface of slippery ice. It’s about the worst possible situation for the horses to move around on, especially on slopes like the ones in our paddocks.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Yesterday morning, while I was doing my best to provide a way for the horses to cope with the slippery conditions, Mia made the mistake of trying to make her way downhill. It was a decision she couldn’t go back on once she made the first move. I was a bit traumatized to be witnessing such a precarious maneuver by a 1200-pound hooved beast. She slipped and stutter-stepped her way down the slope, ultimately avoiding the worst outcome and coming to a stop while still on her feet.
The frantic trip down the icy surface appeared to make it obvious to Mia that she wasn’t going to be able to move around on the ice even though she’d made it to that spot. She seemed to realize her only option was to get back up where she’d come from. After just a few seconds of hesitation, she began moving her hooves to head back up but there was more slipping than stepping happening.
She knew momentum was needed and bobbed her head and flexed enough muscle to attack the incline with some semblance of a run. Somehow, that slipping run was successful and she arrived back to the muddy surface around the overhang.
I was working on covering a pathway with old hay to provide footing to get down to the waterer.
I’d already set out buckets of water under the overhang because it was so treacherous for them to reach the waterer but offering the potential route down felt better than doing nothing at all.
I have no idea how long the icy condition will persist.
In the image above you can see the icy area is darker than the white snow in the distance. I may attempt to rake some sand and/or spread more old hay around on the slope to give the horses options for moving around. The scariest risk comes when one of the horses feels a need to get bossy and the target of their aggression panics in her hasty attempt to escape. If all four horses are confined to the limited space by the overhang, things can get a little testy.
Last night I closed gates to split them into two groups of two to minimize their bickering.
There is no place for shenanigans when the footing gets this disastrous.
.
.
Harsh Environment
It’s not always easy, carving out survival in all the crazy extremes of weather possible in the great outdoors. It may seem odd at first mention, but I think snow actually softens the blow of winter months, both figuratively and literally. We have received very little this year, and what did fall has mostly disappeared. After the rain and re-freeze, followed by a few days of melting, we settled into a pattern of cold that has created a particularly harsh environment outside.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The ground is hard as rock and every other step is slippery from spots of ice.
Dezirea showed up with a bloody cut just under the joint of her cannon and pastern bones. If you look closely, there is a less obvious cut similarly located on her other front leg. I wondered if she maybe broke through some ice in the drainage rut that crosses the back pasture.
There isn’t any snow deep enough to have broken through a crust to get a cut like that.
Cyndie is up at the lake place for the weekend, so I sent her a text with the image. She asked if there was any blood on Hunter’s back hooves.
Hmm.
I hadn’t thought of that. Of course, there wasn’t.
Dezi was moving around just fine and didn’t seem any worse for the wear. There has been no further bleeding from the cut, so I am letting time do the natural healing it always provides, while also watching for any changes to the worse.
Delilah and I walked the pasture to look for any possible hazards or signs of a possible cause. Finding absolutely nothing, I’m beginning to think Cyndie may have identified the more likely culprit.
I sure hope Dezirea is dishing out as much as she is taking in the ongoing roughhousing happening among our three-horse herd.
Makes me miss Legacy that much more. Tomorrow is the first anniversary of his departure from this world. I’m definitely feeling it.
Toward the end of his life, Legacy’s poop took on a strikingly loose consistency. In an unsettlingly timed turn yesterday, while cleaning up after the horses in the paddock, I came upon a pile that was uncomfortably similar to what we used to see from the old herd leader.
Maybe the horses are feeling a little sick, too, over memories of what transpired a year ago on that oh-so-cold January thirteenth night.
A harsh environment, indeed.
.
.
Inescapable Icecapades
Winter conditions on our land have devolved steadily ever since the combination of that day-long rain, followed by a hard freeze. This is despite last weekends’ several days of above freezing temperatures. The melts and re-freezes just seem to compound the disasters of ice that are building up in so many places.
The driveway around the barn is barely navigable.
The paddocks have become practically skate-able.
As I crested the last hill approaching our driveway on my commute home from work yesterday, I noticed debris in the road, but before I could react, I heard the “pop” of glass breaking.
I spent the next half hour with a push broom, trying to clean up the remains of a broken bottle that was scattered across several yards in front of our property, muttering to myself over what goes through a person’s mind that they are willing to toss their trash out the window.
Especially, in front of our beautiful land!
Our weather forecast is suggesting another few days ahead with temperatures expected to climb above freezing. Even with the promise of some partial sunshine, it isn’t clear whether the mild trend will add more treacherous ice to our low spots, or shrink our several skating rinks.
At this point, I think what we truly need to improve conditions is a significant amount of snow to fall. Seems a little reversed logic, doesn’t it?
.
.
Dangerous Formula
Take one part 3-inch snow burst, follow it with a day-long steady rain, and then finish it off with a quick drop in temperature to produce a solid freeze. What could go wrong?
We are currently enduring some of the worst footing since we moved to this property. It has us genuinely concerned about how to best protect our horses from critical injury.
Rain saturated the new snow on Thursday, creating an amazing amount of soupy slush. The snow on the ground absorbed as much water as possible while still being considered snow. It was basically thick water. After an overnight hard freeze, the conditions on Friday morning morphed into an uneven, rock-hard maze of slipperiness.
The splattered wake of tire tracks in Thursday’s slush are now locked solid in a bumpy, slippery, frozen echo of that rainy day.
The ground just beyond the barn overhang in the paddocks slopes down quickly enough that we sometimes worry about the horses staying safe on it on good days.
They were inside for the night when everything froze up, after getting miserably cold and wet the day before. We feared how they would handle the insane slipperiness if we put them outside without warning. The grassy footing of the back pasture seemed like a much better place to start.
They would still need access to the automatic waterer, so we opened a gate that would allow them to walk the flatter ground into the paddock as needed.
All good, in theory, but there would need to be a trick to the execution that we totally failed to consider.
Our plan was to take them out the back door and walk across the grass, past the chicken coop, to a double gate that they probably have never used. The catch was, with three horses, and only two of us, we wouldn’t be moving them all at once.
Without anticipating the consequences, we took Cayenne first. I walked her, while Cyndie managed the gate. Cayenne was expectedly cautious about the odd scene we were leading her through, so we took our time. Back in the barn, Hunter immediately voiced his dissatisfaction with our strange departure with one of the herd.
This also was to be expected, so we weren’t concerned. We would be back to get him and Dezirea soon enough.
Once inside the back pasture with Cayenne, I removed her halter.
Can you guess the next part?
She immediately headed back to familiar territory and Hunter’s call, and not as carefully as we wished. Since we had already opened the gate to allow them access to water, Cayenne trotted quickly back into the icy paddock, running right up that slippery slope to get under the overhang.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
To avoid further running, we decided to bring the other two out under the overhang to join Cayenne like normal. Unfortunately, just as we feared, Hunter lost footing on the icy slope right away. A back hoof slid out from under him, and in an athletic reaction to catch himself, he stomped on Cyndie’s foot with the opposite front hoof.
She yelped, he pulled off instantly, and calm was restored. Nothing broken, but definitely bruised.
This morning, when Cyndie went down to open the barn and let them out, she reported the horses showed no interest. They appeared quite satisfied with the safe footing in their stalls, despite the cramped quarters.
.
.
Relative Something 