Mustang Mountain Photos

Officially known as Star's Rest, our horses live on nine acres situated at about 7,600' elevation located in northeastern New Mexico. The land is mostly vertical and our friends like to tell us we would have thirty acres if we flattened it out. The photo below was taken from the top of a bluff known to the locals as Cougar Point. From this photo you can see the height we are above the valley.

Mike's mustang Cuervo, who is sadly no longer with us, was the first of our horses to forge trails to the top of this bluff and the other horses soon followed. Mike often used the bluff as a training ground for Cuervo teaching him the skills necessary for future mountain packing. After Cuervo's death, we renamed the bluff Cuervo Point in his honor and this photo was taken of him and Mike from the bottom of the bluff.

Our horses quickly began using the entire mountain for their adventures, often at a dead run. It's pretty breathtaking to watch three mustangs, one with very crooked front legs, fly across the face of a mountain that is difficult for me to walk on.

The upper portion of our land was very difficult to fence and trees are often blown down so I try to walk the fence line every other month or so, more often in wind and snow conditions. Walking the fence used to be a difficult and precarious job; but after a year the horses have created safe paths all over the property, even across areas where I once had to hang onto the fence to make sure I didn't tumble back down the bluff. Winding through the photo below is a mustang highway and to the right of the photo is the edge of the bluff seen in the photos above.

We have no pasture, our horses are fed free choice local grass hay and there is no reason for them to use the full extent of the property the way they do. Yet everyday they climb up the mountain on one side, browsing on shrubs and nibbling on small grasses, circle across the top, and then follow switchback trails back down. They not only do this in the daytime, I hear them heading up almost every night at around midnight. The downward switchback trails seem to be keeping back hooves in particular evenly worn across the heels which is usually a problem in domestic horses. The photo below shows a portion of one of the downward switchbacks.

The lower sandy portion of the property has become the social ground for our bachelor band. It is where they are fed and watered, where they nap in the sun, and where they come to play.

My plan for this journal is to create a category log for each of our horses to track their physical health and the changes in their hooves over time. I know our circumstances are unusual here and that we are starting with formerly wild horses who are particularly adapted to living in these conditions. But anyone who is familiar with adopted BLM mustangs is probably aware of how quickly those horses can deteriorate in domestic conditions. Because they have adapted to constant movement and poor forage, mustangs are particularly susceptible to insulin resistance and founder. Only one of our horses has ever worn shoes and his feet still show the effects of contracted heels and deep seated thrush. I will welcome comments and feedback and if you have your own story to tell, I'll be happy to put it on this blog in its own category.