Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

The horses are now chasing the green as if on a very important mission (which it very much is after a mostly dry winter). Though it doesn’t look very green in the above pic, it’s coming up, still close to the ground. Cassidy Rain looked up very briefly from her grazing to check on the whereabouts of her stallion, moseying along slower than the rest of the band.

Hard to believe this was all under a vast sea at one point, millennia past, eh? We don’t need floods, but we do need rain.

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**Update**

As of about 8 a.m., we had received the most lovely 0.18 inch of wonderful, grass- and greasewood- and other-growing and -greening rain. 🙂

Happy, happy goes the dance!

Now this was a hike that led me to these beauties. Almost circular if you note that fact that we started and ended in almost the same place on semi-similar trails – some sections VERY muddy still with melting snow in the shade of pinon and juniper trees. My boots were unhappier with the journey (uppers may or may not be coming apart from lowers), but my heart and my brain were delighted at the lingering moisture … not to mention the aforementioned and abovepictured beauties. 🙂

When Seneca paused in her grazing to look across a little arroyo at another band that was grazing the other side, I was ready on the shutter button. On the north-facing sides of the meandering little drainage, patches of wet, wet snow were still to be found. The horses were making use of the lingering snow – as kids welcome the neighborhood ice cream truck – though they did later wander up and over to the local watering hole (known as a pond in our neighborhood ;)).

‘Tis the season! No, not mud season (well, OK, it kinda is that, too … if we had enough snow to make (more) mud), ELK season!

More elk are visible because they’re moving around as the high country opens again (another reference to our lack of snow, if you can stand it). Soon, this dry low country will be too low and too dry, and these lovelies will melt away again into the shadows of the forested country. Hopefully it will retain some moisture longer than our desert country.

It IS nice to see those La Sals with fresh(er) snow. They were starting to look a little ragged.

These were two different groups of mostly elk cows and calves (last year’s) with a few scraggly youngster bulls still following their mamas and aunties.

The lovely Terra enhances her world.

You can hike with them. You can mosey while they graze along. You can nap while they nap.

They – wild horses – are always as they are. No artifice, no guile, no pretense.

Your – my – presence is just something that ebbs and flows throughout their daily lives … most of which involves not a single human being at all.

But without my – your? our? – presence, scenes like that above, which happen most days, would go … what? Unnoticed? Unwitnessed? Unappreciated? By humans, surely.

We have so much to learn from them – from wild horses … from wild … everything.