Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

Can we do any better than to give them these wild-and-free lives, that they were born to live? It’s the least and absolute best we can do. I’m so glad we can do it in Spring Creek Basin.

Maybe instead of having April Fool’s Day in Colorado, we could have April-Snow-in-Colorado Day! Instead of being reliably on April 1 every year, it can be just whatever day in April it happens to snow, because, you know, it almost always DOES snow in April in Colorado. 🙂

Madison and Temple. Temple and Madison. BFFs for many years. Still going strong.

Just before I took this pic, Skywalker was standing guard on the edge of a little ridge, looking wonderfully handsome and marvelously picturesque. I didn’t think I’d have time to get my camera out of my pack before he moved … and as it turned out, I could barely get my *phone* out before he started moving. Luckily, Skywalker was still marvelously handsome and picturesque in the middle of the panoramic view!

Little bitty pretty muddy girl! Spirit always makes me smile at her sweet self … especially when she’s wearing some fancy new baubles in her forelock. 🙂

What a difference a year makes.

In spite of the snow-heavy winter we’ve had, the mustangs are absolutely thriving, and perhaps no mustang demonstrates this more significantly than almost-3-year-old Rowan, introduced to Spring Creek Basin from northwestern Colorado’s Sand Wash Basin with her mare mates Dundee (4 this year) and Aiyanna (also about to be 3) in the fall of 2021.

A year ago:

This photo, taken the end of March 2022, shows Rowan, in particular, looking a bit lean as a coming-2-year-old.

It’s rare that I have the opportunity of showing some growing contrasts, but I couldn’t be happier with her blossoming. She – and Dundee and Aiyanna – are without doubt wonderful additions to Spring Creek Basin, and I hope they’re happy in their new home (I’m pretty sure that if mustangs understand “happy” as a concept, they are). 🙂

Two Sundances are better than one. 🙂

I may have mentioned the wind has been fierce?! Who needs fake wind for fabulous portraits of a most-handsome mustang?

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Between the wind, the sunshine and temps in the 50s (practically tropical for us these late-winter days!), there was a bit of this yesterday:

That’s actual liquid water, flowing out of Spring Creek Basin and under a bridge along which runs the Disappointment Valley road along the southwestern/southern boundary of the basin. I call it the county-line drainage. You can see a bit of snow on the bank of the arroyo. A lot of smaller tributary arroyos feed into this one, including another large one (also fed by numerous smaller ones) that drains a large area farther to the east. These arroyos, in turn, drain to Disappointment Creek; from this point, the bridge on which I was standing when I took this pic, the creek isn’t too far down this arroyo behind me to the south(ish).

Water shapes our world in many ways here. This: a sign of spring on the way!