Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

Sundance and his daughter graze and watch a nearby band under the soft light of clouds (finally!) at sunset.

Maia at her ease. Just nappin’ on a warm autumn (Indian summer, anyone?) evening.

Part of a lieutenant stallion’s duties are to watch for danger, complementary to the band stallion’s duties of the same. Corazon is the band stallion, Maiku the lieutenant, and they’ve together so long that their mutual reliance is obvious.

Handsome little Maiku was watching some horses that had crossed an arroyo and were grazing their way up the hill. He and his band had just grazed their way into the light from the shade cast by the butte across the drainage. Perfectly lit. 🙂

After being roused from his nap spot by the main band rousing from THEIR nap spot, Sancho looks back to check their progress.

Kestrel, in addition to making sure I am where I am and not anywhere else (!), is showing off her velveting (or is that velveteen? :)) coat. The days are still semi-unpleasantly warm with few clouds to block the shine of the sun or its heat, though the getting-longer-all-the-time nights cool off excellently. All of that means the mustangs are growing their fluffy coats for the coming season (which seems far away when daytime temps are near 90 … in September!).

Days are getting shorter, coats are getting longer, and before long, these glorious days of autumn will be the memory of another year past. Enjoy the moments.

That one, long, gently curving tendril of mane. … Such a little thing. Such a gorgeous thing on Miss Terra, beautiful mustang girl.

Buckeye’s: the face of a content stallion whose world is, just, perfect. 🙂

Today’s swish-model: the lovely Winona.

The horses are grazing on so many delicious goodies currently: galleta, grama, alkali sacaton and sand dropseed. The winterfat (I’m not sure how to describe it; it’s not a grass, but it’s not a shrub … it’s sort of sage-like, if sage wasn’t a shrub) must be yummy now because they’re starting to browse it, too. You can see both grama and winterfat in the lower near foreground below Winona’s chin.

The deer and elk have shed the velvet from their antlers, but the horses are growing their winter velvet coats. The days are still warm – 80s and enough to make a body sweat – and the nights are comfortably in the 50s.

Spring Creek Basin’s elevation is in roughly the 6,000s, so we don’t have aspen, and because it’s so dry, there aren’t many cottonwoods. Also, unfortunately, because of years of drought (ongoing, despite what the U.S. Drought Monitor shows), most of the cottonwoods we did have in the basin have died in the last few/several years (I remember some from at least 17 years ago that are either dead and/or fallen). There are still many cottonwoods along Disappointment Creek, the entire length of which is outside Spring Creek Basin.

The above pic, looking northeast across the basin from the westish, shows Knife Edge along the bottom and the hill/ridge above what I call the east pocket to above the basin’s boundary. That beautiful reddish color is Gambel oak, which always reminds me of the rich rusty colors of a woven tapestry. The basin itself is still a bit too low even for Gambel oak except in the southeast end (which, in our world, is “up” and higher).

Fall most definitely is here. 🙂