Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

Different secret forest! Different band!

Still gorgeous. Miss Cassidy Rain. 🙂

You didn’t know we have a secret forest, did you?

OK, it’s really not that secret; it’s a narrow little forested strip on top of one of the lower ridges. I adore any pix I’m able to get of the mustangs in a treed setting because it’s so rare to find them in a treed setting! It does sometimes make them a bit hard to spot (yay for the greys!).

The dapply light was lovely on Kestrel’s emerging dapples … emerging as she sheds her winter coat for her summer finery.

Little Mister Maiku found a swampy place to roll. 🙂

How DOES he see through that marvelous forelock?!

After the crazy, muddy winter, we are super dry again. But there’s water in numerous places this spring in Spring Creek Basin, and the wild ones know where to find them all.

Mysterium was rocking her glamour shots with the wind machine functioning perfectly. …

And then Juniper photobombed her. 🙂 🙂 🙂

Storm, looking at another band stallion … looking all handsome-like. 🙂 The more things change … the less things change?!

It is with a shattered heart that I report that Dundee’s big, handsome dun colt, Ranger, shown above with his aunties, Aiyanna and Rowan, has disappeared. It’s so hard to bear the unfairness and suddenness of it that it doesn’t even seem real. Dundee was a fiercely protective new mother and did everything right in all the times I saw them together. … It’s a reminder that our beloved wild ones ARE wild and that life is not guaranteed.

Fly free, Ranger. You were so loved.

Kestrel gives me an eyeball while she searches for fresh, yummy, actual grass around the bases of the green greasewood on a bench just above one of Spring Creek Basin’s main arroyos. The horses definitely eat the greasewood, but at this particular time while I was with them, they were all about that grass, which was a few inches tall where sheltered by the woody stems of the greasewood. It must have been satisfying for *them* to eat … *listening* to them snip the bunches of grass with their teeth and chew was incredibly satisfying for *me*! 🙂

It’s worth noting that this is also a season for “bling.” As the horses forage among the greasewood, bits of the branches get tangled in manes and forelocks. You can see a bit in Kestrel’s mane already.