Hillbillie Willie’s DECADE TEAM Ride!

June 9 2026

This is Part II .

Part I is here.

Day 2 City of Rocks:

After I vetted Willie in on Friday, I found out Erin was riding Ivan on the 50. IVAN!!! Many of us lust after Ivan, the 17-hand gorgeous chestnut hunk of 1/2 Akhal-teke, 1/4 Dutch harness horse and 1/4 Arabian. Many of us threaten to load him up in our trailers after the rides. When Erin agreed to try riding with us I was thrilled! I figured we’d match pace pretty well. And I’d get to ride with Ivan! (And Erin.)

Erin said, “Ivan just likes to be adored.” Well no problem there, because Willie becomes instant BFs with most anybody he rides with, and from the start, he did indeed adore Ivan.

And so it was that we started out relaxed on a loose rein at 7 AM the next morning. Ivan was so calm it rubbed off on Willie. Nothing to get excited about, just a 50 mile ride ahead of us. The thunderstorm forecast was completely gone and replaced with partly cloudy skies and 65* temperature. Perfect! And it was rather odd, being on the shorter horse for once!

Julie Bittick joined us for the first half of the first loop on her friend’s Almurath SFF, doing their first 50 together. Julie’s kind of a badass, she rode in and finished the Gaucho Derby in Argentina in February, and she’s going to ride the Quilty in Australia in July.

The original plan for the 25-mile loop 1 was a new trail down from the top of North Fork Circle Creek, down the back way into Castle Rocks State Park, which would cut off at least one way of that 5-mile straight road to Castle Rocks. Alas, at the last minute, we were told we couldn’t use that trail, so, after riding up into and through City of Rocks National Reserve, we had to do that 5 entire miles of road, each way. But with the long strides of Ivan and Willie, those ten miles were a nothing burger. When Ivan upshifted to his big trot, Willie set down into his racing pace, which gobbled up that road in no time. 

The loop through Castle Rocks State Park took us up almost into low hanging clouds over Cache Peak. It was cool enough to slip on my extra rain jacket!

After a vet check back in camp at 5500 feet, where Willie’s pulse dropped to at least 44, the second 25-mile loop took us back up into City of Rocks, all the way to Indian Grove at the top at 7500 feet. 

Though the mountains and the area around Almo were unseasonably dry, in the higher elevations there’s still some nice grass along the trails. Normally Willie is all business on a ride, but he copied Ivan and devoured what grass he could, all day long.

Creeks were dry, (no snow pack from the warm winter; only the one creek in Castle Rocks State Park had any water), but ride management (John and Carl!) put out ample water tubs, and the three troughs fed by natural springs up top were delicious for the horses (and for filling water bottles).

Descending from Indian Grove on North Fork Circle Creek trail, Erin the badass got off Ivan and ran the several miles down the mountain. I am not a badass, so I stayed on Willie, who was extraordinarily sure-footed. Going over some tricky rocky sections of the trail, instead of rushing and stumbling along to keep up with Ivan ahead, he would stop, put his head down, study where to put his feet, take a few steps, stop, and look carefully again before placing his feet thoughtfully. What a smart Standardbred! 

I was able to open most of the gates on Willie, who’s such a good ranch horse, unless the chain was so low on the gate I couldn’t reach it. Erin got off to get a couple of those gates, and Ivan is so tall that unless there was something to stand on, she had to use her hands to lift her foot high enough to reach the stirrup to mount!

Both of us riding rather tall horses, we often had to duck flat on our horses’ backs as we went under some tree branches hanging over the trail. On the Boxtop trail as we trotted through a grove of trees, I must have glanced down at something and then got a WHACK on the front of my helmet so hard it snapped my neck back and almost knocked me backwards off Willie. That’s PSA Public Service Announcement to WEAR A HELMET! Had I not had a helmet on, it would have whacked me square in the forehead and would have knocked me out, not to mention landing on my head on the trail.

All throughout the day I was amazed at what magnificent athletes these endurance horses are. Ivan and Willie traded off leading, and we just let them set the pace. I didn’t ask Willie to trot up hills, he just did it because he could and because he wanted to. We kept up our easy pace all day and finished in 10th and 11th, and once the vet gave Willie the final thumbs up…

We got our Decade Team!!!!!

There are so many people to thank for this and for this year’s ride, and if I miss you, consider yourself thanked!

Thank you to Hillbillie Willie!!!!!! He’s an amazing horse, fun, smart, hilarious, sometimes naughty, always entertaining.

Thank you to Steph Teeter for giving me this horse when she retired from Endurance and horses!!!!! Thank you to Nance Worman and Debbie Johnston for taking this epic ride on again as managers. Thanks to Regina Rose for hauling us there, and Connie Holloway for her support and for supplying DWA Barack, Willie’s BBFF as a traveling companion. Thanks Erin Hafla and IVAN for super fun company on our 50-mile ride! And Julie Bittick too who rode with us on the first loop. Thanks Veronica Stanley for the saddle fitting, and thanks to Cat for shooting Day 2 so I could ride!

As far as we Standie people can figure, Willie’s just the second Standardbred in endurance to achieve Decade Team status. Of course, there aren’t that many Standardbreds doing the sport, which is a shame, because they’re a super versatile breed. And if they’ve raced, they come with a solid fitness foundation.

*Cat Cook photo up top

Connie Holloway photo of Willie opening a gate*

Standardbreds rock !!!

8K5276 

Hillbillie Willie’s Decade Team Quest Part I: What could possibly go wrong beforehand

Friday June 5 2026

AERC’s “Decade Team” recognizes those equine and rider teams who completed at least one endurance ride (50 miles or more) each year for 10 years. 

I’ve pretty much accomplished the main endurance riding goals I’ve had over 20+ years. Tevis Cup - check. Virginia City 100 - check. Ridden thousands of miles in beautiful country with good company - check. Even gotten a couple of Best Conditions - check. The only thing left I’d really like to accomplish would be a Decade Team. In all my years of catch riding, I got so close on one horse owned by Steph Teeter, 9 years on the best ever Jose Viola.

This is Willie’s 10th year in endurance riding. Could we actually really do it together????

I tried not to think about it too hard, and I wanted to get it over with early in the season, because, the longer you wait, the more your odds go against. There’s likely a bad fire season is coming up, with much of the West in a drought and everything already so terribly dry. When smoke is bad I won’t train, and rides might even get cancelled because of fires. Not to mention the skyrocketing gas prices with no end in sight.

So I set my sights on the Antelope Island ride April 18-19. Beautiful ride, the perfect terrain for Willie’s first ride of the season.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, here’s what:

April 18-19 - Antelope Island ride was cancelled! With much of the West having a terribly warm winter with little snow, or late snow that melted quickly and warmed right back up - the gnat hatch on the island came weeks early. That would have made conditions miserable for humans and horses, so ride manager Jeff wisely postponed the ride till October. (The week before the Antelope horse ride, the human Buffalo Run was also cancelled.)

May 4 - Willie and I rode over rattlesnake!!! Trotting along a home trail made narrow by tall golden cheatgrass, we passed over it before I even noticed it. It was a smaller one, and I have no idea if we hit it or if it struck after Willie zoomed by; I just know my heart was in my throat. This has been a big snake year; I’ve seen more diverse snakes in April and May than I’ve seen most entire years.

May 10 - Willie stepped on my foot. Made me howl! Normally he’s very aware and careful to never step on me, but the grass was tall and I had one foot back as I stretched forward with the other foot, and he never saw my poor foot that he walked on. Luckily nothing broken, I just hobbled around for a few days.

May 19 - I STEPPED ON A RATTLESNAKE!!!!! I stepped under the hay tarp before I looked, and when I lifted the tarp up, my foot was on a curled up snoozing rattlesnake! I don’t know who was more startled. I screamed, jumped backwards and fell down and smacked my head on a (luckily) plastic bin. I laid there shaking while the snake slowly unwound and stretched out and meandered underneath another tarp. It was almost 3 feet long. The only reason I wasn’t bitten was because the snake was snoozing and it wasn’t my time. (Also, I didn’t knock myself out or give myself a concussion from hitting my head.)

May 24 - Sunday we arrived at Ridecamp at City of Rocks (we arrive early so Connie and I can start hiking and marking trails in the parks), just missing a gnarly looking thunderstorm to the north of us. Also, there was a 70% chance of rain and thunderstorms for Saturday when Willie and I would be riding our 50! And you know me, I am terrified of lightning.

May 25 - Monday while out riding Willie on the park trails with Connie on DWA Papillon, we saw the blow-up of the Summit Creek fire (started by the previous day’s lightning storm) just over the mountain from Ridecamp. (See top pic, smoke above Willie's head, that's when it first started.) Fortunately the wind was blowing it away from us, but we’d be watching that all week.

May 28 - Thursday a horse got loose in Ridecamp, galloped through our pasture fence and took it down, and all 4 of our horses got out. Luckily it was during the afternoon when many people were around, so they were able to help me surround and catch our herd before they went far, and luckily nobody got hurt.

And so….. we finally made it to Saturday morning, Day 2, the start of our 50 mile ride! 

See Part 2 coming up.

Hillbillie Willie’s 2026 Eagle Canyon

 

Sunday April 26 2026

Plans changed big time for the first ride of the 2026 season. I had Hillbillie Willie ready for a 50 at Antelope Island in Utah to start off the year. He’d never ridden on the island, and since I’d ridden it once long ago with Dudley, I knew this would be the perfect trail for him, and he was fit and ready. 

Then two weeks before the ride (April 18-19), it was cancelled (postponed to October). Because of bugs! The dreaded gnat hatch was two weeks early due to a warm winter and little precipitation. For me the bugs - no-see-ums, gnats, mosquitoes - are always bad anyway at the island any time of year; I am a bug magnet. Even a human race was cancelled two weekends before the horse ride because it was so bad.

 

So, our ride plans changed. Next up was Eagle Canyon on April 25-6 almost in our back yard, at Eagle, Idaho in the foothills. And when I say foothills, that is one hilly ride. It can be a tough first ride of the year for any horse, and it’s real tough ride for a flat-lander Standardbred for his first ride of the year. I have yet to ride Willie on a 50 at Eagle and I probably won’t. I know my horse and that is not his kind of 50-mile ride. So, we’d ride a 25-miler on day 2, and I’d shoot day 1.

Two years earlier, when I used a 25-miler at Eagle to start the season, Willie had a hind end tightness after loop 1 and got pulled, so…. there was that to worry about, because I always have to find things to worry about.

And as always with Willie, I never know what I’m going to have underneath me when we start a ride. He might be calm, he might be on crack. He’s 14 now! You’d think he’d be predictable and calm by now. Saturday afternoon I took him on a short warm-up ride, a mile up to the water tank, where he was calm and forward and didn’t whinny once for his three BFFs back in camp. But on the way back, although he kept it to a walk, he felt ready to explode. Oh boy!

When Connie decided to ride her horse DWA Barack, Willies BBFF (Bestest Best Friend Forever), on the 25 on day 2 and we’d ride together, I knew it was going to be an easy start and a fun day! Willie and Barack hadn’t done a ride together in two years.

Connie pic!

Sunday morning we let most of the riders go out ahead of us, or at least we thought we did, because Barack hadn’t done a ride in almost a year, and Connie always has to be aware and alert riding him. Both boys started out smoothly and calmly, a nice working trot a half mile up a gentle hill till we hit the trails and the real hills. Willie was sooooooo happy to be with his BBFF!

We mostly had a nice bubble on the first 12.5 mile loop, cruising up and down the hills at a steady trot, both horses moving out and having fun. Not quite competing, but powering each other on. The hills were mostly still green from late spring rains, and though they’d had a downpour about a week earlier, there were only a couple of little boggy areas that were easy to negotiate. I always start Willie in a ride in his kemberwick bit in case I need brakes, but today he didn’t pull on me at all, because whyever would he want to get away from his beloved bro Barack!

I put Willie’s beautiful jaquima halter (made by Maria Phillips) on for his second loop, and again we just cruised along the trails, trotting on the rare flats and up hills, and walking down, sometimes dismounting on the steeper downhills. We passed a great horned owl nest with three babies spilling out of the nest. Two water crossings were unusually high, and Barack briefly thought about taking a bath in one of them, while Willie had a splash fest.

Very well-fed cows wandered everywhere, fat from green grass and trail marking ribbons that ride manager Layne and co had to keep going out and replacing. Only one corner through a homestead was missing ribbons at the turn - and it was only our loop’s colors because cows apparently think the green and orange ribbons taste best - but we knew where we were going. We hollered at a rider ahead of us several times to get her back on the right trails.

We let the boys trot right on into the finish, to see what their pulses would be and how long it would take for them to pulse down to 60. Barack was first down, a minute before Willie, and we found out we’d come in 3rd and 4th. We’d thought we were back near 10th or so! 

Willie ended up getting both high vet score and Best Condition, with a CRI of 44-40, a fine start to the season. Go Standardbred!!!!

Next up: Aiming for a 50 at City of Rocks end of May!

connie pic here and up top!

Hillbillie Willie’s Trick or Trot

October 25 2025

After some fabulous fall weather, wouldn’t you know the clouds massed for the last ride of the season, the 2-day Trick or Trot Halloween ride in Eagle. My plans were to ride a 25 on both Saturday and Sunday to wrap up the season, depending of course on how my horse felt and how the weather was. I was prepared and psyched up for rain, because it was coming, but all still depended on footing. 

I packed like 6 raincoats, 4 heavy coats, my still-to-be-used long chaps made of fleece on the inside and waterproof material on the outside, and a pair of shorts (just in case) plus various combos of riding gear, and Hillbillie Willie loaded up with DWA Papillon, DWA Barack, and DWA Saruq into Regina’s trailer Friday morning, and north we headed. Barack and Saruq were along for a vacay.

It’s the *worst* saddling up in the rain, and while it did rain a bit overnight, it was only drizzling when it came time to saddle up for the 8:30 AM 25-mile start on Saturday. Connie and Pappy had already set out on the 50 a half hour earlier, and Willie didn’t mind because DWA Barack and DWA Saruq had come along for the weekend and were keeping him company. (Saruq thought this was the Best Endurance Ride ever - come along to ridecamp and just eat all weekend!).

Willie and I had taken a warm-up hand-walk on Friday with Diamonds and Cat, and of course Willie took quite a shine to Diamonds, so they were going to be our riding partners on the 25-miler. Cat was dressed as a fabulous knight and of course Diamonds, 1/4 Shire and 3/4 Arabian, already looks like a knight’s steed, or a movie star horse.

Willie was a little amped as we warmed up around camp, but he kept his wits. Once trail was open, we actually started strolling out (yay!), then we picked up a (strong) trot. All the horses were feeling quite fresh in the cool light rain! We had about a mile along a flat road, and the further we went, the stronger Willie got, and when a high stepping hackney horse pranced past him, Willie cranked up the volume. The stronger Willie gets, the more he bows his neck and looks like a macho racehorse. Which he was, though at the track he motored down the track with his head up in the air.

We passed photographer Steve Bradley then took a left on a squishy 2-track road up into the Eagle foothills. Some spots were a little slick, but Willie was careful, and we had no slips. In fact the rest of the day things got wetter, and slippery-er in places, but Willie was so sure-footed, I had to think he raced in the mud, or he grew up in the mud. A lot of horses had trouble on the wet trails, and a good number of riders pulled partway through the first loop of the 50, but Willie was like a fish in water. After a couple of miles he stopped pulling and set to watching his feet, adjusting to the footing. If it looked slippery, he moved sort of cat-like, lighter, a little shorter strides, and if it looked deeper, he adjusted to that. I let him pick his path (sometimes he’d move over onto grass) and speed because he was making all the right decisions and taking care of both of us!

He wasn’t in a big hurry anyway, as now he not only had one pretty girl with him but two, Lady and Kinley joined in with us, and we just kept moving along steadily. 

It kept raining on us, sometimes harder, sometimes lighter, but when we climbed up on a ridge we had wind and rain/sleet battering us sideways, and we got pretty cold and soaked (except for Cat in her handy waterproof knight’s outfit). You know how horses will turn their butts to the wind/rain, sometimes even when you’re riding them? Willie didn’t do that. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the rain, from the side or the front; he seemed to be enjoying himself. I sure was, particularly because he was so sure-footed and I did not have to worry!!

As I got cold and soaked on that ridge, I was thinking I might or might not continue on loop two after the vet check, because surely the footing was going to be worse by loop 2… but then we descended, the wind lessened, the rain even let up, and I thought that if Willie passed the vet check, and he looked good during the hold, we’d continue on.

A bonus was that I got a complete change of clothes on during the hold (and Willie stayed toasty and dry under two blankets at lunch), fleece/waterproof long chaps (made by Joyce Kellenberger) and a long raincoat, and out we went for our last 10-mile loop. Again Willie handled the mud with ease, and we all eased into the finish, for a fabulous last ride of the season for Willie! (After it rained later that afternoon, HARD, with lightning and thunder!!!, I wasn’t going to risk going out on for sure muddier trails for the 25 on Sunday).

Thanks to all those indomitable, intrepid, fabulous SWITnDR members, SouthWest Idaho Trail and Distance Riders, our local club, for coming out to help in that awful wet cold weather you all stood or sat out in Saturday and Sunday while many of us had fun out riding where that weather wasn’t so miserable. And thanks to Debbie for putting this ride on, and may we all have fabulous weather in the spring at Eagle!

And big goal next year: a 50-miler gets us our Decade Team!!!! Fingers crossed!