Serious riders keep pace despite cold

BOZEMAN – On a recent afternoon when school was out but the sun was not, a crowd of horseback riders gathered at the indoor arena in Trudy Brence’s backyard.

The outside temperature that day was well above 20 degrees, the minimum temperature at which a horse can safely work up a sweat. But something about the smiles on the youngest riders’ faces suggested they’d be at “Trudy’s Zoo” no matter the weather.

Winter cannot kill the enthusiasm of die-hard horseback riders, whether they are children or adults.

If it’s too icy or cold to ride outside, plenty of indoor arenas in the area offer shelter from the elements. And if it’s too cold for even that, there are always horses that need to be groomed, fed or cleaned up after.

Simply being around horses and the dusty smell of their thick, winter coats is enough to comfort most riders, Brence said.

On that afternoon, however, Alison Pugh, 13, Madi Pike, 12, and Robbie Pike, 9, were getting their riding fix, trotting around the indoor arena without caring about actually going anywhere.

“Girls – and boys – fall in love with horses,” Brence said.

So, too, do an increasing number of adults in Gallatin County, where the enthusiasm seems to be contagious.

It has certainly infected Madi and Robbie’s mother, Jill Pike, who recently started taking barrel-racing lessons on Friday nights with several of her girlfriends.

After watching her two children ride for a bit on this Monday, Pike used a stepstool to climb into a roomy Western saddle.

Then she waited patiently for her turn to race through a triangular pattern of barrels. In recent weeks she’d cut her time by several seconds, she said.

“We’re not out to prove anything. We’re just out here to have fun,” said Brence, who’s ridden almost all her life.

Along with the general population of Gallatin County, the number of riders in the area appears to be growing.

“People for the most part who move to this area fall in love with the Western lifestyle, and horses are a part of that,” Misty Radue, a horseback riding instructor, said this week while supervising a lesson at the Circle L Arena in Belgrade.

Among the handful of riders working with their horses that afternoon in Belgrade was Nancy Winget, who moved to Bozeman from Las Vegas in 2004 after retiring. She’s a relatively new convert to the sport, having purchased her first horse this fall. But she rides two to three times a week and loves it, she said. She moved to Montana, in part, so that she and her husband could ride.

From her house at the base of the Bridger Mountains, Margot Doohan has an expansive view of the houses springing up in Bozeman, Belgrade and Manhattan.

“One of the things that’s so great is that you learn about yourself,” Doohan said of the appeal of riding.

Horses live only in the moment, she said, but people tend to think ahead. If a rider is anticipating an action, his or her body language will change, and the horse will respond to that change rather than what is ahead of it.

The biggest challenge for a rider, then, is learning to communicate with the horse in a language the horse understands and responds to appropriately.

“They’re way smarter than I ever thought they were,” Doohan said while standing in a snowy pasture near her house. “They’re not just big dogs.”