Skillman Horsecamp Aug 12-15, 2001

On Saturday, August 11th, my mom and brother arrived from Los Angeles to spend a fun-filled week at our place. We decided to leave on Sunday and come back Wednesday to avoid any sort of traffic (especially pulling the trailer!).. We drove about 2 1/2 hours to the Skillman Horsecamp in the Tahoe National Forest. I found the campsite through this website. It took a little manuevering to get the trailer into our campsite (#7), but Bob did a fine job. It was nice because we pretty much had the campsite to ourselves after Monday.. the only bummer is that you can hear the freeway.

We got the horses settled in and they seemed to be enjoying themselves despite all the dust and bugs. After putting their flysheets on and the Fly Collar, they were more comfortable and feasted themselves on the free-feed timothy hay we gave them. At the end of the 4 days Tavi's corral was spotless and Isabella's had about a foot of timothy hay bedding. We learned a few things about them during this time.

  • Tavi is a total mess. He'd poop everywhere including on his food. He would roll in his poop and scatter it to make life generally hard for us when we tried to muck his stall (thank goodness he's out in pasture)

  • Isabella likes to pee in her food, but her poops were well-managed, making it easy to clean.

  • Isabella likes to play in the water trough.. she plays seriously also, getting the water down to her eyeballs and splashing anyone in a 10 foot vicinity. She almost tried to climb in at one point even though I was sponging her at the time.

    Blade seemed to settle in well also. One word of caution.. if it's dusty, don't let your dog come with you. Blade was barfing up mud because he'd trot along behind us and get coated with dust. He was okay after a few hours. Darn dog wouldn't go in front of the horses.

    Campsite #7 was nice because it was right next to the human water, bathrooms, and had 2 corrals for the horses. The only bad part was that the 2 horse troughs were a little trek away.. so Bob and Mark spent quite a bit of their time hauling water buckets to and from the horses (like good little minions). They drank pretty well - Walnut Creek is almost at about sea level and the camp was at 4500 ft in elevation. We electrolyted each day we rode because it was fairly hot. They seem to like the new electrolytes as well - Acculytes.

    A nice view of the trees above our site.

    We tried to leave as little waste as possible so we re-used our plastic dishware (we had no choice actually since I didn't pack enough). By the end of the 4 days we were using broken forks and dishes.. Mark was the first to break his fork.

    Bob broke his soon afterwards. Mark still held the record for midget fork. He also somehow mutilized his fork, breaking off a few prongs so not only was it short, it was retarded.

    After I laughed and thoroughly made fun of their forks I soon broke mine.

    And then I proceeded to break it again a few seconds later in the same meal.

    In the evenings we'd have a campfire and chow down on S'mores.. I got some pretty cool pictures from the fire the last night.

    This next one is my favorite.. I love the different colors.

    We're messy campers.

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    Contact me at jsrha@pacbell.net