In which we go up and down some hills, and Willy makes a nice dinner

With sunshine in the sky again today, Jim and I took the mares a little farther afield.

Heart Lake is a neat little trail system maintained by the city of Anacortes around "Mount Erie" (another hill labelled as a mountain by out-of-towners making early maps of the area). I am always grateful for a tall mounting block at trailheads. It's a long way to the top of this mare!

The trails in the area are pretty, steep, and pretty steep. Not up to Trail Master Standards, for sure--there is a lot of washout and exposed rock, as a result of trails built too steeply for the slope. We did notice some blue flags in the woods marking what we hope is a re-route of an especially washed-out trail, so maybe the parks department has gotten tired of clearing bad trails and is ready to make some good ones. We can hope.

Pretty. The parking lot is waaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of the hill.

More pretty.

I didn't take many pictures because we were under the tree canopy for most of the ride and it was pretty but kind of dark.

The low-tech tree branches also outsmarted the high-tech satellites: my GPS only picked up 3 spots on the entire journey (one location was the parking lot) and therefore it reported that we traveled about 1.6 miles in two hours. In real life, we squiggled around on trails under the tree branches for close to 10 miles.

We got back to the parking lot about an hour before sunset, so the light for this picture is sort of harsh. Still, you can see how sweaty Hana was. She is starting to shed her yak-like winter fur, but it still keeps her pretty warm when she's running up and down hills!

Fiddle did the same distance on longer legs--clearly, she didn't work as hard! Also, Fee's recent training rides have got her in a little better shape. She isn't shedding at all yet, but she grows a light winter coat. She is still wearing boots (I had to hop down and replace boots three times, what a pain), but the farrier called me today: he will be out Friday to put steel shoes on again. Hooray!!!

If Hana were a high school girl, she would be the cheerleader who always sticks out her tongue at the yearbook photographer.

Back at home, it's Willy's turn to cook dinner. On the menu: chicken marsala.

Shallots, garlic, lemon juice, marsala wine and chicken broth, over grilled chicken breasts.

It looks great. It smells great.

It tastes great.
Well, it did taste great. It's gone now.

Life is good, you know!