Arkansas: Riding the Ozark Mountains

If you remember, late last year we went to Utah for some fantastic trail riding. This year my sister and I took a shorter, but no less beautiful trip to the Arkansas Ozarks with the mules. We stayed at the Boston Mountain Foxtrotters and Horse Camp.

The horse camp is nothing fancy, it is a big field with water and electric hookups and covered stalls constructed of horse panels. You are also several miles from any type of store and with very limited cell service. That being said I loved it. These types of trips are an escape. We’d sit around the fire in the evening and read, cook, watch the sunset. It was wonderfully relaxing.

I was in charge of cooking this trip and I realized that I didn’t take pictures of any of it. We had a lot of breakfast tacos of breakfast. And I made some amazing Cornish hens in a dutch oven over the fire. Pro-tip: to save room in a tiny fridge or cooler, use your half & half for both your coffee and to make your scrambled eggs fluffy. We did go out to eat once for dinner, there is one restaurant in the area – it’s still a bit of a drive but it has wi-fi – called Hillbilly Slims. Pretty good bar-b-q sandwiches, and the fried okra was great.

I swear we met the whole family that runs this horse camp. The older gentleman owns it, we met on the trail while he was ponying a two-year old horse while riding a palomino. He was excited to see us riding mules and we actually rode with him and his nephew the next day. Both of them were on gated mules out of their foxtrotter stock and both could move fast, even outside of the gated pace.

The Ozark Mountains are not particularly high mountains, that does not mean they aren’t steep. We went up both ways for three days and rode anywhere from 14 to 17 miles a day. We have done this before on flat ground and while it does make for long days it’s not too difficult. This, by comparison, was hard mountain riding. The mules did absolutely wonderful. I love my horse and there are plenty of people that ride their horse in the mountains but I wouldn’t trade my mule.

All in all, this was a fantastic trip. We had a couple little things happen here and there. The A/C in our trailer went out (it’s now fixed), one of the mules through a shoe (we carry rubber boots for this possibility), and I had a rein come unattached (we carry stuff to fix things like this in the trail). While we cannot cover every possibility, we do try and keep ourselves as save as possible.

Would you ever ride or hike in this kind of environment? Have you ever, if so what did you think? Let me know in the comments.

Trail Trip Preparation

If you are curious about the kind of preparation that goes into a trip like this, check out these videos that I released last year. Most of the time we are out working horse or the mules and especially when we are on the trail, they have my attention. I trust our animals or I would not ride them in the situations that I do, that being said, they are still flight animals and need to be treated as such. Anyway, I say that to explain way any of these videos are not as smooth as they should be.

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