Polished carriages and top hats are put away. The horses pull rugged marathon vehicles, while drivers and their helpers wear jeans and polo shirts or sweaters for their go cross-country. At the end of the route, participants must pour on the speed for a series of obstacles, whose ins and outs and tricky turns demand a rare type of cooperation between human and animal. Carriages must be steered between pairs of traffic cones topped with tennis balls. The Allentown Morning Call carried a story on September 26 by Paul Carpenter that details a horse accident that happened while he and his family were on a trail ride.
Hot horses have an innate passion to run and quiet horses prefer to walk.
You might expect the horses you hire at a commercial stable to be quiet. In fact, it's hard to get some rental horses to gallop, especially the gentle ones they reserve for novice riders. When our three kids were still in their teens, however, we wound up one fine day with five hot horses at a Dauphin County commercial stable. My daughters and I were more experienced, and we tried to block the trail so the horses under my son and my wife would not get rambunctious. Being crowded by other horses made my wife nervous, and she insisted we move away to give her room, resulting in the inevitable.