2023 11 Locura Chile 2 through mining country
We are saddling up and Negro, my Chilene riding horse shies away pulling the post out of the ground when I was trying to put the rains on his rope halter, standing like a statue a second later. Putting the post back into the sandy ground I finish saddling him up. The Chilene Saddle I am riding is very comfortable, but you are sitting high above the horse compared to my western saddle. We lead the horses steep up the mountain till we hit a mining road again. Copper is dough out of the mountains here, you can find green rocks everywhere. And even though it's more like pocket mining than grand scale surface mining, they don't have to restore the area and so you find mounds of sandy dirt scattered around the area. We follow the mining road for a bit till my gps tells me that there is supposed to be a trail we have to follow across the mountainside to a summit saddle in the distance. Riding across the brush, we find the small trail and follow it for about an hour. We reach the mountain crest with views in all directions up at 3440 m (11200 f). We let the horses rest before we take them down the other side to a small patch of grass watered by a spring. Following another trail we are riding up a mountainside passing a makeshift shed that is used by the mining people, crossing the mining road following a small trail that leads to the top of a mountain where goat herders on horses build themselves a shelter, piling rocks on three sides and laying beams across on which they would lay tarps. We take the horses down the other side to a swampy grassy field called Vegas here and let them chew on the short grass, while we gather wood and get water from a nearby spring.
We are saddling up and Negro, my Chilene riding horse shies away pulling the post out of the ground when I was trying to put the rains on his rope halter, standing like a statue a second later. Putting the post back into the sandy ground I finish saddling him up. The Chilene Saddle I am riding is very comfortable, but you are sitting high above the horse compared to my western saddle. We lead the horses steep up the mountain till we hit a mining road again. Copper is dough out of the mountains here, you can find green rocks everywhere. And even though it's more like pocket mining than grand scale surface mining, they don't have to restore the area and so you find mounds of sandy dirt scattered around the area. We follow the mining road for a bit till my gps tells me that there is supposed to be a trail we have to follow across the mountainside to a summit saddle in the distance. Riding across the brush, we find the small trail and follow it for about an hour. We reach the mountain crest with views in all directions up at 3440 m (11200 f). We let the horses rest before we take them down the other side to a small patch of grass watered by a spring. Following another trail we are riding up a mountainside passing a makeshift shed that is used by the mining people, crossing the mining road following a small trail that leads to the top of a mountain where goat herders on horses build themselves a shelter, piling rocks on three sides and laying beams across on which they would lay tarps. We take the horses down the other side to a swampy grassy field called Vegas here and let them chew on the short grass, while we gather wood and get water from a nearby spring.