Geldings

Horses For Sale

Talk SCENTSY

to me!

July has brought me the wonderful opportunity of hiring Liz Mabb of Trinity Equestrian, and Dee Lafluer, two wonderful ladies who have a great way with the horses, and are pretty handy too!  Liz has been starting some of the already broke (western) horses to english tack and started them jumping, and is also starting youngsters under saddle.  Dee is helping out as a general hand - and a great hand she is!

June, July and early August kept Intrigue busy. He has covered and caught 10 mares while visiting Alberta (10 for 10 - not too bad for an older boy!) and he will be going home later in August, or the first few days of September.

SEPTEMBER will be bringing a road trip!   I need to deliver some horses to their new homes and pick up CC in Indiana, so if you are looking at any of the for sale horses - hurry, so I can fit them on this load!  Trip will be across Canada to Toronto, then dropping down into US to OH and IN towards the end of the month.  For points anywhere along this route, purchase price will include delivery and for points off the direct track - shipping will just be fuel for the 'side trip'.  We all know how expensive shipping has become, so this is a great opportunity to get a superb Morgan delivered to your door - at a terrific price!

April - June 2009

MARVELOUS INTRIGUE IS HERE!  Yes, Intrigue has arrived in Alberta - he's now settled in and tomorrow will get to start meeting my mares!  Boy, were they ever happy to see him step off the trailer!  He is standing at the special price of $600.00 USD per mare while here, so don't miss this chance to breed to such a well proven, top quality sire, with a chance at Splash at this rate! 

This has been one of the coldest winter/springs in over half a century, as such, the horses that I brought up from the Cochrane and Mid-Atlantic sales spent a lot of time in our new barn and really appreciated the fact that it's got under-floor heat!  My winter blackets and hoods also got lots of use, as they all had the classic 'sales shave' of bald ears, face, v-necks, they were well covered when outside.

February was a real roller coaster month.  In Mid-February I was ecstatic to be able to pick up Shermandell Moccuska (Cuśka) in Billings MT and bring her home to Ammolite Acres.  A big THANK YOU to Susan & Jason of Chargers Morgans for letting me purchase this talented moving, upheaded, gorgeous mare and for bringing her up from CA to MT to meet me! 

On the other end of the spectrum I had a really hard lesson on why to keep friendship separate from business - having to repossess 3 horses, one of which was in extremely poor condition, and has since had to be put down.  You always hear 'buyer beware, well this was a case of "seller beware"!

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Fall 2008

Sue & Blues Big Adventure

This fall I sold two bred mares to Elnoresh Morgans in Vanderleek Hill, ON.  And as Blue’s lease was up and he was due to go home to Morning Star Morgan Farms in London, OH - I started getting shipping quotes.  But I felt they were reasonably high, and I had a mare that needed to come from MI to here as well, so I decided to do the road trip myself this winter and have a Morgan adventure!

So, I hooked up my ’92 Dodge Cummings (we affectionately call it ‘Old Blue’) and 6 horse trailer (set up as 3 box stalls) and loaded up Blue (PHPM Lords Gift of Gold), Ginger (DKKR Gingers Delight - shown above left) & Sugar (Snowdancers SugarN’Spice - shown above right) and headed east.  We had just picked up this 28’ Featherlite gooseneck trailer (I’m used to a 16’ bumper pull) two days prior to heading out, so I was pretty worried about whether I’d be able to handle it, especially for backing up as it just seemed ‘so big’.  My rigs’ size was quickly put into perspective the first night as I pulled into a truck stop to sleep and in the morning, found myself parked beside a Kindersley Transport rig that was a full truck trailer with a second full length trailer behind.  All of a sudden, my unit didn’t seem nearly as large as I felt it was!  I was still laughing a couple miles down the road, when it hit me that I should have taken a photo of that!   Sleeping in the truck had it’s advantages and disadvantages.  Blue thought this ‘hauling’ thing was great, to him it was a giant moving buffet!  He figured out the very first night that when I fed & watered at ‘bedtime’ (approx. 9pm)  that if he started to stomp and bang around at 1 am, that I’d get up and feed/water again, and ditto at 4 or 5 am….so guess what the pattern was every night after that?!?!  No one can ever say Morgans don’t show their character!  Seriously though – they always had food and water in their systems so they weren’t cold, and I think all three got off the trailer fatter and sassier then when they got on!

Northern ON – winter road construction crews had the highway at one narrow lane in a couple places, but the horses didn’t care!  

A classic view in ON, and PA - icicles coming out threw the seams in the road side cliffs.

I headed across SK, MB and took the northerly route across the top of ON to avoid the big hills and lake effect snow to the south, and 4 ½ days later I dropped the girls off at their new home at Elnoresh Morgans.  We off loaded Blue, I cleaned out the trailer and spent the night, having a great visit with Liz and her family, and had a chance to see her nice herd including her nice grey and palomino boys!

Then it was back across the bottom of ON where I stopped to meet Connie & David Chisholm and see the horses of Maple Leaf Morgans in Belleville, and a few hours later to have supper and a good visit with Tanya Ament of Paradise Ranch Morgans.   

Continuing west, I crossed the border at Sarnia and continued on to Ancan Morgans in MI, to pick up LaBelle De Versailles (ZZ Top x Century Flair De Lis), a hunter mare that Anne had acted as agent for me on at the Cochrane sale.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to stop and see any of the Ancan herd, as the radio said there was a storm blowing in behind me and I wanted to stay ahead of it.  So we quickly loaded LaBelle up, and I continued on and headed south towards Blue’s home in OH.  As we headed south it was warming up and at one point when I looked in on Blue – I was stunned to see him ‘all wet’ – then I realized all the condensation from the inside of the trailer was melting off and dripping on him!   The next afternoon we arrived at Morning Star Morgan Farm where I offloaded LaBelle so I could pull Blue off & re-clean out the trailer quickly.  I had a great visit with Wanda and got to meet her family, it was terrific to finally meet Wanda after all the emails and calls.  It was surprisingly hard for me to leave Blue behind.  He is such a sweetheart and has so much character, I’d really gotten very attached to him, and it didn’t hit me till I had to say ‘good bye’ in the barn and then drive away!   Somewhere during this leg of the trip – I turned over 100,000 km on my truck – yes, you heard right 100,000 km on a ’92!  We bought this truck a year ago in September and it only had 67,000 km on it, yes I drive a lot!

More driving and I arrived at the Messers, where I spent a couple nights.  First, I met their two Morgans then Michelle and I spent a day visiting other local breeders - seeing their stock as well.  You will not find better, kinder people then Michelle and Homer, they showed me true southern hospitality and will forever be trusted friends.  I’m hoping they’ll be coming to visit Alberta in July and I’ll be able to tour them around up here, to show them not only how beautiful our province is, but some of our incredible Morgans as well!  Ohio was warm and a bit muddy, good thing Homer can back up a trailer on slippy mud, or I might still be there!

From the Messers, I headed east again to the Mid Atlantic Sale in PA where a pair of rubber boots and an extra heavy duty raincoat and hat would have been really handy the night before the sale!  It was pouring so hard that as you walked across the parking lot, the water would run up and over your shoes – never thought I’d need rubber boots in December, guess I know for next time!  At the Mid A sale I ended up purchasing HVK Bold Ember (HVK Bold Look x Pinehaven Ember) a well trained hunter mare for myself, and two geldings to resell.  Flintstone Warrior, and Queens First Impression - a gelding who was RWC Park harness in his younger days and has won many driving championships with a Jr. at whip, many halter classes and is well broke to saddle as well.

Then it was time for the long trip home…and boy, it felt LONG!  I had left LaBelle at the Messers in OH as she was starting to get a bit stressed bouncing from place to place, so I stopped back by there to pick her up and so had a load of four for the trip home.  I cut across OH and swung out through IL, IN, and WI - this put on extra miles but it was so that I could stay FAR away from Chicago.  I went through it last year with a 16’ stock trailer and it took 3 ½ hours to go around the city - most of the time at 50-60 mph…starting in at 1 am, as suggested by a few people - so there was ‘no traffic’ to fight!  I cannot begin to imagine how people get around a city of this size for their daily lives, and for the first time in my life I understood road rage and how it could become so serious!  I swore I would never go through the large US cities like that with a loaded trailer ever again – so extra miles it was!

     I originally had a couple stops planned for the trip home to see some more horses, but the weather was getting nasty fast as I headed into MN.  It took about 4 hours to get through the twin cities (St. Paul & Minneapolis) in a snow storm so by that time, all I wanted to do was ‘get off these roads’ for the night!  By the next morning the worst of it was over but I chose to pass on the extra stops as the weather forecast had storms coming and going all directions, and I didn’t want to get caught up in one or delayed with the horses on.  The roads were actually pretty good for most of the trip, excluding WI and MN, and the extreme cold gave me some problems (with the windows in the trailer freezing) in ND, but at least by the time I got there the highways were re-opened after a major blizzard a few days earlier. 

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Ammolites MayFlower - Blossum

Sharelle's Cal-La-Vantage  - Cal-la & her '08 Colt