Our company was hired to put buck and rail fence around mine openings in southeastern Wyoming. Two sites were in roadless areas accessed by an arch bridge over the Encampment River. Mya skid poles for the fence across the bridge, then she and Torrin skid the poles and buck legs to the first site 5/8 of a mile uphill in as much as a foot of snow. They each made nearly ten trips. In the skidding picture, our destination is up on the side of the hill just in front of my nose. The second site involved packing the material 2 miles in as much as 18” of snow upriver. Mya, Torrin, and Sue did a great job on a tough assignment. There are articles about this job in the Norwegian Fjord Herald, the magazine of the Norwegian Fjord Horse Registry, and Savvy Times, the magazine of Parelli Natural Horsemanship's Savvy Club. 2005 - Torrin as Log Loader
2005 - Mya on a Bridge
2005 - Torrin as Crane
2004 - The Backing Mya
2004 - Buck & Rail Fence
2003 - Fence Right-of-Way
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The horse logging portion of this contract on the Routt National Forest involved conventional horse skidding in an unconventional situation: a ghost town with an interpretive trail winding through it. I had to scout skid trails much more diligently than usual because of the unique hazards of the situation: log cabin remains, outhouse holes, cellars, rusted tin cans, broken glass, and foundations. For more about this job, see the Holiday 2009 issue of 
This project was a half mile hike in to remove hazard trees from around a cabin. It was typical skidding and brush hauling, but the ‘commute’ required a pack pony (Lily) to carry miscellaneous tack and supplies. Mya had to pull her metal cart over ice-chest-size boulders on the sides of the trail that made an incredible racket. A severe thunderstorm also drenched us with rain and hail during the day. The ponies were stellar and seemed happy to have completed a job well done at the end of the day.
A client needed us to remove dead trees from around her cabin, and we could not get access to the property with a log truck. My husband designed rigging that allowed Torrin to load our flatbed trailer with the logs.
A client hired us to create defensible space around his cabin in the woods in case of wildfire. In addition to felling and skidding trees, we needed to move firewood away from the cabin. The cabin is a technically challenging place on the side of a mountain alongside a rushing creek with springs feeding braided streams. My husband built a bridge over the braided streams, and Mya backed her cart from one end of the bridge to the other for me to move the firewood.
Torrin helped us twice with building a log barn. In January he skid logs into our shop alongside our sawmill. There was just a 3’ gap between the mill and the workbench, a great application of the Squeeze Game of Parelli Natural Horsemanship. In June, my husband again designed rigging for Torrin to help us lift logs onto the top of the endwall of the barn. In the picture you can see the log midway up the endwall. Torrin is patiently holding it there while I snap a picture!
The same client with the technically challenging cabin in the woods asked us to build a deck. We had to excavate the site and get rid of the dirt. We loaded Mya’s cart with the dirt, then she backed it around a corner and down a hill for four hours, a few of them in the rain, without complaint.
A client asked us to clear the trees out of a half mile right-of-way for a fence he was having built. There was no road access to the fence line, so we put chainsaws and lunch buckets on Mya’s pack saddle and harnessed Torrin and spent the day skidding logs out of the right-of-way.