Cob Jockey

Longtime readers of the blog know that you could describe me as obsessive when it comes to finding great cold weather gear. I developed Reynauds in my early 20s, and if I let my fingers and toes go numb long enough, I can sometimes pass out when the blood comes back to them. 

After eight years of wearing the same outfit, my cold weather gear finally changed this year and man, some of these pieces are too great not to share with everyone. So here's the first in a three part series about what's new:

I've found the holy grail of winter weather barn coats.

I had to get a new one this year, and I landed on the Carhartt Montana Puffer Coat - Sherpa Lined. On Carhartt's warmth scale, it's a maxed out "4 - Extreme Warmth Rating". For comparison, the canvas coats you usually think of when you think Carhartt are a "3 - Warmest Rating".

Guys, I almost returned this coat. It's TOO WARM at temps above 15F. It's too warm to wear a scarf with, too warm to wear a vest with. Too warm for a single Smartwool base layer. Way too warm to wear my Underarmour 4.0 with. I sweat no matter what I wear under it even though my body doesn't handle cold well at all. You put your hands in the pockets and they are immediately WARM. It's remarkable, and I can't get over it. 

Just as a fun experiment for this post, I did an hour of feeding, turnout and stalls in just a t-shirt and this coat when it was 18F this morning, and I was sweating! I have never felt anything like it before, and I'm truly in awe of it. 

The weather this morning

How I dressed for it

Other upsides to this coat are:

• Extremely durable water-resistant and windproof outer layer. Yes, it's a puffer coat, but it's a puffer coat that takes the abuse of farm work no problem.
  
• Great pockets - big, warm pockets (with zippers) for jamming your gloved hands into, snap pockets to drop things into, a nice big cell phone pocket on the chest, and an easy-to-access massive mesh pocket on the inside.
• Internal wrist cuffs - you can't see or feel them, but you can feel that the cold isn't getting into the sleeve
• It's lightweight and doesn't restrict my movement in any noticeable way.
  

Giant mesh pocket

It does have some downsides:

• It's massive and not at all attractive. Imagine what the Michelin Man would look like if he had all the curves of a cereal box. That's what you'll look like wearing it.
  
• The zipper sucks. It's plastic and sometimes gets stuck. I can already tell I'm going to be making a trip to the seamstress this summer to get it replaced with a metal one.
• The hood is not removable. This really bothered me at first and I felt like it was constantly hitting me in the back of the head, but I don't notice that as much now - not sure if the hood relaxed as I wore it, or if I'm so grateful to be warm that I don't care. I did have to get a different winter hat to fit under the sherpa-lined hood - more on that in another gear review post.

Sexy, it is not

Closeup of the sherpa lining in the hood and body of the coat

"Our winters haven't been too bad the last few years. It's sweatshirt weather through Christmas, then we get about 8 weeks of winter but the snow never sticks around for more than a few days, then it's spring." - my words last year to our newest boarder who moved here from Las Vegas

Yeah. About that.

Normally we have two miles of visibility from the top of this hill, which is my driveway. That's not fog, that's heavy snow.

Over the previous two days, we got the biggest single snowfall I can remember in all my decades of living in Indiana and Illinois. 11 fluffy inches. A mind-boggling thump of snow for this part of the world.

Dogs for scale

Even more mind-boggling, it's not supposed to melt. Like, ever. This is the land of 4" snowfalls that melt within 3 days, so it's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that we're not going to see grass until maybe February.

Mr. Canada is like whatever

In previous winters, when I lived in town, I've always tossed around if I should sleep on the couch in the barn lounge during winter storms, but I never actually did it. With this storm though, the roads were virtually impassable for 36 hours and a travel ban was put in place. I've never been so grateful to live a softball throw from the property line and to be able to tell all the boarders to just stay home.

Even for a very fit CrossFitter, walking through deep snow spiked my heart rate big time.

The barn owner is away, which meant plowing fell to me for the first time. Thankfully my partner helped me unbury the snow blade the BO had hidden at the back of the equipment barn, because wow, we may only use it once every few years, but when you need it, you really need it. This would have taken forever with just the FEL.

Between the blade and the bucket, I slowly got it done, which took me most of the day. That's a skilled task, getting snow off gravel, and I wasn't awful at it, but I know I'll get better at it over time.

I made circle drives in two different parts of the parking lot and told the boarders they are just going to have to appreciate the snow median until spring.

The horses thought the first day was great fun, when we only had about 6" on the ground, but when they came out to 11" the next day, they were all like "...nah." Nobody played and everyone just stood around and ate hay. Our old man OTTB who moved here from Las Vegas moved so slowly through it, I thought he was injured at first. He wasn't, he was just despondent, lol.

Back in November, my Minnesotan BO put snow sticks around the driveway for the first time in the eight years I've boarded here, and I joked then to the boarders that my BO almanac said we were in for a rough winter. I didn't know how right I'd be!

So here we go...a proper winter. I guess if I still enjoy taking the care of the barn on days like this, which I (mostly...I had my moments) did, I know I'm really meant for this. 

I gotta admit, I was all up in my head about getting on Disco.

All photos thanks to barnmate Leah

I kept going back and forth. It felt like there should be more preparation to do, but also, what was I waiting for, exactly? He'd been ridden W/T/C by a pro in Canada a year ago, and Maude hacked him out bareback even when she was pregnant. He steers well, lunges with tack on and stirrups flapping, and has impeccable voice commands, a "work means work" work ethic, and that driving horse "whoa or die" voice brake. He also lines himself up at the mounting block when asked and stands well.

The usual Castleberry Cob first ride "that's kinda weird, whatcha doing up there?"

Kate was, I knew, ready and willing to assist with a virtual lesson, but in the end, I decided I just needed to DO it, without my usual enormous amount of overthinking and professional guidance. Disco wasn't the problem, I knew.

And. It was fine. Great. Wonderful, even! Look at me, trotting a new-to-me baby horse on the first ride.

It was such a rush of emotions. Finally riding him after three years and eight months. Feeling so at home on him - both because of the way we physically fit each other and his behavior. Trusting him.

I was as impressed with his work ethic under saddle as I am in the cart. His ears were politely trained on me the entire time, giving me his full and undivided attention. I am eternally grateful that this horse was so thoroughly broke to drive, and very lightly broke to ride, at the still-impressionable age of 2. He used to be so resentful of being told what to do, including just wearing a halter, but that attitude never comes out under saddle or between the shafts.

His walk was on the lazy/tentative side at first, but it feels like a strength and confidence thing, because after a solid trot, he was walking out nicely. For me, that's perfect - he's going to err on the side of too little rather than too much, but forward is in there, waiting to be slowly coaxed out over time.

It was a wonderful way to end 2024, and I already can't wait for the adventures we're going to have together in 2025.

Face scratches for the best boy

Take a 3 year old baby stallion that hasn't gotten more than an hour of turnout per day since Saturday, ask him to focus and work, and what do you get?

Playing Kate's mounting block game

I just could not be more impressed with him. Oh wait, I was, the next morning, when I turned him out for the first time in four days.

He was so good, I was able to lead him 100m down the driveway together with Connor while also filming a video. I don't know when I'm going to stop being amazed by his good behavior, but that day is not today! This whole week was asking a lot of any three year old, let alone a stallion, and he couldn't have handled it any better. Good boy, Disco!

On Wednesday night, Disco and I had our second driving lesson. This time, he'd be driving during evening bring-in and feeding time, hearing the grain hit the pans, seeing horses move down the aisle. I'll admit, I had a moment where I thought, "I should really set him up for success by bringing the horses in before his lesson even though it's not my night."

I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. He was perfect. Perhaps a little sticky at the gate a time or two, but nothing egregious. It was like he didn't even hear the feeding chaos, and we had an incredibly productive lesson, even trotting for the first time.

Utterly unconcerned about feeding time

I find myself weighing this "setting him up for success vs pushing his buttons" thing a lot lately. Button pushing is, after all, how we train them. If we never tie them to a wall, they never learn to tie. If we never put them in a situation where they have to work during feeding time, they never learn to work during feeding time. 

(And obviously you have to have a little bit of both - you install "give to pressure" and "confinement" in order to set them up for success when you start tying them, for example.)

He's now been here a month, and I have erred on the side of "setting him up for success" a lot while he got settled in and while the co-op members got comfortable handling him. But now that baseline rules and human/baby horse pecking orders have been installed, I need to remind myself to keep pushing his buttons too.

Getting tacked up, which I did a surprisingly decent job with (as in, I am surprised that I remembered as much as I did). Of course I did not leave the breeching strap over his tail!

The latest button I'm ready to push is allowing everyone else to halter him. As I mentioned in the last post, I've been working with him for a while on this (not allowing him to grab the halter while you're trying to put it on him), but because I didn't want to ask the other co-op members to be as doggedly persistent as I've had to be about it, I've left his halter on 24/7 for a couple weeks now. With me being the only one haltering him, he got uninterrupted time with 100% consistency and black-and-white rules, and no opportunities for regression.

Over the last week, he hasn't tried to bite the halter one single time with me, so I'm ready to push that button and have everyone else try it with him too. I will be watching for a few things - does he even try it with everyone else? If he does, how persistent is he about it and how many times do they have to repeat the exercise before he keeps it closed? It's as much about how he learns and how he transposes rules from one human to another and how he respects us as it is about the actual behavior itself.

So far, the couple of times he's gotten it off in the field and they've been forced to halter him lately, he's been perfect for everyone else, so I have hope. But I won't know for sure until we push that button.