The Maryland Horse Trials at Loch Moy is one of the great venues for autumn eventing in all of America. As long as it isn’t covered in snow, Maryland presents beautiful crisp autumn days for eventing and Loch Moy presents a nice facility with educational courses. EN reader Yvonne Lucas was kind enough to send us a brief report from Loch Moy’s unrecognized schooling show this weekend. Yvonne coached two students competing on Sunday. Thanks for writing this Yvonne and thank you for reading.
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From Yvonne:
The Maryland unrecognized HT on Sunday seemed especially busy in both the trailer and car parking for example, and when I spoke briefly with organizer Carolyn Mackintosh she said they had about 250 rides and 21 divisions running that day. She also noted that at about 10:00 AM they were running out of parking room for both trailers and especially cars. She said she’d never run out of car parking area before, even at the recognized Horse Trials’s! She thought a lot of the car traffic was parents, grandparents, and friends of riders. And there did seem to be a whole lot more spectator traffic today than usual. Whatever the reason, it was great to see so many groups of adults and children at the rail of dressage and SJ, and out on the grassy slopes of XC, cheering and applauding riders.
MDHT ran twelve “arenas”: four dressage rings with two warm-up areas, two SJ arenas with two warm-up areas, and two mostly separate XC courses with two warm-up areas. There were five levels of competition, from Intro at 18″ to Training level. I walked the Elementary and Novice courses. They were rational and well-planned, but quite challenging for first-timers at the level. The Novice courses had some max jumps, including a Swedish oxer in SJ and a trakehner on XC.
As usual the event was fabulously well-run and organized, with friendly volunteers. It’s such a joy to go there both as a rider and as a coach.
