The terrain is like you would see in western movies…deep canyons, high buttes and miles and miles of land! There were several movies filmed at the sanctuary or nearby…Hidalgo and the “remake” of Crazy Horse are a couple that come to mind! Look at this beauty...some folks think he is the horse used in Hidalgo...but that is not true and his name is PAINTED DESERT...his foals often have the much sought after "medicine hat" (color around the ears about the size of a hat)...it was told on our tour that the Indians always looked for markings such as Medicine Hat and Shield of color on the horses chest.
They had all of the stallions separated from the mares and they had just separated some of the mares from their foals…so there was quite a bit of anxiety in the air! The mares would keep coming back to the fence calling for their foals and in the distance you could hear the foals calling back. Then there were the stallions whirling around their pens and calling out to the mares! The closest stallion to us was Playboy, who was a beautiful Black & White Paint. He allowed us to pet his nose but he was not really interested in us! We enjoyed him anyway as he ran and pranced around his corral!
The mares also would allow us to pet their noses, but were clearly looking way beyond us to try and find their foals in a distant corral.
We sat out and enjoyed a beautiful evening. On a high butte across the Cheyenne River we spotted a small herd of horses along the very top ride of a butte…a few we could distinguish as paints but they appeared mostly as silhouettes.
The setting sun shining on buttes brought out many shades of pink and it was very peaceful with only occasional horse whinny!
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