The Sandcastle

At the end of the video featured in my last post, you can see a certain...unusual feature of the indoor arena.  Nicole quite aptly referred to it as a 'sandcastle' in her comment.  Ahem.

Freshly delivered.  It kind of looks like a sleeping dinosaur.

In the above picture, the pile is brand new.  They are delivered by the semi-load, so they start off by taking up most of the arena, although there is always enough room in the front to lunge (although for the first few weeks, the area for lunging is pretty small).  We go through that amount roughly every 3.5 months.

Not impressed.

Why is there a gargantuan pile of sawdust in the middle of our arena?  The property that our barn is currently located on has traditionally been a saddlebred barn.  In the riding and training of saddleseat horses, the bulk of under saddle work is done exclusively on the rail or down the stall aisleways.  Unless the horses are being lunged, they almost never utilize any part of the arena between the quarter lines.  So, traditionally, the shavings have been stored in the center of the arena.  It makes a lot of sense from a saddleseat point of view; that's a lot of space essentially going to waste, and an indoor arena is an excellent place to store shavings - particularly because it's very accessible for stall cleaners.

From today - clearly significantly diminished in size.

Obviously, this presents quite a challenge for our hunter/jumper/eventer lifestyles.  When the pile is new, we primarily work on grids.  This week, it's small enough that we are able to work on jumper courses - hunter style side/diagonal/side/quarter line courses are still pretty tough to pull off since the center is completely obstructed. 

From Monday

It actually was hard to find media in which the shavings pile is visible - I tend to take pictures in the aisles, and when people video they tend to be standing in the middle, so the sandcastle rarely shows up. 

unrelated to the shavings - isn't my horse cute?

Thankfully, after a year of persistence and planning, the BO has agreed to let us find a new home for the shavings mountain.  Hopefully once this last remnant has been used up, the next delivery will be placed elsewhere.  (As a rider, this is going to be the best thing ever...as a stall cleaner, it will probably kind of suck)

So, there you go - the story of the Sandcastle in the Arena.