The first time I ever witnessed someone riding a horse without a bridle, I was sitting in the grass along a gravel road watching the horses and riders, competing in the 2004 Tevis Cup 100-mile endurance race, entering the checkpoint.
“That horse doesn’t look like he’s wearing a bridle,” I said to a friend, pointing and laughing at my mistake – my eyes had to be tricking me.
My friend leaned in for a closer look. And then he squinted even harder.
“No way,” he replied. “That horse IS NOT wearing a bridle. Amazing…”
It would have been easy to overlook the one piece of missing tack; the female rider (who I later found out was Traci Falcone) seemed to have full control of the horse as it trotted effortlessly down the road. That simple moment stuck with me; it was a beautiful and mysterious sight.
The Tevis Cup from Tahoe to Auburn, California traverses the remote wilderness of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, runs up and down rocky peaks, crosses over many different types of bridges (including a swinging bridge), and fords the American River.
The start is one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the event. There, 250 horses and riders pack into one area for a mass start in the dark at 5 am. Riders get dumped, kicked, or run over even before the race begins.
Imagine trying to control a horse through these obstacles, during such chaos with no reins, no bit - it was difficult to fathom.
Like most horse-crazy girls of my era, I watched the 1979 movie, “The Black Stallion,” over and over again. The enchanting Francis Ford Coppolla film, based on the 1941 classic children’s novel by Walter Farley, was chosen for preservation in the United States Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
My girlfriends and I didn’t need any fancy organization to tell us the value of “The Black Stallion.” As horse-lovers and wanna-be Olympic equestrians, it was our real-life dream to be stranded on an island with a beautiful black Arabian.
To ride bareback and bridle-less on an endless beach, to swim with my horse in the ocean, to sleep with my horse under the stars - childhood dreams are the best dreams.
As a kid, I often rode Quito, my neighbors’ giant-headed palomino grade horse, with just a halter and one lead rope. But riding in the big city just wasn’t the same - there were always fences to confine us. In reality, these despised fences probably saved me from my own stupidity; Quito was a sweetheart, but riding safely without a bridle is more complicated than it looks.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve devoted most of my life to dogs, not to horses. But when I ran across an ad for the 2009 Hoosier Horse Fair’s line-up of events, I just had to go see Stacy Westfall’s “bridle-less riding” demonstration.
Stacy Westfall won the 2003 National Reining Horse Association Freestyle reining competition riding with no bridle (a rare performance).
Freestyle reining is a competition where riders incorporate reining movements (circles, spins, flying lead changes, half-passes, stops, etc.) into a three and a half minute routine done to music that resembles the freestyle event in human figure skating. Competitors are judged on technical merit and artistic impression; some events also incorporate applause meters to add to the scoring.
According to her website www.westfallhorsemanship.com, Westfall has gone undefeated two years in a row in major freestyle reining competitions. In 2006, she won twice while riding bridle-less and bareback. A clip of Westfall’s impressive and emotional performance with her horse, Roxy, has been a YouTube sensation among horse fanatics; the reining routine was dedicated to her father who had passed away just 24 days earlier and performed to Tim McGraw’s country hit, “Live Like You Were Dying.”
“Horses actually calm down when you teach them that moving your legs isn’t always about running,” Westfall explained as she rode her gelding, Popcorn, without a bridle in patterns around the ring. “Sometimes moving a leg means move your butt over, move your shoulder over, or stop.”
Westfall gave an overview of her cues. It’s basically the fundamentals mastered, requiring countless hours of training and repetitions.
“People often say to me, ‘Wow, you’re not really doing that much’,” Westfall explained. “But instead of just picking up the reins when I need to talk to my horse, I am actually conversing with my horse every step of the way – all of the time.”
There’s a fascinating beauty in that subtle, constant conversation between horse and rider. Riding bridle-less is a childhood dream of mine that will never fade away.
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