I started think about some things regarding how and where I hunted last fall after injuring my back. Even before gas prices went through the roof, I wanted to cut down on my travel distances. First, with my back issues, I can get pretty stiff in the car on a long ride. Second, Munchkin is now 19 and starting his 16th hunt season. After a long trailer ride he can start off a bit stiff in his hind legs. About half of the Farmington Hunt fixtures are south of Charlottesville and that can be a long drive. So I wanted to find an option to cut down on the drive times. To do that I have added a membership at Thornton Hill Hounds (THH). All of their fixtures are actually relatively close for us. Some are only ten minutes away. So my plan is to primarily hunt Munchkin with THH and Wally with FHC but on the FHC fixtures north of Charlottesville.
Hunting with different hunts is kind of interesting. It's all foxhunting but how each hunt goes about it can very different. Hunts have different mixtures of hounds. Of course, the huntsman is different.
FHC has a pack that is a mixture of American Foxhounds and PennMaryDel Hounds whose number is growing. THH is all PennMaryDel. I've never hunted behind an all PMD pack, so this will be interesting and something new to learn as the voices of the hounds are different. Also, PMD's tend to "talk" more which means I'll to pay attention to learn their language.
Today Munchkin and I were out with THH from the Kennels. The kennels are only a 20 minute trip for us. We started out heading west from the Kennels paralleling route 522. We got up to the Thornton River and the hounds started to speak in a tree line along the river and actually got pretty loud but no run developed. As we turned the end of the tree line across the river, there was scent but it was already high in the air.
From there we worked up the side of Mason Mountain and eventually getting to the top. Going up the mountain we had to deal with quite a bit of damager from some the recent strong storms. Going around, climbing over and bushwacking were required. As we got the near the top, the hounds were speaking sporadically but nothing really developing. It was when we came down the side into the open field that the hounds opened with a roar. We got a pretty decent run out of it as the fox kept coming down the mountain and eventually circled back to where he came from.
It's the first time I've ever hunted in August but the 7:30 AM start helped mitigate the heat. The ground conditions helped by our afternoon rain storms where pretty good. It didn't seem like August out there.
For the day we had the one run, we covered 5.6 miles which included 1500 feet of elevation climb. Some fun and a good workout was had today.
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