Unsuspecting Match Amateur rider Karen Dearmont of Sparks, Nevada, noticed Annie after she recovered from treatment and was put back into training. Matt Wildung, a Maplewood intern from Minnesota, started the “new” Annie back under saddle. He also gave her a new name, Annie Up. Karen had ridden with Julie for 19 years. “I started riding as an adult in jumpers. Julie has found me two special horses,” she says. Unfortunately, by 2010, Karen was having bad luck with her two mounts. “I had an older horse that I was riding in equitation and a baby that was being trained. The baby died and the older horse got injured, about a month apart,” she recounts. She was facing major veterinary bills to rehabilitate her veteran campaigner. “My older horse was 20 at the time, and I’ve had him since he was nine. I did jumpers and equitation with him.” While she loved him dearly and felt very comfortable on him, she knew the time had come to retire him. Karen needed a new horse. The timing was
opportune. “I wouldn’t have been looking at Annie to buy if both of my horses were still around,” Karen says. Even without them, she wasn’t sure she was ready to buy another horse. The unsuspecting Karen
never knew the mare as “Wicked Wanda,” of course, and she doesn’t remember seeing the mare’s previous bad behavior. She does recall seeing one of Julie’s interns, Matt, riding the mare that May. Karen admired her manner. “Then Julie said to me, ‘We’ll put you on Annie and see how that goes.’ I just fell in love with her. She tried so hard to figure out what I wanted,” Karen explains. Karen wasn’t at all sure she wanted to train a young horse. Just a month after her recovery from surgery, Annie was still very green over fences. Karen bought her anyway. Looking back now, she says, “Annie’s been a lot of fun to
train. I’m the only one who jumps her. The kids hack around and keep her fit. I’ve done the majority of her training. That tells you what a great horse she is—when a green rider like me can do this, she’s pretty special.” Annie was one of the 80 horses evacuated from Maple-
wood in January 2012 when a wildfire swept through the property, a scary incident. “We managed to get all the horses out on trailers,” says Karen. “The community showed up with trailers and hauled the horses to local barns.”
Annie’s True Temperament “Annie is the sweetest horse. It was a complete 180,” Julie says, confirming that the mare made an extreme turnaround, from
26 May/June 2013
furious to fun. Her only indication of her previous life is a scar on her right side. “Karen was lucky,” her trainer adds. Karen explains, “I’m an amateur and Annie’s okay with
that. She has so much confidence in what she can do, and I’m not going to shake that. She doesn’t get upset when I make mistakes. She is very forgiving and she doesn’t hold a grudge. She just wants me to be happy. She’s a once in a lifetime horse.” Karen showed Annie to a championship in late 2010, just
a few months after she purchased the mare, at the Horse and Hound Show in Elk Grove, California. She’s now shown her mare two years at the HITS Desert Circuit in Thermal, California. “She loves to jump. She sees that jump and she is going for it. You go in the ring and she knows what her job is,” Karen continues. She appreciates what she calls her horse’s “great brain.” The pair has jumped liverpools, but not open water. At a rainy show, she recalls how Annie had to look at rivulets of water on the showground. “She was worried about the water. The next day, she was worried but she walked over them. The third day, it was like, ‘Whatever, I don’t care.’ She’s like that when she first sees something. The fun thing about jumping with her is that if she doesn’t understand it, she jumps bigger when she first sees it. Once she figures it out she doesn’t
worry about it.” She describes an example of Annie’s thinking,
when learning to jump through a gymnastic. “Julie had poles on the ground, a one [stride] to a one to a one to a two. Annie looked at it and went, ‘One to one to one to a really long one!’ No, we said, that’s two. ‘Oh, I can do that,’ and she came around and did the second time perfect. Once you tell her something, she gets it.” Now when jumping a combination, Karen reports that
Annie understands not to jump them all at once. “That was something she had to learn at home: in a bounce, not all at once.”
Partnership Blossoms Karen values the intelligence and scope that Annie displays, especially when showing at big events. “She really wants to do what you want her to. She tries the hardest is to figure out what you want from her, and if it’s at all possible, she will do it. It’s when she can’t understand, she gets frustrated. Even if I’m wrong, she will try,” Karen explains. “She saved my bacon,” Karen remarks after a class at Thermal, where Annie added a stride to clear an oxer. “The
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