2023-10-08 39 -119

Location

In the southern suburbs of Reno.

Participants

Expedition

After the early morning expedition at 2023-10-08 40 -120, I continued south towards my business conference but also towards this Reno hashpoint.

This neighborhood at the south end of Reno looked like a lot of the American suburbs built in the last 30 or 40 years, but with one really significant difference: there were horses all over the place. And I don't mean that people had large backyards with stables or anything; these horses were just hanging out in the streets, chilling under shade trees, nibbling on curbside plants, and leaving copious mounds of horse poop everywhere. I wondered if this might be some kind of communal horse-ownership scheme run by a neighborhood association or something. That wouldn't be something I'd want in my own neighborhood, but I figured that if that's the way they roll in South Reno, who am I to judge?

After planting my feet on the hashpoint, I noticed a friendly looking woman working in her yard nearby and decided to see if I could find out what was up with the horses. "What's up with the horses?" I asked. She told me all about it: they are actually wild horses that come down from the surrounding mountains to enjoy the good suburban grazing, to bum food from the kind of people who think it's a good idea to provide food to wild animals, and to get hit by cars on the nearby Veteran's Parkway. Apparently she has had to come up with a variety of strategies to keep the wild horses off her lawn. I could tell it was both a genuine frustration for her, but also a really fun frustration to talk about.