This is a story that I love to tell, since it wasn' t me. 12 years ago when I first moved to Colorado I went elk hunting with a friend of mine and a friend of his. His friend had horses, so this would be our very first elk on horse hunting trip. We were in the Gunnison area and we had to ride up about 6-7 miles every morning to get up high enough to were the elk were. Ken (my friend) and I aren' t any type of horse experts so whenever we would get to the really narrow switchbacks we would always get off of the horses and lead them up the trail. After a few days of this Bill (kens friend) was getting sick of having to wait for us and started to bitch about us wasting time, so we decided to ride up the swtichbacks on the horses. After going around one of them Ken got a little freaked out and tried to stop his horse by pulling back on his reins. I guess he pulled back a little too long so the horse started to back up, Making Ken pull back on the reins even harder to make the horse stop. About 4 steps later I could see that the horse was about to step off of the trail, and hence take on nasty step off of the side of the mountain. Bill and I both yelled at the same time for Ken to jump off, and he did just as the horse stepped off of the side of the mountain. The horse slid for about 100 feet or so, then started to slid on it' s side, then went end over end (yes, end over end)! It did 3 complete summer saults until about 100 yards down the mountain it' s ass came to the base of a tree and the horse went completely up on the air against the tree and smacked it' s head against the tree, then fell back to the ground and slid maybe another 100 yards back to the trail below us. Ken scrambled down the slope and caught the horse and walked him back up to us. He had a quite a few scrapes on his legs and was bleeding a bit from where his head hit the tree, but was in one piece.

That was the most amazing thing that I ever saw. The next morning of course the horse wasn' t in riding shape and was pretty sore, but he was alright.