Members from the San Diego unit and the Redshank Trail Riders met at Bailey's Cabin along the Juan Bautista de Anza Trail, to eat lunch and pass the Mochila. Jeannie Gillen and Laura Alexander hold the Mochila containing proclamations and trail documents. Date 11-3-96.
Old Juan de Anza may not have had to put up with freeways and traffic jams more than 200 years ago when he was "horsin' around" in Riverside County.
That's when the explorer and his colonists cut their broad trail across what is now Sonora, Mexico, and Arizona and a long swath of California's mission country.
But the intrepid traveler from down Sonora way probably would have been glad to have modern conveniences of horse trailers, pickup trucks, a propane-cooked barbecue or chain-sawed firewood such as what greeted a hardy band of re-enactors as they jogged their mounts into the Anza Loins Club Arena of a cool-and-growing-cooler evening recently.
In fact, there at the 4,000-foot level of elevation on the outskirts of the southwestern Riverside County town named in his honor, it's a pretty good bet old Juan Bautista would have been as happy to find a warm redshank fire blazing as were his modern counterparts -- the members of the Redshank Trail Riders.
(Let me call a brief time-out here and explain, as I had to have it explained to me, that reshank is a very tough plant -- a bushy tree, really -- that flourishes in the Anza area and provides hundreds of cords of hardwood each year for fireplaces, stoves and campfires of locals willing to work hard enough or maintain a chain saw sharp enough to cut it up. That was what was on the woodpile alongside the arena campfire that greeted Redshank Trail Riders, their breath starting to show in the early evening chill.)
The Redshank club, started about a year ago by endurance rider Laura Alexander of Aguanga and her friend Allison Renck, has become, also, the Redshank unit of Backcountry Horsemen of California.
As one of the most active new Southern California units of that very active service organization, the Redshank unit sponsored and was host for a section of the 1,468-mile Anza relay that started in Mexico in mid-October and was to travel to the Bay Area of California by the end of November.
I'll say more about this really-to-be-admired horse group and its current efforts to grow in such areas as Temecula, the Menifee Valley and even in Norco (where the Santa Ana River unit of the statewide organization, based in Mira Loma, seeks recruits), but first I need to finish explaining the Anza Relay.
It commemorates two remarkable trips made by Anza -- a frontier soldier of obvious skill, courage and leadership ability when he took on the twin missions back there about the time of the American Revolution. He first traveled in 1774 across vast, uncharted areas of Mexico and what is now Arizona t make a trail for the missionaries and colonists who would follow his footsteps into Alta California (present-day California) and establish a presidio in New Spain at what is now San Francisco.
After proving such an overland trail was feasible, he financed his own expedition in 1775-76 to escort 198 colonists and 1,000 head of livestock from Sonora, in Mexico, through present southern Arizona, to cross the Colorado River at Yuma and angle northwest over what is now Anza-Borrego State Park to enter Riverside County through Coyote Canyon.
