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100
winter
|
spr ing
W eekend
Getaway
by James Buckley
A non-profit group calling itself TROTT (Training Racehorses Off The Track) believes that
“ex-race horses are talented athletes who need a job after their race career ends.” TROTT has
teamed up with Stonepine Equestrian to buy, retrain, and find new homes for such horses.
This too would not surprise anyone familiar with Stonepine’s history as the one-time home
of Majestic Price, a Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner. That was, of course, when
Stonepine was the Double H Ranch, and a remnant of that is a four-furlong warm-up track still
in use near the Equestrian Center on the 330-acre estate.
But, this 20-room estate/resort isn’t just for horse lovers. It’s for lovers of all kinds.
Guests arriving in private jets (or commercially) are picked up at the Monterey airport (upon
Carmel Valley’s Stonepine Estate Resort
“Perhaps it’s not too far-fetched,” opines a writer for Architectural Digest, “to give in to the temptation to call Stonepine the most
elegant dude ranch in the West.” We are inclined to believe the writer may have something there.
I
t may be because the Thoroughbreds at Stonepine that guests
mount for trail rides, jumping, dressage or even carriage
driving, are a couple notches up the food chain from the
average trail horse. Most of them, you see, are in fact former race
horses – Thoroughbreds all – that have been rehabilitated and
put back to productive work
.