manitoba ride FAQs

How do I sign up?

Please visit the "Register to Ride" page for details.

How will the ride be run?

Each morning, the ride "breaks camp" and gets ready to roll out at a set time as announced ahead of time by the "Trail Blazer". The communities where we will be staying will usually be providing breakfasts and packed lunches for the road. Riders have to clean up after themselves and their horses! No garbage thrown around and all droppings and leftover hay to a designated area. We will have a wheelbarrow for transportl We will leave the area the way we found it, mostly lol

We are marking out the route ahead of time to find good roads and trails for the ride, usually back gravel roads, the Crow's Wing Trail, or quieter highways. The ride will have a team and wagon leading it usually and a pilot vehicle with hazard lights and slow moving warning signs following along behind. Most of the ride will be done at a walk with the horses staying behind the wagon. Experienced horse people acting as "Swing Riders" will be along to keep the ride in line and in order, and help with any issues with horses.

When we come to busier sections of road or towns, we will have RCMP escort for safety.

When we come to a town which is hosting the ride and community activities, we may need to have the horses and wagons out for public visibility for a while as part of the fundraising efforts for the community. Once this "public relations" step is done, we will then proceed to where we will camp overnight. If the stop is a 'camping' one, say at a community centre, we set up the horses (temporary electric fence corrals, stable in trailers, tie to a highline or build your own corral if you have them), feed them their hay (bales are being provided by the communities and/or we will have some donated hay on the trailer with us) and arrange to water your horses (bring easily portable/collapsible buckets). Then the riders can arrange to set up tents and camp and get comfortable for the night. Bathrooms will be available and most stop-overs will have showers available, power, etc as much as possible. We need to get our horses settled as quickly as possible and get to whatever function is being put on. Hopefully we will have ample time to do this in each town.

The communities will generally be providing evening meals and entertainment, often with live music, BBQ's, dinner dances, bonfires and so on. VERY IMPORTANT - Please be sociable and participate when possible - we ARE the guests of honor and excitement!

Our 'pilot vehicle' truck and flatdeck trailer will follow the ride carrying a porta-potty, water tank, and hay bales, so if you need a stop along the way when riding between towns we can stop for a break and the porta-potty can be used on the trailer, horses can be watered from the water tank, etc. Horses should carry trail packs with your day-to-day needs, such as sunglasses, sunblock, sweaters, change of clothing, hoof pick, insect repellent, collapsible water bucket, and any other items you may need along the way. Larger camping gear items, tents etc can be stowed on the trailer.

Our "Trail Blazer" Pam Glover has been on the Alberta trail ride before, so she knows how things were done there.

How does the pledge thing work?

Each rider or wagon must register for the ride in advance and sign the waiver, stating which day or days they can join the ride and send in their registration fee and deposit. This helps us to spread the riders out more evenly through the ride and plan ahead. The towns need to know how many people to prepare for and we need to know who is coming to prepare the welcome info package.

Each rider or wagon also downloads a Pledge Form to use, we stongly suggest that they also set up with the online CancerCare Manitoba Pledge tracking system and create their own "account" and webpage in order to make it easy for friends, family, co-workers or employers to assist them in coming on the ride.

Each rider or wagon raises $200 in pledges for each day that they want to participate in the ride. If you are busy and can only get away for a day or two, that's OK. Join us on the weekend, or a weekday if you're on holidays, whichever works best for you, and in whichever town you are closest to that works for your schedule.

Getting $200 in pledges is EASY. Ask friends, family, co-workers, breast cancer survivors in your community - heck put up a Kijiji ad asking people to go to your CancerCare page and make a donation onto your pledges via credit card there so that you can come on the ride! It's only 10 people donating $20 each, or 4 people donating $50 each... it's not that much.

If you have a wagon, you can have multiple people in the wagon each day as the $200/day of pledges is per wagon, no matter how many are in the wagon.

Pledges can be made on-line through your CancerCare pledge account, via cheque made out to the Wild Pink Yonder Charitable Society which can be mailed to the Pam Glover, Box 6 Grp 27 RR 2, Ste Anne, MB., R5H 1R2, or by cheque and/or cash delivered when you arrive in camp.

What about my vehicle - how does the trailering work?

In a few places, we have unavoidably had to designate some portions of the ride route as "Trailer from _ to _" to either avoid particularly busy highways, or to make the schedule from town to town work when it would have required two days to ride from one point to the other - with some trailering we can do it in one day to keep up volume of community activities and fundraising.

If you are only coming for one day, or have your vehicle with you along the way, we will arrange logistics as we go. We will have some volunteers to assist with driving vehicles and/or to watch the horses as we "leapfrog" the vehicles ahead. A 7-passenger van will be available for shuttle service, so in the morning vehicle owners can all drive their individual vehicles ahead to the evening stop, then come back in the shuttle van and ride forward. If you don't mind someone driving your vehicle, a volunteer may be available to move your vehicle for you during the day as we ride. If you let someone else drive your vehicle that is your choice and responibility, not ours!

When we need to trailer the horses in the morning for a stage of the route for example, we will load up the trailers and drive to the staging area, then unload, move our rigs forward, shuttle back, saddle up and ride to the evening stop.

One or more of the horse trailer owners may have room for additional horse(s) in their trailer, so it may be easier for 2-3 riders to group together and buddy up for the hauling portions and only have to use one vehicle than to have 2-3 separate trailers. Those details will be arranged shortly before the ride or "on the fly" so let the ride organizers know what your vehicle is, whether you're willing to haul other horses or whether your horse needs a ride etc ahead of time and we'll make it work.

Our purpose is to raise money that will be used for breast cancer research.

We hope you’ll ride with us, starting Sept 10th.

All funds raised by Wild Pink Yonder
in Manitoba will stay in Manitoba
and be used for breast cancer research
as directed by CancerCare Manitoba!