It all started with a call from the late, great Linda Cigliano. ”Sally, you need to come and take this horse that’s over the road from me,” she said in her signature insistent, gravely voice. “You love Arabians and he keeps getting out and taking all the others with him — they are calling him Houdini!”

That 1983 call was the beginning of my 20-year adventure with the best horse of my life. Catalina Muzalbo — “Beau” — was bred on Catalina Island by Philip Wrigley and foaled in May of 1974. He was brought here to Rolling Hills, aged 6, by his young owner Patty Sarver. She trail rode him here for about three years but she had to leave for college in the east, so was looking for a new place to keep him and hence the phone call to me.

I agreed to board Beau and ride him and discovered how magnificent he was. He was steady but delightfully forward and willing and full of fun. About two weeks later, I took him on a Caballeros "Out of Town" ride to Coto de Casa, trailering with Sue Breiholz. We had a great time riding in a group of about a dozen, taking our horses through a river with water hitting our boots and sliding down a steep, tricky hill with rolling stones, just like in the movie The Man from Snowy River. Beau and I ended up winning many of the events in a small gymkhana during the visit there — what a great horse I had found!

I ended up buying Beau from Patty and proceeded with many adventurous trail rides here in Rolling Hills and more visits to other places, such as Santa Ynez for a weekend, where I was "initiated" into the Hillfilly Club by Juanita Crane (very scary!). On that outing, we had a great trek up the long hill to President Reagan's Rancho del Cielo to have lunch “in the sky.”

Beau and I competed in many of the annual Rolling Hills horse shows, which were so well run by Frances Riegle. We enjoyed racing Bill Corette down the bending poles. Later, I organized that same show at the Caballeros ring for young riders, but it sadly came to a stop for lack of entries.

It wasn’t much later when Beau and I met Carole Hoffman and started dressage training at her lovely arena on Saddleback. We took lessons from Zola da Virro, Franz Rochowansky, David Wilson and Louise Koch. It was quite an awesome undertaking, involving serious training several days a week for 10 years. I loved every minute, but it is very hard work and required an enormous amount of preparation to get ready for a show: Washing and braiding Beau, loading into a trailer, learning to actually drive him with a trailer in-tow to Santa Barbara for the Arabian horse shows, Del Mar or the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, and even to Scottsdale, AZ, in the pouring rain! Beau did extremely well and won many championships, including in non-Arabian dressage shows.

In May of 1992, alarmingly he started showing some strange symptoms and had to be rushed to the hospital to have a stone removed. It was due to a very rare condition that apparently happens mostly in horses living in coastal areas, for it has to do with content of the soil and the pH balance of water near the sea. But he was very brave and recovered quickly.

We went on to compete in dressage at the Prix St. Georges and Intermediate 1 levels in 1993/1995 and then happily retired back to the wonderful trails of Rolling Hills. I was always riding the trails, whilst training dressage and often combined the two on my favourite trail loop, up John's Canyon then a little work out in Hix ring and return home down Si's trail.

As we both got older, I hand-walked him on nearby trails for a couple of years. Then, one day I found him lying down in his stall and he could not get up. After keeping a close watch for several hours, he still could not move and with the help of our vet we made the painful decision to put Beau to sleep at age 29 in June 2003. It was an incredibly sad day. I was truly blessed to have been the caretaker of this wonderful horse and shall treasure his memory forever.