Meet My Endurance Horse: Katla from Windsong

March 25 2022
By Merri Melde-Endurance.net

Katla from Windsong, aka The Wee Dragon
12-year-old mare
Icelandic
Owned by Rebecca Supinger

210 LD miles

The 160-km 7-day Icelandic horse ride Rebecca Supinger went on with a friend in 2016 was “the most fabulous vacation ever for horse people!

“When I came back from Iceland, I was in love with the breed - I figured I was going to be,” Rebecca said. “I’d already gone gaited as I’d gotten older and broken a lot of parts. When I got home, I started looking for an Icelandic horse.”

She found the perfect horse four months later, in Katla from Windsong. “I had geldings, and geldings were driving me crazy. I really wanted a mare. But my mare field has really dominant mares in it, so it was going to have to be a really tough mare, because she was going to be the smallest one out here. So I had to not only find a mare I got along with, but she couldn’t be the bottom of the pecking order. It had to be one who thought she was at the top. And it worked out really well, because Katla didn’t put up with any of the nonsense that the two Arab mares were giving her.”

Katla was bred and raised in New Mexico by Ulla Hudson, of Windsong Icelandics. She was sold as a 2-year-old to a woman in Maine who had her shipped east and finished raising her. Rebecca flew to Maine in the fall of 2016 to try out Katla and another gelding; she bonded with Katla, and then drove from Virginia to Maine in December to pick her up.

Katla was 7 and newly under saddle. “She’d had some initial work with a trainer. She’d only pretty much been in the arena. She tried real hard for me. And off we went from there. And now she’ll go anywhere I ask her. She’ll go through trees, over trees, under trees, vines, rivers, bridges, water bars, across roads, pick her way through boulders and loose rocks and sand bogs. She can ride with a single other horse or with a hundred other horses, she doesn’t care.”

A most memorable ride for Rebecca was the DBDR Indy Run in Indiana. It was being touted by Rebecca’s Icelandic group as a gathering of Icelandic horses. “Katla and I were one of 12 Icelandics that descended on this ride. That was a real special one, having all those Icelandics there and riding with some of them. We’ll try to do it again this year.”

The pair did over 12,000 trailer miles last year from a home base in Virginia, doing trail rides/camping trips in New York, and competing in Endurance rides in South Carolina, Virginia, Maine, and New Jersey.

“She’s always willing to go for another adventure and see where we end up. She’s been my little road warrior!”

Photo by Rebecca's daughter at Manassas Battlefields