Photo credit Patti Klein
Kim Walnes pulled her Chevrolet 250-diesel, double-cab truck she calls Wave Dancer up the short hill to Harvest View Stables in Manheim, PA on a bitterly cold, beautiful January day. As she unpacked the supplies she would use for her clinic, which included a bucket of essential oils, it was clear her methods are different.
Walnes reached the pinnacle of eventing success as a bronze medalist for the US team in the early 1980’s. Decades later, her focus is on refining the conversations riders have with their horses.
“Most competitive riders are not paying attention to a lot of what is going on in the environment that their horses are picking up on,” she said. “They don’t have any awareness of energy, and they miss out on the real relationship and deep bonding with their horse that can occur when they take everything into consideration.”
Her classical approach based on bodywork and focus on listening to what horses need from riders in order to perform at their peak has been aggressively challenged in some circles.
Andrea Datz, founder of the slow integrative approach called, “Tango with Horses,” managed several large barns in Colorado where Walnes visited as an instructor, but for a period of 12 years, she had trouble filling clinics. "She was talking to horses, back when talking to horses was not a popular idea, and she was working with communicators when nobody did," she said. "It freaked the barn owners out."
Datz was a horse management student at Colorado State University when she learned about Walnes. “I had finished my colt starting class, and had serious doubts about my career choice,” she said. “I thought if this is the only way to train a horse, then I didn’t want any more to do with it,” she said. “Kim calls herself a rebel, but I found a kindred spirit who is as sensitive as I am to recognizing trauma in horses and people. She was saying to me, you can be true partners with your horse.
“There are a handful of us openly talking about stuff that really talented equestrians know and experience on a multi-sensory level,” said Datz. “They are just afraid to say it.”
Goose Games
As an eventer, Walnes was paired with a difficult, unruly iron gray gelding called Gray Goose who early on, threw her almost every day and expertly escaped from fields. Improving her equine communication skill was critical to bonding with what she calls a “super being.”
“If you can’t have a relationship, you can’t compete,” she said. “I’m still learning that the horses have so much to teach us, but they will always raise the bar.”
This mindset served the pair in 1982, when they won two selections trials and were crowned National Champions at the Kentucky Three-Day Event. Despite breaking several bones in her back and competing with a partially healed injury, she was third individually and a team bronze medalist for the US at the World Three-Day Eventing Championships in Luhmuhlen, France that year.
She and Gray Goose went on to place second at the Boekelo CCI*** and were named alternates for the 1984 Olympics. Retired in 1987, Gray was inducted to the United States Eventing Association (USEA) Hall of Fame in 2012. His ashes are buried at the Head of the Lake in the Kentucky Horse Park.
Self Taught
Walnes came from a military family and learned to ride in the northern Virginia woods, riding double and jumping bareback with her friends. She had no formal lessons and depended on books to learn the basics.
“My mom would drop me off at the barn,” she remembers. “So, it was just the horse and me, and I’d ride down the shoulder of the main roads until I got to the open fields.” Walnes got a horse at age 16, and since has worked with Jack LeGoff, George Morris, Sally Swift and Linda Tellington Jones.
Filmmaker Sybil Miller began producing a documentary about Walnes before the pandemic. “The intention was to do a brief profile of Kim. Her story, though, is complex and while a short piece is still my goal, there is more. I have interviewed several of Kim's friends, fans, and students. Each touches on a different aspect of what she means to them,” Miller said. “The deep admiration and affection they hold for Kim would make anyone want to keep going.”
Harvest View owner, Cindy Gilbert, wishes she’d had a Kim when she was learning so she wouldn’t have had to relearn so much in her later years. “She’s been really helpful with my hunting horse, Patrick,” she said. “If I’d had Kim, maybe my body would not be so beat up. He likes that I have Kim, now. All the horses do. She understands them.”
Gilbert hopes that since the world has slowed down, “Maybe now, people can be open to trying something new, which is also old,” she said of Kim’s classical style.
Rebuilding Riders
Rebuilding has become part of Walnes’ DNA.
In 1990 Walnes and her husband of 20 years divorced. A year later, her 18 year old daughter Andrea was abducted and was missing for four months before her bones were found in the West Virginia woods. A car accident in 1996 that resulted in a near death experience left Walnes with a traumatic brain injury and in a deep depression. She turned to Gray who was patient with her unsteady balance and helped her make her way back to physical and mental health.
She spent two years soul searching, obtaining a spiritual life coaching certification. “I’d realized every dream,” she said, “but had to learn resilience again.” She now combines the heart and science of riding in her clinics on communication between horse and rider and shares updates on her stallion, Gideon Goodheart, via Facebook.
Walnes’ student, dressage rider Rebecca Hayden, 43, Johnson City, TN began virtual lessons in March via an iPad. Even in this scenario, she said, “I can’t believe what her eye can see. Kim has helped me understand movements I make, then how to take that to under saddle. My horse crew (Henry, OTTB, 14 years; Bali, TB, 20 years; and Fairfield, Westphalian, 20 years) is so unique, but Kim’s lessons apply to all of them. Kim’s style is also supportive. She is quick to laugh while we are learning which is a joyful experience.”
Tabbetha Marron of Lancaster, PA recalled auditing a 2014 clinic during which Walnes smudged the arena with incense when a horse balked in a corner. Marron has since been working to deepen her connection to her 13-year-old draft paint cross, Bohdi.
“I think people get stuck,” she said. “They don’t want to look at how they are impacting the horse, and the horses just want authenticity and honesty. Kim’s teaching is slower paced and a lot of people are looking to be fast-tracked to greatness. They fail to realize, it takes what it takes. It’s about becoming a more present version of myself.”
As Walnes ended her six-lesson day at Harvest View Stables she loosened the noseband on a horse called Sprite, and said, “Namaste.” In yoga the word means, “The light in me, honors the light in you.”
Speaking to a horse or rider this way may be considered by some alternative, holistic or plain crazy.
Walnes isn’t deterred. “We are born connected, then trained out of it to become tense. The smallest degrees of awareness are the hardest for most riders,” she said. “They have crooked posture or protection patterns and don’t want to connect but there’s a whole world out there.
“The horses,” she concluded, “want us to wake up.”
Learn more at thewayofthehorse.com. To schedule a local clinic phone (717) 625-4946.