Ride a mile in these shoes

When you pull on a shoe in the morning, you are putting your feet into something designed by a large corporation and put together on an assembly line. When a horse has a shoe fitted, however, it is a farrier who labors over the precise fit.

Standing feet from a sweltering forge, wiping sweat off their brow while slamming a hammer onto an anvil to shape a shoe and, using heavy equipment, finishing the shoe with painstaking detail, a farrier's reward is a well-fitted shoe for a horse. And after finally finishing the shoe, there are three more to be made before the work is done for a single horse.

Last weekend at H&C Feed in Palmer, several farriers got together for an informal Alaska State Farrier Association competition. Instead of actually competing against one another, the session was more a sharing of information, in which tips and pointers were given freely.

"Nobody knows everything because every single horse is different," said Valley farrier Mark Couch, who took part in the event. "When somebody tells me they know everything about making shoes, well, they don't know much I think."

A large portion of the farriers in Alaska are here in the Valley. That's mostly because this area is home to the highest concentration of farms and horse owners.

"There's a couple of farriers in Fairbanks, a couple down on the Peninsula, and I think there is one or two in Anchorage," Couch said. "But most of them are here in the Valley it seems."

An anvil and hammer are two of the most important tools a farrier uses. After heating the metal, the shoe is placed on the anvil as the farrier bends and shapes it. The process of heating the shoe and then hammering and bending it into place is repeated until the shoe matches the hoof perfectly. Throughout the shoe-making process, the farrier also has to take into consideration where the nail holes need to be placed, and the exact fit of the shoe.

"In a competition, it's judged based on a number of things, like how close the nail holes line up and the fit of the shoe to the hoof," Couch explained. "The fit has to be as precise as the thickness of a dime."