The 81st edition of the Canadian Percheron Broadcaster annual magazine features Sedgewick’s Roger Ferrier, and local photographer Joe Hartung.
Ferrier has owned a team of Percheron horses for around 15 years.
He says his dad and other area farmers always had horse teams around the farm, although they’d been sold when he was very young.
Ferrier says having a team and wagon was always a bucket-list kind of thing for him.
He says when he purchased his first Percherons, they were a well-broke team, and as he already had a cutter, he would drive them around home and in local cutter rallies.
Since then, he’s acquired a few wagons, and has been asked to ferry some important passengers, including former Lieutenant Governor for Alberta, the Honourable Donald S. Ethell, when he attended the grand opening of the Main Street Park.
Ferrier remembers that event vividly, as he was up until past midnight the night before trying to track down the carriage to be used in the ceremony.
He now owns three wagons, and Ferrier routinely brings his team in for area parades, often carrying local MLAs and MPs.
He even gets calls for weddings, which he says he enjoys.
What he enjoys the most about having his team, however, are the wagon rides he and some friends have been doing for the past few years.
He met a couple of other owners in Saskatchewan who run Clydesdales when he worked in Kindersley a few years back, and since then, the three came up with the idea of camping and touring with the wagons.
Ferrier says they started camping out with their teams through Grassland and Cypress Hills provincial parks in Saskatchewan, with a group of around 15 to 20 people.
One of his wagons is a covered wagon, that’s the one he uses on these trips. He says the trip through the Grasslands was on a particularly dry year. “We had to take the shoes off our horses, it was so dry.”
Last year, the group travelled to the Clearwater River, located east of Caroline in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
He says they went for five days, and hired an outfitter, Clearwater Basin Mountain Adventures, who supplied all the cook tents and sleeping tents.
The trip involved a five-hour trek with the wagons to a base camp, and then daily rides from there. They enjoyed it so much, they are already booked for the coming year to do it again.
Ferrier, like anyone else who has a team, has a number of harness sets for his horses, including the decorative set seen in the magazine cover.
Unfortunately, a fire a few years back cost him four other sets and he even lost a wagon in that fire.
A few years back, Ferrier invited local photographer Joe Hartung to accompany the group on their annual trips. Besides getting some amazing photos for his own collection, Hartung actually takes some of his best shots and turns them into calendars for the group members.
The magazine has used Hartung’s photos before, and asked them this year if they could use this photo for their cover, a real honour.
Ferrier also hosts private cutter rally events on his land through the winter, just a few weeks ago he planned one, before the snow disappeared for the season.
Ferrier has three horses now, including the two five-year-olds Jack and Robbie who are featured on the cover.
He says the next thing he’d really like to try is doing some farming with his team, from seeding, cultivating, and binding. He’s been gathering up the equipment he’ll need here and there, joking, “I have more equipment than horses.” He figures he’ll need a couple more horses to give it a shot.
In the meantime, he’s enjoying the experience, and is happy to share the time with friends and family.
Leslie Cholowsky
Editor