Trinity Appaloosa Farm

04/01/2025

Things may have seemed quiet here the last few months, but that's just because we've been working on our next big venture!

Our horses have long been admired for their cool heads, trainability, and adaptable personalities. That's why we weren't surprised at all when, last year, we were contacted by a luxury cruise ship line wanting to bring an unforgettable equine experience to their voyage customers, and they needed the beauty and brains our horses have to offer!

To select for the best bloodlines to use for this endeavor, we will be testing all of our existing stock on their sealegs by putting them on a barge out on the pond and building up their experiences from there! We expect this to go absolutely fine with zero problems.

Over the next ten years, we'll be partnering with an international cruise ship line to bring the first foals into existence bred specifically for their seaworthiness. In less than a decade, you'll be able to ride one of our incredible horses in the middle of the ocean. For international fans of our program, this will be a wonderful way for you to meet some of the horses you so love, and get a fantastic vacation in for the whole family!

Stay tuned for more announcements as time goes by, and start making your plans to ride some of the first commercial 'sea horses' when they arrive on deck! 🛳🌊🐠🐟

Bon Voyage!

03/25/2025

One of our grandfoals! Her mother is a Colida SkipNTwist daughter, Heckapoo (One Wicked Twist) from our 2018 foal crop. How time flies! What a total stunner!

03/20/2025

Owners of dun factor ApHC foals from our program can now paper through ABRA's Buckskin Bred program. If you need help with any paperwork, ask away!

ATTENTION PAINT, PINTO & APPALOOSAS, your equine may now qualify for the ABRA Buckskin Bred Program’s new rules.

How do you know if your paint, appaloosa, pinto-patterned horse qualifies?

In 2025, the American Buckskin Registry Association expanded the Buckskin Bred Program to include non-ABRA colored equines that have an ABRA-colored equine ancestor within four (4) generations of their pedigree.

Additionally, Paint, Pinto, and Appaloosa patterned horses that have an ABRA base-coat color (buckskin, dun, red dun, grulla, and perlino dun) may now be registered into the ABRA Buckskin Bred Program also.

This means your paint, pinto, appaloosa, etc., may be eligible to register and show at the 2025 ABRA World Championships in BBP classes as well as any of the Futurities and Ranch Challenge, which are already open to any color/age/breed.

Check your horse’s pedigree on allbreedpedigree.com and look for a dun, buckskin, red dun, grulla, or perlino dun dam or sire for a chance to become a part of the American Buckskin Registry and compete for regional and national awards, look for a Charter Club in your area on americanbuckskin.com and attend local events.

If you own offspring from one of the following sires that carry at least one colored parent (whose base color is dun, buckskin, red dun, grulla, and perlino dun) from either sire or dam lineage up to four generations back, then your horse is now eligible to register and show in the ABRA Buckskin Bred Program with this new rule.

The following partial list of non-ABRA registered sires may have offspring that are now eligible to register within the Buckskin Bred Program:

Machine Made

Lazy Loper

My Sleepy Valentine

Heart Stoppin

The Lopin Machine

VS Code Blue

The Extreme Machine

Fire N Ice

Good Better Best

The Best Martini

RL Best of Sudden

Good I Will Be

Bank On The Best

Im W***y Fabulous

Millionaire Machine

First Thingz First

Salt On The Rocks

VS Phantom Code

All Time Fancy

Lopin My Best

Potential Investment

Invest Your Bucks

Plenty White Wood

Dakota Goose

Frostys War Chief

PC Frosty Bid

Frenchmans Guy

Fritz Leo Command

Hollywood Dun It

Blondys Driftin Dude

Tuf N Busy

Bueno Chex

Poco Tivio Chex

Dual Spark

Shining Spark

Invested Gold

Hollywood Vintage

(this list is preliminary; there may be additional sires to add)

03/20/2025

Look who had his 1st birthday party this past week!

Jabberwocky is now a year old and celebrating in style! Thanks for the update, Airiel!

03/14/2025

Both our Appaloosa and ASHDA programs have several horses carrying these bloodlines. The ApHC foals are dual qualified to register with CRHA.

Bloodline of Influence - The Colorado Ranger Horse, Patches.

The Sugarbush Harlequin Draft is a breed with an amazing history, and it is built on the dreams made reality of our founder, Mr. Everett Smith. However, Mr. Smith was not the only man to see the benefits of combining Appaloosa and Draft traits. Another of those legendary horseman is Mike Ruby, the founder of the oldest LP breed in America, predating even the Appaloosa Horse Club, the Colorado Rangerbred Horse.

Mr. Ruby used several descendants of drafts in his new breed program, but one of the horses that founded it all was Patches, CRHA #1. The breed registry, The Colorado Ranger Horse Association, was started in 1935, beating out the Appaloosa Horse Club by several months. Today, it's thought that as many as one in eight ApHC Appaloosas is CRHA qualified by having the required lineage to Patches, or CRHA #2 stallion, Max.

Patches was the result of quite a lot of careful crossbreeding. Born in 1918 and described as 'cream, black, and white', his sire, Tony, was a double bred grandson of the grey Arabian stallion 'Leopard', who had been gifted to general Ulysses S Grant alongside another stallion, Linden Tree. Patches' dam was an LP draft cross mare, Judy. Her sire, Spot, was sired by a half Shire, half Percheron stallion named 'Chancelor', and her dam, Mollie III, was at least 3/4 Percheron. This made Patches himself roughly thirty percent draft at minimum, and possibly even more than that as Mollie, his great-granddam of unknown breeding, was noted by Mr. Ruby to have pulled a milk wagon.

But, the draft influence didn't stop at Patches! Quite a few founding CRHA mares had draft influence of their own. Several were sired by the Shire stallion, Albert Lee. One of the foals resulting in a cross of Patches to a daughter of Albert Lee was Black Mane, described by a CRHA Booklet as "One of the greatest mares the Plains ever knew." Black Mane was a prolific dam, producing several CRHA foals all at minimum 20% draft by different stallions. The blood of Patches is found in a majority of modern CRHA registered and qualified horses today, carrying his Percheron and Shire influence through time. It is easy to pick out those good traits in many of the Colorado Ranger Horses we know and love - hardy builds, good bone, and excellent temperaments.

Today, ASHDA benefits from the influence of these bloodlines by using dual registered Appaloosas which also carry the Colorado Ranger Horse breeding in their pedigrees. Patches can be found in the bloodlines of several ASHDA Hall of Fame horses including Rorschach's Hextatic, Stonewall Virginia, and Hexenhammer and their descendants, as well as in the pedigrees of multiple notable ASHDA horses across all books of the registry such as Twisted Heiress, Rip, Wisconsin's Charity, Rockin Mighty Belle and more!

It's great to see so much in common with a great breed founded almost a century ago and our horses of today, and to benefit from that influence in so many of the foals born for ASHDA. If you own a registered ApHC Appaloosa, there's a one in eight chance your horse is also a Colorado Rangerbred, and if you own a registered Main Book or Heritage American Sugarbush Harlequin Draft, the chances are even higher for having a horse carrying those historical bloodlines! A special thank you to CRHA breed historian, Sherry Byrd for her tireless work to record the accurate history behind the breeds that help make ours!

📸 RTD's Sugarbush YouNeedIt, an E-Designation ASHDA filly bred by Rockin the Dots and owned by ASHDA Lifetime Member, Randall Napier, and a descendant of CRHA #1, Patches.

03/03/2025

Someone is huge! Kraken is coming up on two years old and is making his grown Quarter Horse buddies look fun-sized! I think a ladder will be needed when this guy is ready to start riding if he keeps growing like this!

Thanks for the update, Erika!

02/21/2025

Flashback Friday! In 2021, when Salem was just a little baby 2 year old and was harrassing the new guy, Jaster, who just found out he WASN'T the baby anymore!

02/21/2025

Handsome Beast is getting more frosty every year! Even with his minimal coat expression, he is LPLP, the only LPLP stallion in the ASHDA Main Book at present!

02/19/2025

Beautiful Wolpertinger, 2015 ASHDA/SSB mare, aka "Schatzi", has a few more snowflakes than usual!

02/19/2025

Today, we made our first spring delivery of 20+ cartons of our farm fresh, free range eggs to the Central Virginia Community College Farmer's Market!

This great program put on by CVCC staff provides access to FREE produce and other grocery items to CVCC students. This is the second semester we have donated our eggs to their market, and we will continue to do so through the rest of Spring 2025's semester. If you are in the Campbell County area and grow fresh produce or have other grocery items, consider partnering up to help ensure these students have a great selection to help ease the stress on their grocery bills! Let's help take care of our community. Good food is an essential ingredient to great minds!

02/17/2025

Policy Change - Foal Registration papers

We will be implementing a change for our foals going forward. Previously, we provided original papers and a signed transfer to everyone who bought a foal from us. These transfers were made out to the buyer specifically.

However, there are a number of horses still in our name, which are long sold, and now it is difficult to track where they are. When people don't file those transfers, it creates unnecessary drama or expense should they ever sell the horse. We provide new transfers to anyone who asks, but oftentimes, new owners want to avoid the hassle. And we suspect that some people have withheld papers from new owners because they didn't want to reveal that they were the ones that didn't file the transfer.

Going forward, at the time a sale contract is struck, a transfer form for the foal's motherbook will be filled out. At completion of the contract, it will be filed by us. The cost of this will be rolled into the price of the foal. Our foals deserve to have their accurate owner history recorded, and their papers as easy to transfer as possible once they leave our farm. We do not sell grade foals, and anyone who makes one of our foals grade by withholding their paperwork from the next owner will be blacklisted.

In the case of non-motherbook registrations, such as dual registration in CRHA, ABRA, Stonewall Stud Book, or any others our foal owners are interested in, we are more than happy to provide any copies of paperwork, signatures etc to make those happen as well!

Thank you all!

📸 is Pseriously Chic 2011 registered ApHC Appaloosa and AHA Half-Arabian filly

02/15/2025

It's hard to believe they were ever so little! Pardon My French as a teeny little lad! He was so cute! Now he's a big boy stallion!

02/08/2025

Virginia friends with young colts to geld, mark your calendars!

🐴 FREE Horse Castration Clinic! 🐴

The Virginia Tech Veterinary Teaching Hospital castration clinic on Thursday, April 3, is now accepting applications! Spots are limited, so book early. A waitlist will be available.

Your horse must be:

Halter-broke
Negative Coggins test
Vet-confirmed 2 testicles
5 years or younger
~1000 lbs or less

Call the Large Animal Hospital front desk at 540-231-4621 to sign up.

01/27/2025

We love traditional Clydesdales too, we'd love to see them make a comeback!

While the American Sugarbush Harlequin Draft's draft roots were established using the registered Percheron, even during the founding days of the program, the positive traits of other draft breeds were admired and considered as prospective influences on the development of the breed. Mr. Smith even came very close to adding a pair of registered shire mares to his broodmare band!

When ASHDA was founded as a continuance of Mr. Smith's original registry, much discussion went into what breeds might be allowed to continue to influence the Sugarbush. The conformational type of draft horses as a whole has changed a great deal in the last few decades, and as a result, the majority of the modern Percheron didn't show a reflection of the horses used to found ours. It was decided that a Sugarbush ought to look like a Sugarbush, and that was more important than forcing the breed to change to mimic the trends in other breeds. Today, breeders can cast their nets a little wider in order to find horses that fit our breed standard in terms of conformation, while still adhering to our requirements in genetic testing, correct color, and breed studbooks that stand behind their horses' DNA. The Percheron, Belgian Draft, Suffolk Punch, Shire, and Clydesdale can all be selected from to try and best match our breed standard and other requirements, allowing breeders to produce foals of type without limiting their outside resources to a single rapidly shrinking supply.

Today, the heavy draft breed that has the next highest amount of influence on our breed is the Clydesdale, with several purebred mares in our Improvement and Approved Dam categories, and their descendants breeding forward into the next generation. Horses like It's Going Down, Rockin Mighty Belle, Rorschach's Hextatic, Sky Ridge Matrix's Scarlett, and more have contributed their Clydesdale lineage to our breed's future. As our breed continues to grow, we look forward to seeing how our breeders make their Sugarbush Harlequin Drafts of the future!

📸 Clydesdale Stallion, Holyrood painted 1906

01/25/2025

Congratulations to Kerry on her purchase of BLUESTONE'S HARVEY! This beautiful registered fjord gelding will be heading out to CA soon to begin the next chapter of his life!

With his sale, the only horse we have available until foaling season is our beautiful miss Puff!

01/21/2025

Beautiful Puff's adventures in the snow ❄️

Contact us for more information on this one of a kind filly!

01/14/2025

Godiva has had some beautiful foals for us, and we are huge fans of her son Roo as well!

12/27/2024

Coming in the New Year is the best time to get your ideas for the future on track.

If you are looking to get involved with the Sugarbush Harlequin Draft breed, you can't ask for a better start!

SUGARBUSH SMOKESHOW is a 2024 bay founding line ASHDA E-Designation filly. Sired by multi champion ASHDA Stallion, Hexenbiest, a son of our legendary ASHDA Hall of Famer, Hexenhammer.

"Puff" is EE Aa LPlp and 7panel NN through parentage. She can never produce a red foal. While her coat looks solid bay at present, she does have one copy of LP, and if she is anything like her sire, granddam, or aunt, she will have some astoundingly beautiful coloring before long!

The mind on this filly is unmatched! She knows how to walk and trot in hand, leads, loads, is excellent for shots. She loves people and being handled and groomed and is so incredibly smart.

As an introduction to the breed, or to an established program, she ticks all the extra boxes on top of her stellar mind, conformation, and gaits:

💎 Founding lines including ASHDA Hall of Famers Sugarbush Harley Quinne, Stonewall Rascal, Sugarbush Felina Del Noche, Charlie Degas, and more!

💎 The only available descendant of HEXENHAMMER anywhere!

💎 One of the highest draft % mares with LP available in the breed.

💎 Sire, siblings, and other close family have ongoing careers.

💎 Great handling foundation, ready to go right into a young horse program.

Contact us to schedule an appointment to meet this amazing young filly. Don't be kicking yourself when you see her in someone else's barn.