Dissecting the 17'1" Fall

To figure how to fall safely at height first specify the concerns, maybe?

Noted last post, compared to sitting on my 16'1" hander, sitting on the 17'1" hander, from those heights it's fairly easy to visualize a safe landing at 16'1" whereas I personally am having a lot of trouble figure it at 17'1" even thought the difference in height on the measuring stick is--what?--a little more than one foot.  Will have to take my tape measure to measure the actual differences in terms of inches.  Certainly the actual difference in falling is much more than one foot.

While on this subject this--is there a big difference between 15'3" and 16'1" in terms of the fall?  #17 was 15'3" on June 29 when I had my firecracker fall.  Thus I can relate, yes, there's a fairly significant difference--both in visualization of the ground from the heights and in the falling.  I fell off 16' 01" Rollin' Rod many times.  The fall of the 15'3" horse was comparatively very easy.  Why?

The explanation starts with understanding that most horse falls result, at least at the inception of the fall, in a horizontal drop as opposed to a straight vertical drop.  A vertical drop from height would be straight down.  Release a 150 lbs iron ball from 4 feet and there will be a significant thud on ground contact.  Cause that same 150 lbs iron ball to fall more at a horizontal angle then at ground contact some of the falling force will
dissipate as the ball rolls at the horizontal direction.

Conclude then that the more horizontal (as opposed to vertical) the fall, the less direct ground energy (thump) will go into the rider's body on ground contact.

So--can we see the first problem from falling at the greater heights--at some point up the height scale part of the fall is going to be vertical--i.e. straight down--and that is even if the beginning of the fall is horizontal.

continue with this next post.

Training:
#17--goal was continuous gallop around course by tomorrow, Sunday.  What we have instead is four continuous days of rain, snow and extremely cold weather.  To keep our trainer's sanity we're having the goal of doing as much as is physically possible with #17.  The good news is that over several tack sessions the past two weeks the horse has been totally calm and into his work out in space.  This is the necessary precursor for serious work in the pasture.
#148 Nature of the latest injury to the heel bulb area is now fairly clear.  Will post before and after vids later.
Fairly obviously the horse once again put his paw through a fence, luckily avoided extensive damage, but caused a parallel to the ground puncture line about 3 inches long(hence all the bleeding) that is shallow instead of deep  but has one fairly deep thimble size puncture right in the middle.  The good news here is that all this will probably heal and would be well on the way except due to weather we're having to bandage, and the bandage itself is causing damage.  Some innovative bandaging.  Will do a post on this.