Equestrian events in Moore County

McLendon Hills sits on Highway 211, about two miles west of Seven Lakes and ten miles from Pinehurst, with its own 23-acre Equestrian Center built into the front entrance of the gated community. The McLendon Hills Equestrian Center runs its own facility at the community's front gate, built around a 24-stall central barn with a climate-controlled rider's lounge and three outdoor rings, a dressage court, a lighted arena, and a hilltop ring with show-quality jumps. More than 20 acres are set aside for grazing, and 8.5 miles of bridle trails loop through the woods, fields, and streams inside the community itself, separate from the 2-mile paved walking path that circles the 80-acre Lake Troy Douglas. As of a few years ago, the barn's longtime trainer, Samantha Southerland, had already logged 17 years there, teaching riders from age six through adulthood across dressage, western, reining, and trail work.

 Walthour-Moss was established after the death of William O. "Pappy" Moss, specifically to preserve the open land and wildlife habitat he and Virginia Walthour Moss had protected during their lifetimes. It sits about a mile outside Southern Pines and covers more than 4,000 acres of long-leaf pine, sand trail, and stream crossing. The foundation's stated mission is land preservation and wildlife habitat, and its trail system reflects that: sand paths without much signage, a handful of pastures marked on an interactive map, and stream crossings that reward slow, unhurried riding rather than a packed schedule. Visitors who've logged full days there describe it as the kind of place where you ride the perimeter one day and the interior the next day. Walthour-Moss's public fall calendar holds a single dated event: the WMF Horse Country Social, Sunday, October 4, from noon to 3 p.m. at Lyell's Meadow.

 Carolina Horse Park was founded in 1998 on 317 acres in Raeford, it exists as a nonprofit competition venue, and its own numbers put its annual calendar at more than 42 events a year, most of them free to spectate.

 From this coming weekend through the week before Thanksgiving, Carolina Horse Park has an event on the calendar every single Saturday.