Olaf Growald
Jordan Skeith probably — no, definitely — saved a few layers of skin on the bottom of my left foot after warning me of the horseshoe I was getting dangerously close to stepping on. The horseshoe had recently been taken out of a forge — a small furnace attached to the back door of the trailer out of which Jordan operates that “gets hotter than the blazes of hell and damnation itself.” So, the shoe’s temperature was running at well over 700 degrees, plenty hot to quickly burn through the thin rubber soles of my Chuck Taylors.
Jordan, a professional farrier who owns and operates Skeith Equine Services, was tending to one of his many clients in the area, which includes some of the top people in the cutting horse industry, when we happened upon his impressive horseshoeing operation. He’d trimmed a hoof with what they call nippers, then shaped and smoothed it with what they call a rasp — essentially a large, metal nail file — and cleaned the hoof with what they call a pick. In some ways, it’s the equivalent of giving the horse a pedicure, except this isn’t done merely for aesthetic purposes. No, sir. This is about comfort, balance, and overall health of the horse.
“Horses don’t all need the same thing,” Jordan says. “I mean, there are basic fundamentals that still apply to every horse, but every horse grows different, moves different, some have different training styles. I work for quite a few different trainers, so we have to make sure what we’re doing with their feet matches what a trainer is doing.”
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When competing, a cutting horse without the healthiest of hooves and great fitting shoes is immediately at a disadvantage. Jordan is their personal Nike outfitter, giving his clients’ horses an edge. Which does, after all, align with Jordan’s namesake.
“I have older brothers, and when I was born, Michael Jordan was the GOAT,” Jordan says. “They wanted to name me Michael, but my mom wouldn’t let ’em name me Michael, so they named me Jordan. So, that’s why I tell guys, ‘We got to get the Jordans on your horses.’”
Growing up in Seattle — not what one normally expects of a farrier’s place of origin — Jordan didn’t spend his formative years around equines but managed to catch the horse bug around the age of 10, when he first started riding. “Everyone thought I’d get over it,” he says, “but I never did.”
Fresh out of high school, Jordan would go to horse college in Oregon — yes, that’s a real thing — where he would get introduced to the sport of cutting. He’d then leave home to work for his first cutting horse trainer in California and “hadn’t looked back since.”
“And, of course, if you’re doing cutting, it leads you [to the Fort Worth area],” I say. “Of course, of course,” Jordan responds. “[In this area] you can’t throw a stick without hitting a horse.”
Jordan, who started Skeith Equine Services five years ago, has about 300 horses (all cutting) that he regularly shoes over the course of five to six weeks — this being the time when a horse is likely due for a new fitting.
Like a traveling doctor with a black bag, he arrives at horse ranches towing his trailer, which is stocked with all necessary tools and rows and rows — hundreds — of horseshoes, each different in shape and size according to a horse’s needs and whether he’s fitting a front or back hoof. These shoes will go into Jordan’s forge before he expertly pounds the shoe’s hot metal with a hammer on an anvil, getting the U-shaped shoe into the right shape.
Before nailing the shoe into place, Jordan places the still-hot-as-the-bejesus shoe on the horse’s hoof, imprinting its outline as a thick cloud of smoke engulfs the air. This, I’ll note, does not hurt the horse, as it has no nerves on the bottoms of its hooves.
The smell of the smoke is distinct and unlike anything I’ve smelled before — sulfuric but also sweet. I comment on the smell to Jordan.
“Smells like money,” he says.
