Trippy Dip

Trippy Dip is the very definition of a blue hen mare.

“Trippy Dip was a lady,” says Abigail K. Kawananakoa, who was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2018 and owned “Trippy” for the last six years of the Thoroughbred mare’s life. “It was a privilege to have her. Trippy was a special horse, a great mare, and the Quarter Horse breed lost something unique when it lost her.”

Bred by S.F. “Sonny” Henderson of Odessa, Texas, Trippy Dip is a daughter of Scout Leader. Foaled February 7, 1976, the bay mare was out of the Dancing Dervish mare Dancing Straw.

A classy sprinter who in 1978-79 won 10 of 29 Thoroughbred races, with eight seconds and two thirds at distances from 4 to 6 furlongs,  Trippy Dip earned $78,169 in two seasons at tracks in New Mexico, Arizona and California. Trippy Dip ended her racing career at Santa Anita in December 1979, where she came to the attention of American Quarter Horse Hall of Famer Ginger Hyland.  “She had a bowed tendon, her feet had overgrown her shoes. And she was still winning races. She had so much guts. I took one look at that great big, tall Thoroughbredy-looking bag of bones and said I’ll take her,” she recalls.
 

Ginger took Trippy Dip home, nursed her back to health and developed the mare into the Hall of Fame matriarch she was meant to be.

Trippy Dip produced 16 foals, 15 of which went to the track. Eleven returned as winners, seven in stakes races and three of those as champions. Her first foal was her first champion, a brown son of Dash For Cash foaled in 1982. Named Calyx, he was the champion distance horse in 1987 and went on to sire 37 stakes winners and the earners of more than $7 million.

Trippy Dip’s second champion was Calyx’s full sister Florentine, who in 1986-88 earned $1,123,102 and three titles on the track. A Dam of Distinction and the 1995 broodmare of the year, Florentine produced four stakes winners and the earners of $1,594,867.

Altogether, Trippy Dip produced six offspring of Dash For Cash, three by First Down Dash, one by Easy Jet and two apiece by Timeto Thinkrich, Chicks Beduino and Ms. Kawananakoa’s stallion A Classic Dash. Trippy Dip’s foals earned $1,746,567, where two decades after her death she still ranks in the top 60 all-time.

“Trippy represents one of the finest female lines in our industry today, a line that will have very far-reaching effects on the breed itself,” Ginger says. “Not only did she produce a consistency of speed, but she threw in other things as well, soundness being one. Her foals are very sound, both athletically and reproductively. Trippy passed on a lot of intelligence and personality.”

Trippy Dip was euthanized June 24, 1999, due to chronic crippling osteoarthritis in her right knee. But the mare is not done. More than 20 years after her death, and for decades yet to come, the mare still is impacting the world’s fastest horses. She was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2019.

Biography updated as of March 2019.