With a few modifications for modernity’s sake, the horsemen of the Fort Riley Commanding General’s Mounted Color Guard began their five-day, 130-mile trot across northeast Kansas to mark the 150 years since the birth of the fort and territorial Kansas.

Thursday, fighting heat and traffic, 15 men followed the Santa Fe Trail — now a stretch of Kansas Highway 192 — on horseback from Fort Leavenworth to Winchester in Jefferson County on their way back to Fort Riley. Near a baseball field in a Winchester city park, a camp of shiny, red trailers and rest rooms with running water awaited them.

Members of Fort Riley's Mounted Color Guard navigate an empty stretch of Kansas Highway 192 between Easton and Winchester. The five-day re-enactment ride along parts of the Santa Fe Trail celebrates Fort Riley's 150th anniversary. The riders began at Fort Leavenworth and hope to reach Fort Riley on Tuesday.

Armed with light cavalry sabers and six-shooters, the men had ridden for seven hours and were ready to kick back on one of the cots lined up in the shade of a trailer at the encampment.

“You’re not just sitting up there like a lot of people think,” said Sgt. Ryan Thomas, who has been with the guard for about a year.

A group of volunteers formed the group in 1992 to commemorate the fort’s original cavalry, which ran messages to Fort Leavenworth generals and escorted pioneers on their way to settling the West, said Maj. Joel Graham, the officer in charge.

That cavalry ran from 1853 into the 1940s when the tank replaced the horse in combat, Graham said.

Since 1996, the group has been an official wing of the Army. Active soldiers otherwise trained as mechanics, infantrymen, and engineers take breaks from their normal jobs and work as cavalry troopers.

The mood was relaxed Thursday, but the men work hard to learn the techniques of mounted combat that cavalry soldiers practiced, Graham said.

They work daily from about 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. grooming horses and training for re-enactments and ceremonial functions. The unit performs between 200 and 250 times a year.

They practice hill slides, where the mounted horses scale down 90-degree angles. The men also know how to manage a charging horse while wielding a saber.

“We engage targets while we’re jumping over things like that picnic table,” Graham said, pointing to the park’s table nearby.

The group’s training is serious. A soldier, Spc. Derek E. Junk, died last year in an accident when his horse turned sharply and propelled him into a tree.

Now, the unit emphasizes more preparation and carries a period cooking pot that bears Junk’s name.

Thursday’s only mishaps involved a lost horseshoe and a few laughs over a man who missed the stirrup while mounting and slipped off the horse, Thomas said.

Weather permitting, the group will head down U.S. Highway 24 to Meriden and arrive at Fort Riley on Tuesday.

Cavalry soldiers from Fort Riley's Mounted Color Guard take cat naps in the shade cast by a horse trailer in Winchester. The soldiers were traveling Thursday by horse from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Riley to celebrate Fort Riley's 150th anniversary.