Thursday Video: ‘Suicide’ Hitch Rolls Again

Dave Rohrbach and the Bee Tree Trail boys are at it again — check out their performance of the five-horse “suicide” hitch at Walnut Hill!

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Dave Rohrbach here at Horse Nation: any guy who willingly drives something called the “suicide hitch” has got to be our special brand of insanity. Another favorite pastime of Dave’s is the pyramid hitch, in which he drives a five-, four- and three-abreast fronted by a pair and a single — that’s fifteen horses hooked up in a pyramid shape.

So it only made sense that the Walnut Hill Carriage Driving Competition of Pittsford, New York, as the largest pleasure-driving competition in the country, invited Rohrbach and his fantastic hitch of gray Percherons to travel from their home in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania and demonstrate the so-called “suicide” hitch for driving fans from all over the world.

(If you want to go by the book, this setup is technically called the pentadom hitch … though we’re sure you can figure out how it got its nickname.)

Dave Rohrbach, to the best of our knowledge, is the only driver to have performed this hitch with draft horses with media documentation. He makes this challenging and dangerous setup look mighty easy — we don’t recommend you try this one at home. But in the meantime, we’re quite content to sit back and let Rohrbach show us how it’s done.

Go driving!