dog – Page 6

A Lucky Break

I’ll be posting more frequently the next few months and I feel I ought to explain why.

Last year after we adopted Bear I was caught off guard by how intensely homesick I suddenly felt for Portland (this is Ellie and I playing in the snow in our backyard a decade ago). It’s not that I hadn’t missed Oregon before — you can’t love a place as much as I loved the Northwest and not miss it when you leave — rather I missed it in the same way I’d miss the desert if I could snap my fingers and give us our old lives back. But I’ve never had a problem mourning the beautiful things I’ve lost as long as it doesn’t keep me from loving the beautiful things I have and have gained. And if you’ve followed me long you know how much I love the Sonoran Desert.

Something else was going on.

A big part of it was I had been having trouble sleeping, leaving me physically and mentally exhausted. Bear was more of a challenge to integrate into our lives than Ellie had been. Sam died around the same time, not that any of their death’s have been easy but I always knew his would be hard. There was pandemic fatigue, the school shooting in Uvalde, the stress of a car commute after so many years taking the train, an especially challenging project. To top it off I got sick twice and had to miss a week of work each time, burning off a huge chunk of my time off, time I usually spend letting my mind spin down. And even though I try to live in the moment and am keenly aware of how good my life is and how many people are genuinely suffering each day of their lives, I still reached a point where I couldn’t keep going and needed to find a way to retire.

Thankfully my boss offered an option to take a leave of absence instead and I took him up on it. Tomorrow I start my four month break and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to step away and recharge. I may not get to play with Bear in the snow as I did Ellie, but he is about to start going on a lot more desert hikes. Looking forward to doing more photography and editing old pictures, my backlog goes back many years (including this one!).

Layers Upon Layers

This picture of Bear at the end of a winter afternoon hike has several layers of meaning to me. When we first adopted him he was overweight and slightly limped even on shorter walks in the neighborhood, and his manners precluded taking him into areas with lots of people and dogs. It took months getting him physically and mentally ready for long walks before I was willing to try him on less-visited trails far from trailheads. Take to the trails he did, while he enjoys his neighborhood walks he has a special love for the desert and when we’re about to head out he practically knocks me over as he scampers to the back of the garage and waits beside my hatchback.

As his progress continued I started taking him to more and more populated trails, culminating in this our first visit to my favorite place, the Brown’s Ranch trailhead. We took my favorite hike, finishing up at Sunset Vista with the sun sinking low in the sky, stopping for a snack break and some pictures before dropping down the hill to the car. I was growing confident we had a lot of desert hikes in our future, as he did well even with the off-leash dogs we encountered.

I snuck Brown’s Mountain into the background as I love to do, as this landmark more than any other was the anchor that helped me find my bearings when we moved here and it felt like we were in a never-ending whirlwind, with this part of the preserve my refuge in stormy seas. The looming mountain would add an extra layer of meaning to the picture a week later when for the first time I took him up its flank to the overlook, watching him enraptured as it slowly dawned on me he had never been up that high before.

It’s now far too hot for any evening hikes and we haven’t been into the desert for weeks since I haven’t been able to get up early enough to beat the heat. Long swims will have to do until I can manage an early rise, but even then I’ll avoid trails with elevation gain until cooler weather arrives in the fall.

What? All The Dogs Are Sitting This Way Now

The View From Home

One of the things I love about our house is the view of the mountains in the distance when you walk in. For months now though this is the view I often first see when I come home from work. Sometimes Bear greets me at the door and runs off to find a toy for us to play with, but if he’s sleepy he rolls over and asks for a belly rub. There may be wiggling involved lest such a subtle gesture go unnoticed.

A New If Old Leash

Another picture of Bear and The Elephant, taken towards the end of an afternoon hike a few months ago. It’s hot enough now that such walks are verboten, it’s early morning or nothing. Evening swims are now on the table though! I have switched back to this leash, which we bought on the day we adopted Ellie in 2009. We have fancier leashes but I’ve always come back to this one.

Bear Passes an Important Test

Yesterday as Bear and I took an afternoon walk around Cone Mountain, I took a few snapshots of the desert in bloom as mementos of our time together on the trails. Later on as we circled the mountain, as we passed a boulder closer to the trail than this one, the tall grasses began to shake and rattle. I instinctively told Bear to leave it (we’ve been practicing whenever my beloved lizards scamper across the trail) but he wasn’t showing any interest in any case. To be sure he understood what I wanted him to ignore, I backed up a few feet, still far outside striking range, to make sure he saw the rattlesnake. He looked at me the same as when I stop for a picture, ready to go when I am, so we continued on our way.

I’m delighted he didn’t try to position himself between me and the snake, or show any interest at all, but the snake was fairly hidden in the tall grass so perhaps it would have been a different story if the snake was slithering on the trail in front of us. Odds are highly in favor of it being a western diamondback but it was so obscured I couldn’t tell with a quick glance and didn’t take a picture since I didn’t want to risk disturbing it any further or to take my eyes off the pup.

Bear gets formal snake training in a few weeks but I’m glad to see he passed the test, this was his first rattlesnake. It’s a test he’ll have to pass repeatedly to be allowed to hike in the desert in the warmer months. Sadly our afternoon hikes will come to an end soon as hot weather is fast approaching, then it will be early morning hikes only for him. There are more dangerous things than rattlesnakes.

1 Year Anniversary

Today marks Bear’s 1 year anniversary with us! We’ll count it as his birthday since we don’t know when it really is or even how old he is (he’s probably 7 or 8 now). He wasn’t as easy an adoption as Ellie but easy is not the same as worthwhile. Glad you found your home sweet home, pup.

Back on His Feet

A few weeks back Bear showed signs of pain around his neck and the vet recommended some pain killers and no playing or walks until the medicine ran out. So far the long rest seems to have done the trick, I was able to leave work a little early on Tuesday and took him on a short hike in the desert and he practically dragged me down the trails. Friday afternoon we took his first hike to the Marcus Landslide where lots of wildflowers were blooming, yesterday we took my favorite loop up at Brown’s Ranch. His rattlesnake training got pushed out a month due to his injury but thankfully we haven’t encountered any of the bitey bits of the desert yet.

Bear Climbs a Mountain

As part of his continuing education Bear and I have been hiking each weekend, I take him on a mix of trails he’s well familiar with as well as some new ones, to give him some new sights and sounds and see how he does on different types of terrain. He’s been doing great, on this occasion I took him up Brown’s Mountain, when we met a woman on a horse he immediately stepped to the side and sat and earned praise from the rider and a treat from me.

When we got to the overlook near the top of the mountain I planned to take his picture with the summit behind him but I couldn’t as this was my only view of him. He was transfixed by the view of the desert below, to the point he wouldn’t drink his water and even only ate his carrots if I reached around and placed them in his mouth, so he didn’t have to avert his eyes for even a moment.

I wondered if he knew our house was off in the distance by the mountains to his right? That the dozens of trails we had walked lay near and far below us? That seeing him blossom on our walks first in the neighborhood and now in the desert brings me such joy? He gets so excited when he sees me put on my hiking clothes he starts chasing his tail, and when we arrive he bounds down the trail with such enthusiasm I once wondered aloud if he was making up for lost time. Which perhaps he is.

I realized he had probably never been up this high before and let him soak in the view for a while. A fighter jet roared overhead to celebrate our achievement, or perhaps to fly over the Super Bowl on the other side of the valley. A woman the size of an ant appeared on the trail below and he let out a quiet growl to let me know something wasn’t right. I assured him she was so sleight because of our great height but he wasn’t convinced. When he was finally ready to go our wandering wizard had reached the overlook, thankfully she had transformed back into full size and Bear was happy to continue on our way.

Bear Gets Into Cathedral Rock

Far and away my favorite rock is folk rock but Cathedral Rock is pretty nice too (given how many made up names I use for my favorite places in the preserve, I should point out this is the official name of this massive rock formation at the foot of Cholla Mountain). This visit a couple of weeks ago was Bear’s first, I’ve been here before but not in a while as the potholes can hold water long after it rains, which tends to attract my arch-enemies the bees. I had a wonderful experience here with two desert spiny lizards in 2018, and in the same year saw two of the three Gila monsters I’ve ever seen on the trail leading here, which is a good reminder to visit more often when the rocks aren’t buzzing.