Brilliant Beauty

When we were at K's Rock in Utah, it felt as if the desert reached its peak bloom. It had rained hard the week before, and I suspect that every flower came out to play after that moisture.

You can see the purplish hue to the ground in front of the rock. That was mainly Larkspurs, which I'll show some closeup photos of later.

We were at K's Rock last year at almost the same time, and there were no flowers due to extreme drought. This year, there were flowers of every color - purple, pink, orange, red, and yellow. Shyla stopped to sniff some pretty yellow ones.

Orange flowers, called Common Globemallows, also bloomed and looked lovely along with R's black fur.

R was finally starting to feel better after a couple of days of resting at K's rock but we wanted him to continue resting, with little exercise. So, I played training games with him to keep life interesting despite his lack of exercise. He is good at waving with either his left or right paw, depending on which one I ask for.

I get scared whenever R isn't feeling 100%, like during this trip, because he still has malformed blood cells, both red and white blood cells. Usually, the malformed cells that he's had for about 9 months indicate hemangiosarcoma. However, that's an aggressive cancer, and our vet feels fairly confident that it wouldn't lie dormant for this long. That makes her feel less worried that hemangiosarcoma is suddenly going to rear its ugly head. Despite that, I have to admit that I emotionally over-react whenever R is not feeling right. That's why we are so relieved that he seems energetic, happy, and healthy now!

I think that I also had K on my mind, which is part of why I felt so worried about R's malaise. It seemed like Shyla picked up on my mood one day as she sat next to me on K's rock, laying her head down and looking pensive.

But, we made the most of each day there despite those gray clouds over us. I love the sunset light at K's rock. Shyla lit up each evening like a red labrador!

 She tried to climb the rock around sunset one day, giving me a wry look as she hopped down.

 The sunsets were glorious, with K's rock to the right in the photo.

And then, on a couple of nights, the clouds thinned out enough to let me take photos of the stars as the Earth spun around the North Star. I'm still learning how to take and process these "star trail" photos. This one was taken over the course of a couple of hours. It's a time lapse photo, and I've combined hundreds of short exposures into one photo below.

Whenever I see a natural wonder, like the brilliant stars in the dark desert sky, I think of K and the dogs who came before her, like our yellow Lab, S, who died 4 years ago today. I hope that all of them are up there somewhere, waiting for the rest of us.