Silhouette Sunday

The vivid colors of the Rocky Mountain skies inspire me!

Sunset is one of my favorite times of day, especially when I can share it with the Duo.

Poetry in Motion

The other morning, Shyla sat on a boulder with me around sunrise. She leaped up effortlessly, while I clambered like an uncoordinated human.

After I carefully climbed down, stumbling just a little, I asked Shyla to join me on the ground. Watching her navigate the boulders with effortless grace awed me.

I wish that I had one iota of her physical ability.

Shyla shows absolutely no sign of fear when she's bounding through the mountains!

That, together with her incredibly sweet personality, make her the perfect dog for me!

A Birthday!

Shyla recently had a birthday. She's three years old! Time flies when you're a wonderful and sweet dog like Shyla!

She still has puppy eyes.

We had a super fun adventure to celebrate her birthday. We'll tell you all about it very soon!

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's Turkey Day in the US! Here's a wild turkey, in its natural habitat.

Today is also "Thanks Blogville" day, a concept that I would not have understood before I wrote my first post almost six years ago. I had no idea that my simple little posts would lead to such a wonderful network of friends as those I've found in Blogville.

Blogville is a group where we support each other through thick and thin. I became most aware of this back when my heart dog, K, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma on Christmas Eve, 2011. She lived with cancer for 7 months before her journey ended, leaving me with a shattered heart.

In retrospect, the months of K's illness were some of the toughest, yet most love-filled, ones of my life. I knew that K wouldn't live a long time, and we seized every single day to find happiness and love with her.

In addition, Blogville did so many things to keep our spirits burning strong during that tragic, yet poignant, journey. There was the huge surprise of a day of posts dedicated to K on Valentine's Day, 2012 (there's a link to those posts in the right sidebar). I woke up that morning to discover many beautiful posts supporting and honoring K. I smiled and I cried as I read posts about K from all over the globe. The theme of many of the posts was "The Power of the Paw", and many featured a photo of K's paws that I'd taken just before her bone cancer diagnosis.

Then, Blogville did even more. You sent me a gorgeous painting of K, by Kathleen Coy, that is always featured in the upper right corner of my blog. In our home, it hangs above K's bed (also given to us by our Blogville friends - I am still overwhelmed by your generosity). I look into K's eyes in that painting every single day. Kathleen truly captured K's loving spirit.

This photo shows K's spirit that you helped me to celebrate despite my sadness - a happy and loving girl who was ready to play fetch on the day after she'd had intensive radiation to kill the bone tumor in her front leg. She lifted me up out of my sorrow with her irrepressible happiness and hope.

Here was K almost 7 months later, with a close friend who I met through Blogville (yet another gift from Blogville). That friend helped us through the last few days of K's life. She helped me to laugh and helped K to be silly despite the fact that we knew that we were in the last few days of K's life.

After K's death, a young and very sensitive dog, Shyla, joined our family. Since then, you've been so supportive as I've navigated the difficult world of helping her learn to cope with her fears. Your words of wisdom helped me through many days when I felt lost.

The great news is that Shyla has come out of her shell and, although she is still very sensitive, she can cope with most of life. I believe that she's very happy now.

Shyla is a new spirit, a unique soul, and I've come to love her like crazy. So has R.

Thank you, Blogville. The spirit that you represent is generous and kind - and I am so grateful that we are part of this group.

Happy Thanksgiving Blogville! K taught me to try to be thankful for each and every day. Today is special because we all join together in that thankfulness.

Wordless Wednesday - Sunset over the Divide

Our Black Dog

R is able to act so crazy and loud. When he's excited, he likes to talk - or shout - about it

But he is also also very serious, especially when he's out on evening hikes with just me and Shyla. He likes to keep watch over us girls in that situation.

 He is always scanning the world around him on those hikes.

Most of the time, when he's at home with the pack, he's a mellow dog but people who know him in other contexts might not believe it. This is what he does most days, in between runs, hikes, and meals.

The life of luxury...

Eyes or Nose?

I find it fascinating to spend so much time in the woods with a different species, a dog. We humans rely very heavily on our sight to "scan" the world around us. For dogs, it is undeniably different. I've seen Shyla walk right past all sorts of wildlife - deer, elk, grouse - who were standing still downwind of her. She didn't see them with her eyes, and the wind was taking their scent away from her. This was one example last summer. She didn't see this grouse!

Because we humans are so visually oriented, we tend to focus on the eyes of our dog friends when we look at them.

But, perhaps their portraits should look like this to emphasize which sense is most important to them!

Sometimes I wish that I could "see" the world through a dog's nose for just one day!

Silhouette Sunday

Snoozing Saturday

A restful Saturday...

Shyla snoozed in the lap of luxury. Happy Saturday!

Bobcats

My snowbike leaves wide tracks in the snow that many animals like to use for walking. Near my house, I've seen bobcat tracks superimposed on my snowbike tracks almost every morning.

Seeing that photo made me want to check my other trail cameras in bobcat-rich areas.

This is one such area... where bunny rabbits hang out and bobcats hunt them.

It made me laugh that a bobcat stood in almost the same spot a few nights later, getting his profile photographed.

And, on another animal trail, I'd noticed many bobcat scrapes throughout the autumn months. So, I decided to put a trail camera there to see what activity was occurring. I captured a photo of a mother bobcat and her kitten. Here is the mother...

And, here is her kitten, lagging a few seconds behind. The kitten is getting big but is still clearly smaller than mom.

I've observed that female bobcats don't leave scrapes (territorial markings) like I'd been seeing along this trail as often as males do. So, I wasn't too surprised when a bigger bobcat, a male, showed up the next night.

Here he is, preparing to scrape the ground and mark his territory.

Marking involves kicking backward multiple times with both back paws. In this case, he dug all the way down to dirt. On this occasion, he left scat in the scraped area.

One of the promising things about finding a bobcat marking area is that it usually attracts all sorts of wildlife to sniff it and then mark it themselves. I am fairly certain that mountain lions occasionally use this route so it'll be interesting to see if we get any photos of them.

I don't know what happens when a male bobcat meets a kitten. There are stories that wild male cats kill kittens but I don't know how many solid facts back up those stories. This trail seems like a place where this male and the kitten could meet...

It is the season when all the animals are changing their "usual" routes because of the snow and cold. I'm hoping that I can figure out more of the their "usual routes" this winter than I have in the past! These bobcat photos are a good start!

Acrobatic Shyla plus Photo of a Mountain Lion Kitten

We had a quiet start to the day, heading out onto peaceful trails. No wind, pretty warm - we were both happy.

Shyla was in a zooming and acrobatic mood, almost scaring me with the way she was sprinting around on boulders.

That boulder is almost vertical but she came down it without hesitation.

Landing in a handstand!

She's at that age where I cannot imagine what she'll be like when she's older. She seems indestructible, performing leaps that seem impossible to me.

After I rode with Shyla, I headed to a faraway trail camera. I went to it yesterday to put new batteries in it. While I was there, a migraine started to come on. In my rush to get home before the symptoms got terrible, I left my keys next to the camera. So, today, I had to ride there again, to fetch my keys. In the process, I discovered that the new batteries must have been bad because the camera was already saying it had low batteries (after I replaced them yesterday). That means yet another trip to that spot...

As you can see, my wildlife photography ends up taking a lot of time and energy! But, it's worth it to me, when I peeks into the secret lives of mountain lions, like this one. This photo was at the end of a long play bout with Mom. She'd just walked off and the kitten lay there by himself.

I plan to make a video from all the footage, as soon as I have time. I think that glimpses of big fierce animals being playful are amazing!

Wordless Wednesday

Struggles and Successes in Training

We just barely missed actual sunrise this morning. My migraine-preventative medicine makes getting out of bed feel like I'm trying to escape quicksand - a huge frustration for me but it's better than having constant migraines. Fortunately, when we finally burst onto the trails, the sunlight was still soft and reddish. I love that time of the morning.

I keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, we'll get one or two more autumn-like days but Mother Nature has not cooperated. This morning was cold (10°F) with high winds out of the west. Shyla turned her back on them and her hat's toggles aligned with the gusts.

It's funny that this is the only hat that she doesn't act upset about wearing. She's squinting due to the sun in her eyes... but, generally, she doesn't mind this hat. I love how it acts like a wind gauge, aligning with the gusts.

When the wind became too cold, we retreated to the edge of the forest that protected us to some extent. And my girl relaxed on one of her favorite perches.

Our big accomplishment for the morning was making it to Hug Hill, a tough snow bike ascent right now. Thankfully, the wind died down, ever so briefly, while we played up there. The mountains are now fully cloaked in snow and very often have shrouds of winter clouds surrounding them. I guess it is now fully winter.

Going to Hug Hill feels like running a gauntlet these days. We've recently run into some hunting dangers near there so I insist that Shyla stays right next to me as I pedal uphill. She understands "heel" but, since becoming gaining more confidence, she gets tempted away by scents. A big part of our recent training breakthrough was working on "leave it" intensively. Now, as she starts to drift toward a scent (and away from me), an upbeat verbal "leave it" brings her running back to my side. That has solved almost all of the behavioral issues that we struggled with over the summer.

I also noticed that, when I felt that I was losing control of Shyla over the summer, I'd get a panicked or angry tone in my voice. By returning to our trainer's advanced drop-in classes, I've relearned the importance of sounding "fun" to Shyla. She is so sensitive that any stress in my voice makes her less likely to respond to me.

I'm sure that this won't be the last training challenge we'll face because both Shyla and I are constantly changing. Most of all, I'm grateful that her confidence seems to keep on growing!

I told you so!

I think that winter is here to stay. Shyla does too.

Indeed, this morning, I think she might have been ready to reverse her decision to reject boots and wear them! Sadly, I didn't have them with me. She started out fine.

Then she waved at me, tossing some snow into the air at the same time.

Then, as she started to put her paw back down into the freezing snow, she had second thoughts.

And she decided to adopt this pose.

I took it as a sign that we needed to get moving. Indeed, that worked. As long as Shyla was in perpetual motion, her paws were fine.

We had a fun ride, full of quiet and snowy trails. Shyla even ignored a herd of about six deer that pronked away from us at the start of the ride. I almost fell off my bike in utter surprise at the fact that my teenage dog has reverted to her former good behavior!!! Believe me, she won a huge jackpot of treats for being so good.

Her look seems to say "I told you that I could do it!". I love this girl more every day!