Winter's Beauty

Since we returned from the desert, Shyla and I have been enjoying our snowbike rides immensely! We are usually out at sunrise, dodging moose and trying to get to a good point for photos. I think that my favorite part of winter here is the sunrises.

As the sun just barely touches us, its color is deep red, which is reflected in Shyla's fur.

Then, as the sun gets a tiny bit higher over the horizon, its brightness grows exponentially.

Because the sun rays are almost horizontal, the shadows are amazing. Here are me and my girl.

And here's Shyla sprinting in front of a golden boulder.

I mentioned my new approach to teaching Shyla to recall away from dead animals. We've been training next to whole elk carcasses and elk limbs recently (these are pieces of mountain lion meals that were left behind). On Day 1, I tried to stash an elk leg in a tree to make it accessible to me to pull down for daily training. Shyla leaped vertically and pulled it out of the tree. Her mouth is on the hoof in the photo. That shows you how determined she was to get to parts of dead animals.

In contrast, after a week of playing super fun games of fetch and doing lots of high reward recalls next to these dead animal parts, Shyla now sometimes refuses to leave me to go "check it out" (that's my cue that it's okay for her to go to the yucky thing). She thinks I'm more fun - and that is exactly my goal!!!!!!!! Her recall success rate off of the yucky things is very high now. I am extremely hopeful that this new approach will help us to navigate the forest without Shyla becoming obsessed with her latest dead find.

I'm going to end there. This is a late post because I've had a migraine all day. I've managed to greatly reduce my migraine frequency by making sure that I get a full 8 hours of sleep each night. But then I had a few very busy days, and I woke up with one this morning. Oh well.

Shyla expressed how I felt all today perfectly.

Tomorrow will be a new day.