The Desert Trip - Like Visiting Mars

Back to our desert trip - After a few days at K's Rock, we moved onto another beloved campsite. We found this site more than a decade ago but it's become popular since then. We always try to choose very "unpopular" dates and days of the week to visit it now. We did that perfectly this time!

This was the view from our campsite. As you can see, we ran into some storms during our first couple of days there.

Any running in this area requires boots for dogs due to slickrock and cacti. It was a little sad to see only one set drying on the boulder because R wasn't running.

As you can see, Shyla was running pretty happily in this set of Ultrapaw boots (a gift from Lily and Edward - Thank you!).

However, somehow, she shed her hind boots when I wasn't looking. I searched and searched and searched - and I found one of the two lost ones.

Despite the never-ending boot struggle, Shyla and I had fun on our mountain bike rides. It's like riding a bike on Mars because the terrain is so alien. (This photo was pre-boot-loss).

Of course, R was recuperating from surgery so he stayed around camp all the time. He seemed to soak up the sun like a lizard as he relaxed.

We enjoyed looking at the petroglyphs near our campsite. It is upsetting, however, to see the vandalism grow by the year. The "Joh..." in the right is obviously not ancient.

The sunsets at this site are sublime. I discovered the amazing sunset light here first with Angel K. The tradition of sunset photos of my chocolate lab has continued with sweet Shyla. There's something about chocolate fur, red-orange rocks, and sweet eyes that melts my heart.

The sunlight turned a deeper red as sunset approached.

No doubt, we'll be visiting this site again in the fall. We have some "sneaky" plans to try to visit when it should be deserted, like it was on this last trip.

When we moved to Colorado many years ago, I had no idea that we'd fall in love with the desert. But we have. Desert time is a highlight of every year!