Live with the joy of a dog

Do you ever wish that you could freeze time? I often feel that way in the autumn, as the very last wildflowers bloom in the midst of changing leaves.

As the leaves change color and hang golden in the cerulean sky, I want to freeze them in place so that they don't fall to the ground.

As we have our last warm days of swimming and playing in the mountains for this year, I wish that I had the power to stop time like the camera shutter did, showing us the individual drops of water flying through the air in the photo below.

Alas, we can only be certain that we have today, and I'd like to seize it with the enthusiasm and joyfulness of our dogs.

Dogs don't worry about the fact that they're getting a few gray furs on their faces. They're happy in the moment, not worrying about how short days, seasons, and lives are.

And, dogs don't stop for a melancholy moment watching brilliant aspen leaves wash away in a trickling stream.

Rather, dogs leap in the stream and have fun today! I need to learn how to live like a dog.

Wordless Wednesday

In the dark of night...

And, in the brightness of an autumn day...

Splendid colors

Our world has suddenly changed colors. Now yellows dominate...

And, K's fur and eyes look different with the golden hue around her.

Some deep red hues also have popped out. Wild rose bushes have blood red leaves and candy red rose hips, and they covered the ground in areas like where K stood in the photo below. When K stands in the reddish landscape, her fur takes a rusty hue.

Both K and R think that rose hips are a delicacy. K nibbled on one as I took photos.

As I took the photos of K in the rose bushes, the sun was setting behind me in a kaleidoscope of reds, purples, and oranges, making the rose bushes look even deeper red.

Just as the world fell into darkness, a fiery orange danced above the Continental Divide.

This time of year is like Nature's last hurrah before going to sleep for the winter.

Autumn colors and elk mating season

K and I started our day with a short walk in our dazzling forest. Despite her cast, she's still feisty. She stood tall and growled to protect us both from something that I couldn't perceive. Even with a cast on her leg, she's ready to take on the world!

She has a new collar, a gift from me, to lift both of our spirits, but mostly mine since K can't see her own collar! We've also started working on a new trick where she holds up her cast for me when I need to put her hiking cover on it. She's learning this new trick super fast!

After her alarm passed, K looked back toward me with a querulous look on her face. "Do you really mean that we're only walking a few hundred yards?", she seemed to ask. She seems to be in much less pain, and has even tried to gallop and jump while on leash. This may be a very long 8 weeks.

We gazed together at the moon, still shining in the azure sky, among the yellow aspen. Can you wish upon a moon? I hope so, because I wished fervently for K's paw to be healing well under her cast.

A little later, I snagged a brief time with R for a very short bike ride. His primary calling is that he runs with the Runner. So, it's a special treat when he can lead me up to Hug Hill.

When we arrived on the peak, he reveled in the sunshine, solitude and scents.

On our way home, we practiced recalls. Would you trust this 60 lb freight train to stop before bowling you over?

He did, barely!

I took R home, after our short sojourn in the woods and continued pedaling on my own through a golden world with the moon still peeking at me.

Although the golden beauty surrounded me everywhere, I missed my K the most on this trail. We've enjoyed this trail together in every season - I wished that she were with me today.

Yesterday afternoon, we made our annual pilgrimage to Rocky Mountain National Park to watch the amazing display of the elk rut. It was ironic that yesterday morning, one of my wildlife cameras captured footage of an elk bull within a half mile of our house. For some reason, he wasn't in the high mountain meadows vying for a harem of cow elk. His antlers suggest that he'd be competitive in the mating competition, especially in a hunted population like ours, where bulls with big antlers rarely live long. I wonder why he's still down here, far away from those sexy cow elk?



At Rocky Mountain National Park, a bull elk had lost the battle for his own harem and meandered by himself. He grazed near a stream, waiting for darkness before he tried to enter the main arena of the nearby meadow where the dominance battles were underway among the gargantuan bulls. Sorry for the blurriness - I'm really starting to wish for a digital SLR camera with a telephoto lens!

For the majority of the evening, the dominant bulls fought for supremacy too far away for me to photograph them. We sat in a secluded site next to a vast meadow and watched the action through a spotting scope. The most macho of the bull elk in the meadow had corralled about 30 cows and calves. He homed in on any mature bulls who dared approach his ladies, chasing them away with his chin tipped toward the sky and his massive rack of antlers laid back along his neck. He had 6 points on each antler - that's a big rack! You can see his harem, tiny dots in the grass, spread out in the meadow below the sunlit rocky peaks.

Nearby, an older bull, perhaps a year or two past his prime, sneaked around the periphery of the macho dude's harem, carefully checking the hindquarters of each cow to see if they were ready for breeding. The dominant bull burned many calories warding off this crafty elder bull elk. The official biological name for a crafty bull elk cruising the periphery of a harem for breeding opportunities is "sneaky fucker". I'm not kidding.

Throughout this drama, the mature males bugled endlessly, emitting amazing high pitched scream-like calls. Here is someone else's Youtube of a bugling elk. The short video is worth watching if you've never heard an elk bugle.

We stayed after darkness fell, listening to the bugles emanating from all corners of the meadow, an ethereal experience.

Gorgeous ride

We awakened to smoke in the air, bring that edge of worry back. However, I couldn't see a fire anyplace nor could I find any news of a growing fire.
Colorado's Smoky Mountains...
K and I mountain biked this morning. She's growing happier each day despite the muzzle. I give her occasional muzzle breaks during each ride, like this one for a recall. From out of the darkness...
... and into the light.
We rode through aspen groves where every light ray glowed yellow and green in the sun's illumination.
And, my K posed for me with mountains and yellow leaves behind her.
A hillside of aspen trees had grown noticeably more yellow overnight.
In the midst of autumn colors, flowers still bloomed. A ubiquitous yellow flower...
And lupines...
It was a glorious ride because our world is beautiful beyond words.

When I returned, R made me giggle, yet again. He wriggled on his back while loudly snorting.
Then, he noticed he camera and gave it the eye and a snarly smile!
Tomorrow, R will be having an abdominal ultrasound. Do you think that he'll lie still on his back without sedation? Methinks not. He's having this ultrasound to start figuring out why he has a serious drinking problem. He's slurped tremendous quantities of water for his whole adult life but his drinking has recently skyrocketed to new heights. His initial tests showed that his urine was so dilute that we needed to start investigating the cause of his wildly obsessive drinking. The ultrasound is one step.

The best outcome would be that there's nothing physiologically wrong with R. Rather, he might have "psychogenic polydipsia". In other words, he's obsessed with drinking water. We already know that he's a crazy Lab so that particular diagnosis wouldn't be a huge surprise!

I hope that you all are having a peaceful day.

The timeless forest prepares for winter

This morning, the specter of winter loomed on the horizon in the form of an inexorably advancing wall of clouds. A chinook wind whipped off the peaks, blowing the new season toward us. Forecasters say that freezing temperatures and perhaps even snow will pummel us in the coming days. I haven't seen a hummingbird in a few days - just in time, from the viewpoint of our tiny flying jewels.Meanwhile, a few miles from the Divide, the warm sun baked K and me, more than compensating for the wind, while we stopped on a granite hill during our mountain bike ride. I wore a sleeveless jersey and wondered if it would be the last time this year. After K took a brief ramble off our peak, I called her and a side wind blew one ear skyward as she galloped to me.The force of the wind ripped yellow aspen leaves from their moorings today. The photo below shows the blurred aspen leaves on the trail as K ran along side me.
When we passed through sheltered sections of forest, the scene remained warm and autumnal.
K acted frisky during our short ride but I continue to worry about her. She's drinking and urinating more than usual - and of course it's a weekend so my regular vet office is closed. I'm a champion worrier - but I wonder if I'm seeing hints of collateral damage from her pancreatitis. I'll be talking with my vet soon.

After our joint ride, I left K at home and headed out on a favorite loop. After yesterday's exploratory adventure that involved lots of bike pushing and even carrying, I (and my aching spine) wanted to spin the pedals for my whole ride. So, I chose a route on smooth established trails replete with mountain and aspen views.

Near the start of my ride, I tunneled through gold aspens and remembered that blooming columbines and ninebark flowers leaned over the trail in this grove just two months ago. Now, the changing leaves of those plants lend the ground a rust hue. The transformation over such a short time boggles my mind.
I rode along a ledgy trail and had trouble focusing on the frequent rocky obstacles because the view over the Divide mesmerized me.I emerged onto a plateau with expansive brilliant aspen groves. Imagine, all of those trees are part of one organism, the grove, joined by underground roots. Many groves have lived thousands of years. Every year, without fail, their leaves morph to yellow and then flutter to the ground in preparation for winter. Losing their leaves too early stunts their growth by shutting down leaf photosynthesis. But, losing them too late can be catastrophic if an early heavy snow hits. It's a delicate balance. As a side note, a cool thing about aspens is that they have chlorophyll in their bark so they can photosynthesize energy in fall and spring when the sun shines strongly but their branches are bereft of leaves.
When I travel through vast aspen groves that might be a thousand or more years old, the forest feels timeless to me. I'm a temporary speck in the aspen grove's world view - and the grove keeps marching through its seasonal cycle while paying no heed to who walks among its trees. I'm astonished by the thought that grizzly bears wandered here, probably even in this exact grove, before humans extirpated them in the early 1900s. Wolves also lived here and likely hunted in the hallowed ground under the grove - before they, too, were hunted down and eliminated. How the world has changed - but the aspen grove remains.
I wonder if the Divide will be snow-covered in the next couple of days. A distant peak has maintained its snowy cloak all week. Winter is coming. I'm sure that we'll have a few sporadic summery days but they'll be the exception rather than the rule.
A yearly question is worrying me once again - should I see if my basil can survive the cold (in a tent) or harvest it all? It's the conglomeration of all the little decisions, like the basil one, that make up the fabric of daily life.