A Desert Sojourn

We just returned from a sojourn in the Utah desert. It was mostly peaceful and relaxing. We managed to miss one of the big heavy spring snowstorms here in Colorado. That made me smile. The best spring snowstorms in Colorado are the ones when I'm away in the desert!

I'll keep this post brief but two wonderful things hit us while we were in the desert sunshine. One was that R was running a lot and very fast but he didn't limp once. We could never discern any hitch in his stride.

The vets told us that it took a year to get the full benefit of CUE surgery. Now I believe it. I'm so grateful that we did it, and we gave him these pain-free days of romping. Every day, week, month, and year of a dog's life is precious, and we feel as if we managed to get him more fun time in his life through CUE surgery.

The second great thing was that Shyla seemed to return toward normal, with the side effects of the phenobarb reaching a level that I'd call acceptable. I can still see a bit of a deficit in her spunk and endurance but it's small price to pay for controlling her seizures. She had no seizures on our trip despite a couple of stressful days and the general stress of traveling.

She also reached some peace with wearing boots - a miracle!

As for her recovery from being belted by the evil woman out on our trails, Shyla seems to have concluded that women on trails are scary. She won't approach any women on trails, even ones who she knows. If a woman appears, Shyla hides. In contrast, she will greet men, as long as they aren't paying attention to her - which is exactly how she dealt with all people on the trails before she was hit by that evil woman.

I hope that we never see that woman again. It turns out that Shyla isn't her only canine victim, and the neighborhood is tightening its borders to make sure that the evil woman doesn't trespass again to get into the little sanctuary behind our houses.

Now, I am excited to be able to visit my friends' blogs. We had no cell service for most of our trip so I've been away for too long!

Unique Desert Views

First, a quick update on the acute spine pain that I've been battling for quite a while now. I still have pain, although some of it has been replaced by pins and needles. That's actually a promising development, as my spine doctor says that pins and needles sometimes accompany nerve healing. It's hard to be patient but I'm trying because there's a chance my body is healing on its own. I'll find out about surgical options (or necessities) later this week. However, if the docs are comfortable with it, I hope to stick with conservative treatment for a bit longer, in hopes of avoiding yet another spine surgery.

Onto more upbeat topics... During our trip, I was awed, again and again, by the gorgeous silhouettes that the wind had carved from the sandstone that dominates the area. This was the view across the canyon from one of our campsites around sunset.

As dusk fell, this was the view up the canyon. I kept seeing "abstract art" as I looked at the sky colors and shapes around me.

Before we left that campsite, I did some mountain biking on my own. My attitude toward pain is that it's just pain and is nothing to be afraid of. As long as I don't make myself worse or put myself in danger by riding my bike and hiking, I'm going to do it. Based on my long experience with spinal pain (it started in my teen years), I know that I am far happier if I do things that I love despite it. It's an attitude that has worked for me - letting me be pretty happy despite chronic pain.

Anyway, I had fun riding along a rim that overlooked both desert and snowy mountains.

The juxtaposition of red rock desert and the high mountains always catches my fancy. Those are the mountains that we sometimes visit during late spring Utah trips when the desert gets too hot for us.

The "destination" of my ride was a butte with slickrock all around it. Its size is truly awe-inspiring. My bike looked tiny propped against its base. It's a popular destination for motorized off road travel in the spring but, aside from cawing ravens, it was completely deserted on this trip. Yipee!

After I played on the slickrock, I headed back toward camp, with another of those crazy views of the combination of sand, red rock, and snowy mountains.

When I got back to camp, it was time to pack up camp and move on. We headed for a place we call "K's Rock". It is far from civilization and quiet even on holidays. With Thanksgiving coming up fast, we moved there.

It's a place that our whole pack knows and loves.

Thus, it was the perfect place to celebrate Thanksgiving and our sweet chocolate girl's 4th birthday a few days later.

A Desert Moonrise and Sunset

While we were camped in the land of canyons, we did "sunset" hikes each day to walk up higher where the sun still shined after our campsite was in the shade.

On our last evening at that campsite, we got to see the almost-full moon rise to the east over the red rock desert from our sunset lookout point.

And we could see an incredible sunset to the west from the same spot. There has been a dearth of great sunsets at home for a while so that made me appreciate it even more! The colors started mostly orange.

And then a reddish hue started to creep in.

At the peak of the sunset, the Runner found a great spot for a canine silhouette.

And our canine bowed down in thanks for Nature's beauty.

We decided to return to camp via a canyon that gave us a western view so we could see the transition to night.

Indeed, an inky darkness gradually took over the sky.

After a cold day here, that desert sunset seems magical as I relive it in my mind.

Short Days in the Desert

On the first day of our trip, we drove most of the day and arrived in our campsite late at night. Before we went to sleep, I admired the wide open sky, the bright moonlight, and the stars. I quickly set up my tripod and camera, programmed the camera to take photos for the next several hours, and went to sleep.

For such a fast set-up, I was very happy with the outcome! This is a series of exposures spanning 3 hours. It's easy to see how people who lived a long time ago didn't know whether the universe was spinning around the Earth or vice versa.

We woke up the next morning to see that we had the area to ourselves. We were beyond thrilled. We've been visiting this spot for many years but it's been "discovered" recently. It seems like the cold short days of autumn are the quietest ones there!

It was about 17°F when we woke up so we stayed snuggled in the sleeping bags for a long time until the sun warmed our campsite a little. This was our view as the sun rose.

When we finally got moving, it was time to break out the dog boots. That is not Shyla's favorite part of the desert. I might try, yet again, to find a kind that she likes better.

When she got moving, she tended to forget about her boots and have fun!

We knew that the area had received a decent amount of rain over the year. Yet, I was still very surprised to find desert "pot holes" filled with water deeply enough that Shyla could swim in them! Actually, if I'd been on my toes, I would've stopped her. These pot holes have delicate organisms in them that lie dormant for long periods of time waiting for water so that they can live. It's bad to mess with the pot hole water because it hurts those organisms - and, thus, I usually keep Shyla out of it.

This time, before I was aware of what was happening, Shyla actually broke a thin layer of ice to go for a swim in a pot hole. It was her one and only swim during our trip. I was on my toes after that!

She shook and then ran to me, her "desert swimming" fun over.

As we descended toward camp, I looked up behind us. The butte where we'd been playing had cool wavy clouds above it.

Alas, we didn't plan that first day very well. It was almost time for sunset by the time we'd biked and then had lunch. There were still stars to be watched...

...but we learned to make better use of the short daylight hours for the rest of the trip.

A Slickrock World

Desert slickrock can hurt a dog's paw pads very fast. So, we have boots for our dogs to wear when they run on slickrock.

The hard part is Shyla simply doesn't like boots. She moves in a funny way when she wears them. The next photo is of Shyla running in her boots. Obviously, her gait is not at all normal when she wears them!

On this trip, her dislike of the boots seemed to grow more intense by the day. This was still on the first day of boots, and she already looked forlorn in the middle of one of our rides.

My vet has suggested another type of boot that Shyla might like better. On slickrock, a dog's boots need to be very tough. On our first trip there, we used simple nylon boots, and they were shredded by the slickrock within a day.

So, during this section of our trip, I kept Shyla's runs pretty short, and then I headed out to ride on my own, while she relaxed in camp with the boys.

I love visiting buttes that have large slickrock aprons around them. My bike size puts the butte's size in perspective!

I particularly love how quiet these places are in November. I had the entire slickrock playground to myself. Do you see the snowy peaks way off in the distance? I love the contrast with the red rock.

In between slickrock areas, I rode on sandy 4wd roads like this one. As I tried to pedal through the deep sand, I wished for my snowbike because its wide tires would be ideal in sand.

After my ride and some relaxation time, we'd go for a walk as a pack around sunset. At this campsite, there is rock art all around us so we'd visit it each afternoon.

Entire sections of wall are covered in it. It's incredible having relics of human history surrounding us. But, it's sad to see that modern humans feel the need to deface some of these walls. A few more sets of initials appear each year in the midst of the petroglyphs.

As we finished our walks, the moon would look beautiful among the red rocks.

The intricate shapes of the rocky buttes were mystical at dusk, particularly with the moon over them.

After our evening walk, we'd quickly jump in the van to warm up. Then, I'd get out my tripod and start shooting the stars. It was an incredible trip with clear skies every night except for one. I'll save more star photos for a future post but, be forewarned, I have lots of them after such great weather and long nights in the desert!

Not as planned...

Today didn't go as planned but that's okay because our "veterinary situation" turned out to be minor.

Late yesterday afternoon, Shyla started squinting with her left eye. Shyla was also doing this odd one-eyed rapid blinking. If I didn't know better, I would've thought that she was winking at me. Of course, she waited to show these symptoms until after our regular vet had closed for the day.

I did the usual home-first-aid. I examined her eye for foreign bodies and saw none. Then, I irrigated her eye profusely with eye wash. That didn't help. So, then I moved onto putting a drop of an eye antibiotic into her eye. When we woke up this morning, her eye didn't look much better. You can see it in this photo.

That's in contrast to her right eye which looked clear and as beautiful as ever.

I put in another antibiotic drop early this morning. (I was confident in the steps that I took because I had a dog, years ago, who had really serious chronic eye problems - so I know the ophthalmology "drill").

I called the vet at opening time. As I expected, we needed to go have Shyla's eye examined to make sure that there wasn't an injury to the cornea. That wasn't how I was planning to spend my afternoon but eyes are important. At least there was good news - it appears to be simply a tough infection that will take a couple of days to respond to antibiotics.

I've devoted this week to being my "anti-migraine" week, and a long drive to the vet wasn't part of the plan. I'm trying to do everything in my power to slow down the train of these awful migraines that I've been having. So, I'm not going to try to write the post that I had planned for today because my head has a hint of that "pre-migraine buzz" that I know so well.

Instead, I'll share a few star photos from our desert trip. This is one of those intricately carved buttes that make the red rock desert so beautiful. The moon had already set so the sky was dark, showing off billions and billions of stars.

Even though I had to point my camera to the south (so the North Star was behind me), I decided to experiment with star trails over the butte. I did a long series of photos. This one was after 33 minutes of camera exposures. It looks mystical to me.

And this one was after 2.5 hours of the world spinning under the stars.

Even though these photos are not the "classic" star trail photos with concentric circles around the North Star, I was pleasantly surprised by pattern that emerged with the beautiful red rock of the butte glowing in the foreground.

Several of you have mentioned wanting to try star photography. When I first started, I simply experimented with almost no guidance - and I didn't learn very fast. Then, I bought a book about Night Sky Photography that has helped me immensely. I highly recommend it (and no one is paying me to do so!). I still refer to it regularly.

Tomorrow, if my head is okay, I hope to be able to tell you about an amazing sunset hike we took in the desert.

Our Days in the Desert

One of the things that I was excited to do in the desert was to ride a regular mountain bike, not my monster snow bike, which will be my main steed for the winter.

We never got an early start on any of our rides. It was quite cold at night, falling into the teens at least once. So, we'd laze around in our sleeping bags until the sun warmed the world a little bit. We brought sleeping bags especially for the dogs but they always ended up in ours instead! This was the first time that Shyla was totally comfortable with snuggling all night long with the pack. Previously, she'd retreat to a more solitary sleeping spot after everyone was asleep.

After our slow morning start, Shyla and I went for a mountain bike ride while the boys went for a trail run. Shyla was incredibly well behaved - an amazing mountain biking companion. She just turned three, and I think she's perfect! But, then again, I'm biased!

You perhaps can see the leash on her in the photo above. We rode in an area with BIG cliffs (like 2500' high) so I leashed her whenever we were close to them.

The view from the cliffs was breath-taking. We stayed back from the edge.

Later in the trip, we took a sunset hike down in the desert sculptures below the cliff in the photos. I'll share some photos of that landscape in a future post.

We both kept all feet on the ground the whole time!

After our daily ride, it seemed like sunset snuck up on us almost right away! The days are so short now. The next photo is what we call "K's Rock", glowing in the light of the setting sun. We discovered a hidden campsite below it on K's last trip to the desert.

The rock got warm in the sunshine, and we all reveled in it for the brief afternoons. I love seeing Shyla enjoy the desert like I do.

All of us relaxed and even snoozed at the base of K's Rock at one time or another.

And then, before we were ready for it, the sun would sink to the western horizon, and I'd snap some warm sunset photos of our chocolate girl.

As soon as the sun set, the air would become truly cold, and we'd retreat to the LabMobile. I'd set up my tripod just outside it, and I'd quickly go out to capture photos as night fell. I loved being able to see a few stars twinkling in the sky still painted bright colors by the sunset.

As much as I love the mountains, I love the red rock desert too. It is such an alien landscape that reminds me, time after time, that I am a tiny speck in the history of the world.