Cats and Dogs

All summer long, a bobcat has been walking past a trail camera next to our house that has a super bright flash.

The flash doesn't seem to bother her... she has visited very regularly for months, leaving territorial scrapes and scat in strategic spots near our house.

I was surprised by her behavior. Usually, bobcats start avoiding trail cameras that flash brightly after a few passes. I've shown you only 2 photos but the camera captured many many more.

Well, I discovered one reason why she might have been staying in a small territory over the past couple of months. There's a bobcat in the foreground of the next photo, and there's another one in the background. I think the bobcat in the foreground is a kitten!!!!!!!!!!!

Yipee! I love getting glimpses of our wildlife's secret world like this. The funniest part is that the dogs and I were probably on the deck a very small distance from these two sneaky cats!

Although we have bobcats around our house regularly, I've never captured photos of a mountain lion near our house. They seem to give the road and the houses a wide berth. I have trail cameras that are around a half mile from our house, deeper in the forest, that see mountain lions regularly.

Just recently, I captured photos of a lion heading through our neck of the woods.

His attention was caught by the scents at the base of a bear marking tree that he was passing, and he turned suddenly.

Then, he lay down to sniff the scents more closely. Almost every animal who passes a bear marking tree slows down to sniff the ground below it.

I loved how his tail remained taut while he laid still to sniff.

Some animals, including some mountain lions, will even roll around to leave their own scent under these trees. This guy didn't - he hurried on his way.

It is the season when I find that my trail cameras get far less wildlife traffic going past them than the rest of the year. I suspect that some of the animals take advantage of the huge elevation differences over short distances in our area. So, at this time of year, they can walk 5 miles and drop by 3,000' in elevation - which makes a huge difference in the weather. It's much more summer-like down lower than here.

The leaves haven't even started to change yet at lower elevations. At our elevation, almost all the leaves have turned color.

Here, autumn is in full swing, and winter is not far behind. So, my Shyla and I are making the most of these colorful days!

Silhouette Sunday

I love Rocky Mountain sunsets!

Autumn's Glory

Last weekend, we were high above treeline with golden aspens below us.

We gazed out at them on the mountains below us.

Now, autumn has come to our neck of the woods. Our bike rides and hikes are through tunnels of golden leaves.

I love the nuances in color among different aspens. The ones behind Shyla in the next photo were very orange.

And, a few select aspen trees have reddish leaves. These are my favorites because they are like red jewels in a sea of gold.

We've had the most glorious week of autumn here. The weather has been warm but not hot. The sun has shined continuously. And, Shyla and I have had a blast romping and rolling through the fall aspens!

I am fervently hoping that we are gifted with more glorious days like these before winter arrives!

P.S. I am working on getting my photos taken down from the sites that have been stealing them. I promise to tell you about the process after I have some results since some of you have faced the same problem. Thanks for your advice and support!

Happy Friday

I hope that you have as much fun this weekend as the Labraduo had playing at DogLeap Lake yesterday!

Be sure to shake off any lake water, just like R did!

Happy Friday.

Thank you

Today is the day that we go visit the lake where we used to celebrate K's birthday every year. We've kept that tradition since her death, and now it's a day of remembering K while loving our current Duo.

In my rush to try to "lock down" my photos yesterday, I briefly made every photo in my blog disappear. I completely panicked, which made it incredibly clear how much this blog means to me. Many of my memories of K are tied to the photos and stories about her posted here.

After I fixed the problem and reinstated the photos, I went back to read the the post just after K's death where I received many heartfelt messages from you. The steadfast support of many of you over the years makes this blog even more special to me.

For today, I'm posting just two photos - one of Shyla, the girl who has helped heal my heart.

And a photo of the stars, viewed by my camera over many hours from our campsite last weekend. When I gaze out into the sky, I feel like K is with me. Her spirit is all around me, wrapped up in the beauty of Mother Earth.

Thanks to all of you for your support over these past five years in Blogville!

Wordy Wednesday

This is a photo of Shyla that I took during a special moment high in the Rockies. I love sharing these photos with you because I feel that you understand that my photos are more than "pretty pictures" to me.

I look at a photo like the one above and I remember all the things that led me to take the photo - the warm sun, the mountain breeze, and my love for my dog. And, the "See Beautiful" tag on her collar - a phrase that summed up our weekend in the alpine world.

Last night, I was using my iPad, and I needed to take a quick look at this blog. I don't have it bookmarked so I did a quick Google search to find it. What came up first? Nope - not my blog.

The top hits were websites offering my photos for download as "wallpaper". Here's an example link.

I don't know if everyone feels the same way that I do about their photos. For me, it's the first artistic endeavor that I've felt allows me to express my emotions without words. The photo of sweet Shyla glowing on top of the mountain at sunset expresses my feelings about her, about the mountains, and about the peace that nature can bring us.

That's why it hurts me so deeply when I find my photos being tossed around like pretty little pictures, with no stories behind them.

It appears that some of the websites somehow automatically steal any photo that I post on this blog. Then the photo appears on their website for download. I need to figure out how stop that systematic theft - it's unconscionable. There's probably a software solution but it looks complicated.

I'll keep working on a solution. And I'll keep trying to take photos that reflect my inner feelings. I can't help it - it seems to be written in my genes. And, those genes were given to me by my mother so I can't turn them off.

Yes, my mother is a big part of my love of photography for she loved it herself. The greatest compliment ever given to me was from my mother's brother. As we celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary, he said "Your mother isn't gone. She's sitting right across from me.". In fact, *I* was sitting across from him. Tears filled my eyes.

A love of photography is one of many gifts my mother gave me, and I won't reject it.

Alpine Autumn

It is truly becoming autumn here. Our time in the alpine zone last weekend might be the last camping up there for this year.

During one of my mountain bike rides over the weekend, I was high above our campsite, and I spotted the white LabMobile far below me. Do you see it?

I love the LabMobile. It's made it possible for me to camp all over the west despite the fact that my fragile spine can't handle sleeping in a tent. We thought about bringing our mobile camp up even higher - we might do that next time!

I enjoyed glorious bike rides with Shyla. We were above treeline so we weren't inside the golden aspen groves but, rather, we looked down on them.

Shyla seemed to energized by the boulders and the wide open spaces. She ran like the wind.

Some hunting seasons are underway - mostly birds and large game archery - so we weren't bedecked in all of our orange garb yet (we save that stuff for the large game rifle seasons). However, I have to admit that I am not comfortable with our dogs being anywhere near people toting what look like big guns to me. I've written in the past about our first dog who was murdered by a crazy man with a gun. The man was prosecuted and paid a price (but no price could match taking a life, in my opinion).

However, the legal system's punishment didn't heal my psyche, which still fears for the lives of my precious furry friends around guns - even when the people carrying them seem very responsible. I can't help it even though our horrific loss occurred a long time ago.

So, I kept Shyla quite close to me, curtailing her high speed running a little bit. Even on a bike, I'm slower than Shyla at full speed so she has to rein in her enthusiasm to stay next to me.

Although autumn was taking over the aspen groves, a few summer flowers hung on. "Old Man of the Mountain" flowers still bloomed.

And, in the shelter of the remnants of a mining cabin, fireweed glowed gloriously. It even had buds that hadn't opened yet!

However, there is no doubt that this alpine area will get its first big snowfall before too long. I was grateful to be there to enjoy it once more, before it becomes a high mountain winter wonderland.

Winter or Autumn?

It seemed surreal even though I always say that it snows in every month except July and August. Last Friday morning, the temperature was 24° and fresh snow coated the world.

Shyla stared at the world with a look of surprise.

She looked even more surprised as she ran through the freezing world.

To top it off, I was coming down with a cold so I wasn't particularly happy on our morning mountain bike ride. Shyla seemed to inform me that we needed to do something about this - like go to the Bahamas.

Instead, we opted to drive over the Continental Divide to the western slope, where weather reports said that it was sunny and gorgeous - typical Colorado fall weather. They were right.

We went up very high, well above 11,000', driving through golden aspen groves as we climbed in our LabMobile. From our campsite, we looked down upon the gorgeous world, replete with deep blue lakes, pine trees, and golden aspens.

After spending the morning in the winter world near our home, we were all happy to be in the autumn world of the western slope!

The sun was intensely warm at high altitude although the temperature plummeted at night. We curled up in our sleeping bags with the "Labraduo" heating system keeping us cozy.

We had a great weekend - more about that in coming days.

Black Lab Sunday

The Prime of Life

Shyla has reached that magical age when she is so agile and fast that it awes me. When we were high in the mountains this summer, she'd often choose the toughest routes to get from one place to another. Who else but a 2-year-old dog would choose to go over (instead of around) these boulders?

And she makes it look easy as she hops from one to the next.

Around the house, when Shyla is in a hurry to get someplace, she goes over the furniture in a similar way. It makes us all laugh!

She's also been making huge strides with her confidence. Just recently, she had a great day in town with me, doing some shopping in dog-friendly stores that would have been too nerve-wracking for her just a short time ago. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that one observant gentleman quietly said "she's a tiny bit nervous for a Lab, isn't she?" He was right.) However, in almost every way, her burgeoning confidence is wonderful.

The only downside to her confidence is that she sometimes chooses to ignore my verbal commands when we're in her comfort zones - at home and out in nature. My trainer warned me that we might reach a phase like this, if Shyla became more comfortable with the world.

I think that Shyla used to obey me partly because she was afraid of the rest of the world. Now, that she feels invincible, I need to work on other sources of motivation.

I've never gone through this type of "teenage" behavior with a dog who is Shyla's age (the "teenage rebellion" is usually just before their first birthday). Usually, my dogs are pretty grown up and stable by her age. Have any of you experienced this with a mature underconfident dog?

I am forcing myself to go back to basics. We are practicing recalls and off-leash heeling intensively. I remind myself that Shyla's world view has changed dramatically - so I need to "re-teach" the basics so that she's motivated to do them within her new, more confident, world view.

In the meantime, I always remember that we are in Shyla's prime of life. I've been through the full lifetimes of enough dogs to know that I want to savor these days.

I'm also trying to be grateful that we've even reached this point - where Shyla is almost "too confident" in her comfort zones!

See Beautiful: The Sky

Since I started loving photography, I notice the beauty of the sky much more than before. This summer, when we camped high in the mountains, the Milky Way was omnipresent, rotating around our campsites throughout the night. It is a gift to get to see it, so far away from city lights.

On one particularly dark night, after the moon had set, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning. I quietly sneaked outside to look at the stars. It was inky dark and completely quiet. Above me, the Milky Way seemed to glow above a bank of clouds that clung to nearby mountains.

When we're camping, I have my camera on a tripod almost all night when the weather is good. So, it was easy for me to take a photo of the ethereal sight. 

In daylight, it's hard to believe that it's the same sky, since we can't see the stars. However, the clouds and sun are as dazzling as the nighttime stars.

The photo above is from a recent evening hike. As dusk fell, sweet Shyla stood guard, watching over our meadow.

I make a point of getting outside and "Seeing Beautiful" every single day. Some days, like the two that I just told you about, the sky is what catches my fancy. It is, indeed, beautiful!

Golden Moments

This morning's ride was a microcosm of life.

It started out so cold and wet that my toes froze almost immediately. I tried to cheer up the ambiance with a bright bandana around Shyla's neck. In my opinion, it didn't work. But it is rewarding to see Shyla standing so confidently while propped on K's favorite stump.

For those who remember the early days of this blog, that bandana belonged to S, our beloved yellow Lab. So, in some ways, two of our departed Labs are in this photo with Shyla.

After visiting Hug Hill this morning, we had a long and shady ride to some sprawling aspen groves. At first, I was so cold that I was ready to give up and go home. Then, I noticed some fleeting glimmers of sunshine filtering through the forest. And, I noticed that Shyla was being exceptionally well-behaved. Life started to seem happier.

As we reached those faraway aspen groves, I saw a small area of glowing golden leaves in the grove. Then, the sun somehow burned through the thick layer of clouds for a brief visit.

I called Shyla to me so I could take some photos of her golden eyes in the golden grove. She had a puppy-like crazed look as she accelerated toward me.

The sun didn't stick around for long but we basked in every moment of its somewhat veiled visit.

After the clouds had enveloped our world again, we rode back toward home. As we passed through a meadow filled with drying golden grass, I noticed this beauty tucked down in the "understory" of the grass. I hope that it survives the snow that we may get tonight.

As we approached home, the world became darker and wetter again. Rain droplets on leaves have an unparalleled beauty that almost makes up for how cold it is to ride a mountain bike in 40°F with soaking rain.

I've been trying to remember those brief golden moments in the warm sun with Shyla to keep my spirits high for the rest of this day.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Rain

Before last September's devastating floods, I believed that there was no such thing as "too much rain" in our neck of the woods. I was wrong. On these days near the anniversary, it's been raining almost daily, again.