We went walking on the Blue Ridge Parkway, where our section is typically closed throughout the winter. Normally, we have it all to ourselves, but fresh powder brings out lots of others. Here is who we shared the trail with.
Wooo - Who is that coming down the road?
One of the half dozen cross country skiers we met.
And this guy was loving running with his skier
And kept a good pace the whole time.
Kiska got a high vantage point to watch everyone pass
And all of these people were sledding down a hill
Qannik was wondering who was making all of the racket behind him
Some Pup was doing her "I wanna" song and would not be quiet
For those of you who do not know the “I wanna” song, Cheoah can be quite vocal when she wants something, which is pretty much all of the time. The trick is figuring out what she wants at that given moment so you can get a few minutes of quiet. I wanna drink of water. I wanna eat something. I wanna go to the bathroom. I wanna go for a walk. I wanna have my belly scratched. I wanna out of my crate. I wanna in my crate. And so on. Experience tells us that she gets louder and louder until you give in. And then you have a little quiet until she thinks of something else she wants.
In this case, she was bored watching the sledders and wanted to keep walking. After a few minutes of crescendo, we caved and kept walking. She has the humans well trained with embarrassment as her motivating tool. Sigh.
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Pups – need your help. Another of us is sick and needs pawsitive thoughts. Please cross your paws and send the best of vibes to Sitka who is being treated at the University of Georgia for a pneumothorax – which basically means a hole in her lungs. As of this posting, she was responding to treatments, but next steps are still being determined. Join The Herd in praying for a full and quick recovery. Power of the Paw!
Woo – we are so happy. It is officially the weekend. Ok, ok, the hu-dad has to get some work done today and all of that stuff, but we are ready to go do some of this:
Hiking!
Anyone notice what is really unusual about this photograph? Yep – we are all 6 in it – with no Photoshop special effects. We screwed up and allowed our human to capture a rare picture of everyone. We will try hard not to let it happen again.
By the way, we were very literary in our Wednesday post. We thought for sure that Dave of the A04 would pick up on it.
You looking for me?
Just walking through the kitchen.
Innocent Ruby.
Yes – Haik-woo! Dave is the master of Haik-woo and has some of the best ones we have ever seen, but we tried our paw at it as well. Guess we were a little too subtle with that one. We should know better. We Sibes are not exactly known for subtle.
And exactly how did the dogs get muddy like this? What could they possibly have been doing?
Really shows on the white fur
Qannik - Proud of my mud!
Kodiak - Relaxing after his mud bath
The answer is simple – we went for a walk. Yep, that’s it. A walk. The proof is in this video here –
P.S. – Yes, this would have worked for Walking Wednesday. In fact, it was supposed to be Walking Wednesday. But YouTube fought us and won on Tuesday night, but we got it to load Wednesday finally. So, let’s call this Trotting Thursday.
No, the mystery is not why is our hu-dad so far behind on checking on blogs. That is clear – he has a lot of busy-ness to attend to this week. He promises to get caught up really, really soon.
But the mystery we are working on may require us to bring in an expert. Maybe even Dennis the Vizsla dog, because you know he never gives up until he solves a mystery – no matter how utterly strange. And this one was strange.
We were walking on the Blue Ridge Parkway after a fresh snow. In our area, they just close the parkway for most of the winter because they lack the budget for snow removal. Fine by us, because it makes for a great walking area. So as we were going up the road, no one else had been by that morning. We saw a few deer tracks, and birds, etc., but no other human or canine tracks marred our path. It was really beautiful:
But after we got to the top, we turned around and started back down the road. You know what had happened? There were tracks everywhere. Lots and lots of tracks:
We do not profess to be the expert that our pal KB is. She can look at tracks and tell you all sorts of things. We really encourage you to follow her blogs because we learn something new about nature everyday.
But we still studied these tracks and made some conclusions. Two humans and six dogs had come this way earlier. Wow, bet you are impressed with that conclusion. Now if we could only figure out who they were.
Natasha is carrying away some top secret evidence to be examined later.
Boy, has the weather changed. Our temperatures this past weekend were into the 70’s F (20’s C) in the valleys (a few degrees cooler on the ridges). Despite freezing temperatures at night, the warm days are making Cataloochee Ski Resort miss a crucial element – SNOW!
In fact, they were using the beautiful, sunny Saturday to do training for their staff, including their first aid training. Nothing like watching ski patrol training on grass.
Even our tree was looking forlorn without its leaves, but without the snow we saw surrounding it the last time we posted pictures of it. Can you tell we really love this tree?
Even the view down our valley from the ranch looks different than the last time we showed it to you. The leaves are all gone, but the clear skies allowed for a crisp view of the mountains.
As we did last time, you can zoom in on our house in the middle of that picture. Without the leaves, you can really see the house much clearer:
Ok, so we are without snow. But with a gorgeous weekend, we went out hiking all weekend anyway. We just had to find different “drifts” to walk through. Makes for quite the crunchy noise. Since we can’t show you noise with a picture, we thought we would end with a short video of “Leaf Crunching – Herd Style.”
We took another part of the Mountain-to-Sea Trail up to Rattlesnake Lodge, an old home built in 1903-4 that burned from a lightning strike in 1926. The highlighted link for the lodge will take you to the history of the house and family, as well as dozens of pictures from the era. Hope you enjoy our hike.
Friday afternoon and evening, we received almost an inch of rain. Saturday morning, we had clear blue skies, but some pretty strong winds. You can see that most of the colors are gone at the higher elevations, though still plenty of color at 2000′ to 3000′. This picture is taken from almost 6000′ and is looking down into Maggie Valley to the left.
The bad part to all of the rain the night before – the trails were pretty wet. Ok, the trails essentially had a creek running down the middle of them. Never slows The Herd down, though they can all get very muddy. We love the mud on Qannik’s white legs.
And where we were not treading through water, lots and lots of leaves. The strong winds and the nighttime rain (not to mention, last week’s snow) has knocked a lot of the leaves off the trees. Makes finding the trail a little challenging in places.
No matter – we always take a nice sunny day this time of year. Makes the hiking far more pleasant.
@norwoodsworld And what trouble did you cause?March 19, 2010 - 4:01 PM
Waiting for the Weekend - http://networkedblogs.com/1nhmPMarch 19, 2010 - 3:30 PM
Feeling old - 80's is classic? RT @MichaelYokota Today's want: classic 80's Vuarnet tshirt. http://tinyurl.com/ydlpglaMarch 19, 2010 - 2:12 PM
Crisis! Hu-dad served the last of our Eagle Pack for our breakfast! No food in the house. Riot at 6! http://bit.ly/aRnRouMarch 19, 2010 - 12:38 PM
Important lesson RT @cesarmillan If you feel yourself getting frustrated or angry, put a stop to the training session and try again later.March 19, 2010 - 1:50 AM
