Some photos from our four-day weekend…
Category Archives: great outdoors
I wrote a book! Well, wrote isn’t exactly the right word… there’s only one page of text. But, there’s 69 other pages full of photos! It is self-published and I entered it in a contest. Now I need your help to get to the next round, and maybe then I might have a shot at winning! So here’s the scoop…
My book is called Trail Tails and is chocked full of photos of dogs enjoying the great outdoors. Yes, you’ve seen a lot of the photos on this blog already, but there are so many others that I decided to keep secret until the book came out… maybe even some of the best ones! So now you have to go check it out, right? Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to buy it (but hey, if you want to, go right ahead!), but I need everyone who can to go and vote for it! It’s up to the public to get me to the next round! So if you could please spare a minute of your time, please go check out the book and vote for it if you like it. The entire book is viewable online!
You’ll have to sign up with Blurb.com to vote (literally only takes a couple seconds), but you might be glad you did, because it’s a really cool site that lets you create your very own bookstore-quality books, whether it be your first novel or a photo book of your Disneyland vacation. So play around with it, you might have some fun!
Here is the cover of my book! Click it and it will take you to the website to view the entire book online… and then vote for it and help give me a shot at winning! If you do, I will love you forever!
But wait, that’s not all… other big news is that later this week, National Geographic’s new book Dogtown comes out! Sadly, despite being on the television show, Haley is not in the book… but a few of my photos are! Super exciting times here in book land!
I beat the weather this time. Well, sort of. Every year when I go visit my parents in the Black Hills, the weather wreaks havok on my plans. Two years ago, I spent the night in a community center when the interstate shut down from too much snow. With no intentions of letting that happen again, last year I chose to travel a month earlier, and by airplane. But of course, it snowed too much just before I arrived and the trails I wanted to hike were all closed. Then my flight out got canceled due to freezing rain and I was stranded at the airport for eight hours. This year, I would not let the weather win again. I opted to drive once more (for flexibility if the weather did plan to suck) and to leave yet another month earlier.
I arrived on Monday, promptly checked the weather report, and discovered I’d have one nice day of weather… Tuesday. So mom and I (and the dogs) got up early that morning and hiked Harney Peak (one of the hikes the weather thwarted me from last year), and I showed that weather who’s boss! Of course, the next few days were cold, windy, or snowy… but I had that one good day, so my trip was a success. The only incident that I hold any sort of contempt at the weather for is when I woke up at 3 am one night, about to wet the bed, and had to go piss outside in the freezing, snowing, wind. I should explain. See, my parents live in a tiny one-bedroom ranch house. They built a chicken coop last week and decided I’d get to sleep in it, rather than taking up their entire living room during my stay. So me and the dogs had our own lovely 12-foot cabin, equipped with an air mattress, space heater, and no chickens. Oh, and no toilet. I’d have gone inside the house, but their dog would bark and I didn’t want to wake up the house at that early hour. So I bared my ass and peed ice… for like two minutes straight. It was miserable. But peeing aside, the chicken shack was quite nice and will never actually house chickens now. It’s going to stay a guest shack… and a guest shack with no toilet. Let’s hope future guests remember to let everything out before they go to bed.
I know you’d all love for me to continue with stories of my peeing adventures, but here are a few photos from the week…
Zoe at Sylvan Lake after we hiked Harney Peak
Bill’s barn
Baby Shitty stalks like a lion when hunting horses
Clancy is cute
Bobert unloads hay while wearing one of the many hats in his new hat collection
Jackie and Jemma
Sue’s dogs
Zoe on the trail to Harney Peak
and Pumpkin
While it’s still 90 degrees down in the desert, and the trees are maintaining their springtime hues, up here in the mountains, the temps are cooler and the fall color is at full throttle. Not surprisingly, this photographer could not be happier. Yesterday, the dogs and I hiked Daly Canyon, and today Ecker Hill (with old canine roommate, Chloe), and with such brilliant colors everywhere, I had to post. I love fall.
