A dog with a blog
She made me a little nervous, so I was asserting my dominance. Just like they tell you to wave your arms an look as big as possible when you see a mountain lion so they won't come any closer, I was trying to make that woman see that I was the bigger beast and I wasn't scared of her."
I'm a barefoot runner," I explained. "You should try it. Although sometimes I have to wear hats, and you shouldn't try that if you can avoid it." "Oh no!" she said. "Would you like me to call Sarah McLaughlan for you? She can help, I saw a special all about it on TV."
Forests aren't really boring, but they make the distance feel longer because you can’t see the mountain you’re climbing ahead of you, or the valley pulling away below you, so it feels like you’re not getting anywhere at all.
Based on the reviews, it was hard to know how wild we would need to be in this wilder-ness because they let anyone use the internet, even numbskulls. The reviews from the numbskulls who had taken a hike on the wild side before us said that either the trail was hard to find, or that the trail wasn't that hard to find, or that it wasn't really a trail at all but more of a "track" (whatever that means…).
Most people don't know this, but deer are actually very large birds related to chickens and turkeys. Poultry like deer can't fly very far, but they can fly over bushes without breaking stride.
The white dirt wasn't everywhere, though. In the sunny patches, the rocks made a messy set of stairs that wagged up the mountain. Above our heads the pointy crown of the mountain stuck straight up toward the sky and all around it in a giant skirt was the biggest pile of loose rocks you can possibly imagine.
I walked out onto one rock, and then another. But after that, I couldn't find a way across without getting wet. I cautiously put a paw into the river, but it was cold, and deep, and pushy, and not at all the kind of adventure that I wanted to be on. "Come back!" I barked. "Come get me!"
The best trails play out like a story. Some trails are like chapter books with sections of different scenery that each tell a little tale. Other hikes center around one big feature, and follow a story arc up a mountain or around something impressive-looking. But in Arnold we hiked for miles through forests that went into too much detail without moving forward, like a story that you didn't realize was dull until you'd already started telling it. (Mom tells those kinds of stories all the time.)
Sometimes you need to be brave to be scared. Not everyone's brave enough to run to Mom when they're frightened. What they don't know, and I didn't know until this week is that I really like nursing, because people who want to lie still and give me pats are my favorite people.