Snow Day!

Thankfully we didn't have snow at the house. While an inch or two is great, the whole city tends to shut down. I think I've come to the realization that it's far more conducive to myself and the dogs for us to have to drive somewhere to get our snow fix. And that's just what we did! Now that my truck is in fine running order, we headed up to Mt. Hood to play in the snow. I brought both my cross country skis as well as my snowshoes because I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to find. After the disaster that was last winter, I come prepared for all circumstances.;o) Thankfully we are having some good snow fall at the 4,000 foot level, so I got to hit my skis! I decided to try the dogs out for a little skijoring run. I realized that Bess and I have our first race two weeks from Saturday, and it would be good to get some actual time in actually skijoring! I snapped some pictures and took a little video while we were out. I still need to put the video together, so that will come later. Here are the pictures:

What you can't tell from the pictures (but is evident in the video) is that Bess, my normally more than eager to whip me around dog, was not really into it. It actually got to a point where Heffner was doing all the work. Bess gradually started lagging behind to a point where, due to the neck line, Heffner was basically hauling me as well as Bess. She has NEVER been like that! I was shocked! Normally I hook the two of them together because Heffner will actually stop and has enough weight to basically force Bess to stop as well. This time around you would have thought that Heffner was my primary puller and Bess was the one who needed encouraging to move forward. Not sure what the heck was going on there. She just really wasn't her normal self today.

I have a feeling that it has to do with her going through a false pregnancy. Her falses are nothing compared to what they could be. Her teats get a little swollen and there are some minor behavioral changes. The weirdest of them that has been fully manifesting whenever we're out and about, is that she roots around the bases of trees. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think maybe it has something to do with making a nest/den for the pups? She does this every cycle. She goes about it with a mindless fervor that is something else to watch. But terribly annoying when she has booties on and she's digging in dirt and we are surrounded by trees for three hours. Once I let them both off leash (I tried having just her hooked up to me for a bit to see if maybe she'd perk up by herself, but no go), she started going after the trees. So generally Bess was acting off today. On the up side, we all got some great exercise! I did 7 miles in almost three hours and who knows how many miles the dogs racked up! Now on to the rest of the pictures!

Here's Heffner waiting for Bess to resurface from inside the tree so that he can pounce on her:



We found an ungroomed side trail where the snow was a little deep, but the dogs loved romping in the wonderful powder.

And here is a perfect example of Bess and her trees! I thought it was actually pretty cute the way that she was peering out. It made a perfect little house!

It seriously weirds me out when one of the dogs goes on alert and I can't hear or see anything! ARG! If they both do it, I usually preemptively grab their collars in case a deer or something is coming our way and I just don't know it yet.
And this cheeky little bugger followed us (at least I'm pretty sure it was him the whole time) for almost our whole trek! At one point he landed on the trail and Bess went running up to him only to come up short. They had a stare down and then Bess did something that I haven't seen her do when she comes across something to chase. She turned around and trotted back to me. That combined with Heffner not even wanting to chase after the crow gave me a creepy feeling.