Adventurer's Blessing

I happened to see this a few years ago and thought of mushers, especially those that make their own trails or run the hard and dangerous races.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering through
pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers
into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps and
down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas,
domes and pinnacles and
grottos of endless stone, and
down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful and
more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

~Edward Abbey

My first two trail companions.

Guard Dog Doolin

The wind was blowing hard, like it seems to want to a lot lately.  A loud boom startled me late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning.  And then Doolin started barking...and barking.  But none of the other dogs were barking.

This went on for a few minutes, so I got up, rapped on the window and Doolin stopped barking...till I got back into the bed.  I let him go for another few minutes, but no one else was joining in, so I knew it wasn't two legged or four legged that had his attention.  I got up again and rapped on the window and then I watched for a bit.  (The light I've been leaving on that seems to keep the dogs calm has more than one use!)  Doolin was standing on top of the dog house and when he started barking again, it was towards the northeast.  He'd stop barking for a minute, jumped down, circle the kennel, jump back up on the dog house and start barking towards the northeast.

Finally, having had enough of what apparently wasn't a major issue, since none of the other dogs were even outside their dog houses, I rapped on the window again.  Then I lowered the window and told him that was enough.  Doolin settled down, I settled down.

The next morning, I looked all over the area between the house and the kennels and around the lawn area where Doolin had been barking towards.  I didn't see anything.  Maybe a few new branches had fallen, but that was about it.  I put it out of my mind and went to work.

On the way up the driveway after work, I saw what the big boom was and what Doolin at been barking at.  Well, barking towards since he couldn't see it from his kennel.  A tree had fallen down a good 200 feet away from the house.

In my active imagination, I thought it sort of looked like the dying tree had been trying to crawl up towards the house and that's why Doolin kept barking, to warn the tree away.  Good job Doolin!