Hiking with Furrydoc

Furrydoc, our dogs, and I went woodswalking yesterday. Given Furrydoc’s schedule with the vet clinic and her active, hyper-accomplishing family, we manage to do this only a couple times a year

With all the recent forest closures, we had to go 10 miles out of town to DNR lands to find a great place to hike. We climbed a logging road for about a mile before picking up a well-marked equestrian trail that took us deeper into the woods.

We’ve been here before but not for a couple of years. The trail we were looking for ends in a magical spot.

We got to the magic place, though by a route we’d never previously taken. There we sat for a while on a log (and on plastic bags I’d brought in my backpack).

The magical spot is a miniature hatchery. Just three 55-gallon barrels of baby fish, reachable only on foot or horseback. There are no signs to say who owns or maintains it. No keep-out commands, either. The only notice is an authentic highway sign some joker hauled up and carefully installed, decreeing a 12-ton limit on the rickety footbridge you cross to reach the hatchery. All in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

A tiny natural stream has been engineered to create the hatchery. You can see in the photo that the waterfall (about 50 yards above the barrels) is made with sandbags, not rock. Stream water is piped from just above the waterfall to the barrels.

This is Furrydoc’s black Lab. Like Ava, she’ll be 13 this year and is slowing down. But yesterday you would have thought both dogs were puppies.

Ava and the Lab have known each other for years. But b*tch that she is, Ava has never accepted the laid-back retriever as a friend. She growls at her and their only “relationship” is to try to pee on each others pee spots to the point of absurdity.

But as Furrydoc and I sat on the streamside log, the dogs finally, after all their years of aloofness and animosity, began playing. Up and down the trail they chased each other. Into the stream and out of it. Up the hill with a stick. Pulling friendly little ambushes on each other. (And splattering us with mud and pondwater every time they passed.)

It was chilly, only in the low 40s, cloudy and damp. So we didn’t stay long.

On the way back, we met a woman riding a horse and leading another up the hill. The dogs saw them before we did and I confess Ava misbehaved.

I don’t believe she’s ever seen horses close up. After growling, looking menacing, and getting way too close to their front hooves, she decided to go behind and attempt to sniff their butts, heeding none of my calls for her to come back to me.

I warned her she was going to get her head kicked in. Luckily the horses were remarkably mellow, as was the woman with them. She turned out (small town world) to be one of Furrydoc’s clients. The horse she led was an unbroke mustang recently adopted via a wild horse roundup program. Yep, Ava lucked out when she tried to sniff the butt of that one. So did I; the woman didn’t have to be as gracious as she was.

Furrydoc and I used one of my plastic bags to police beer cans and bottles from the road end of our route as we descended. (Fortunately, none of the beer-and-chips slobs are ever likely to reach the hatchery, so high up, so far off the road, and so well hidden.)

Then we got in her truck and headed toward town. Halfway home, we stopped and ate lunch — sourdough bread, apples, rainbow carrots, tangerines, almonds, cheese, and cinnamon cookies — on the deck of her in-laws’ creekside home. (They have the good sense to spend the winter someplace warm and she wanted to check on the place for them.)

It was a good day.