The Downside of Spring

Sorry about the crappy cell phone photos, but my kids killed the new camera batteries at a volley ball game last night. If you look hard though, you can see the down side of spring. Cars were filling up the parking lot of Black Bay Park this afternoon.

Yes, I know they pay taxes and it's there park too, but dang it sucks when the park gates swing open for the season. My dogs and I have the park pretty much to ourselves all winter except for a few sledders, but they never venture into the upper country. So that's where I take the pups to burn off some of their unbelievably high energy.

I just hate having to leash the dogs up while we are hiking up there. They hate it too, of course.

They especially hate it this time of the year when the marmots (not to be confused with a certain Brit that visits this blog) start coming out of hibernation. There were at least two of them in the rock slide to the left that kept the pups busy for awhile this afternoon. They don't harm them...they just chase them around like they chase our two house cats.

Last year the pups found a nest of baby marmots they were about four or five inches long and scurried all over the place. It drove the dogs crazy.

OK, now that I got the negative stuff off my chest, I have to admit that today was just beautiful. It was a perfect hiking day. There is hardly any lingering snow in the park. There was a little last weekend, but I hardly found any today. Finally, a little spring...



I think my pups felt the same way. It was all I could do to keep them out of the water. That's a picture of Buddy on the left. He kept running up the bank and finding sticks and pine cones for me to throw out in the water, but I didn't want him to get hypothermic he is still recovering from a poisoning last week, and he is doing great thank Goodness... but Vizsla short-haired pointers have virtually no insulation in their fur, and almost zero body fat, so they can get hypothermia much faster than most animals. Still, the way things looked today, it shouldn't be long until the dogs can get wet again.