The Sunday Family Hike

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Today is Sunday. The frost burned off quickly but maybe that was an illusion brought only by the time change. At noon, the skies were still sunny with only a light mackerel scaling brushed across the horizon. What would we accomplish today? Pwah! After all these years of working, it is hard to consider ourselves as semi-retired and have to force the issue.

The cats were annoyed and restless since I had kept them in most of the day. With an impressively sized raptor and its mate circling the canyon all day, I wasn't about to let them out unchaperoned. I had been getting the resentful look from Beautiful Dave the Cat which we know so well to mean "You suck!!! You suck!!!" You have to say this in a voice slightly lower than a cartoon chipmunk since he is still a fairly young fellow. So perhaps a family hike was in order and not just a hike over to the barn but a genuine up-the-side-of-the-mesa adventure. The party would include Mark and I, Brou the pup, Ming the Merciless and Beautiful Dave. The photo above (above because I don't know how to stick it anywhere else in the blog) shows one adult male, one dog taking a pant break and two cats at the summit. Can you find both cats?

The nice thing about our isolation is that no one can see a strange procession resembling a trailer from some Disney animal adventure movie. Believe it or not, the cats are excellent hiking partners, never wandering more than 50 feet away and, in fact, become quite perturbed and vocal when they think they are being left behind. Brou, as usual, made his 30 steps for every one of ours. At the top, we stopped to take a panorama set of photos of the view and then followed a random set of muledeer tracks for a while as a vague excuse for adventure. "The boys" would side track only occasionally to pose as mountain lions atop exceptionally good and stately rock formations. You could feel the Walter Mitty thoughts radiating from their smug and sublime countenances - they were in feline ecstasy.

After a few trial and error route attempts, we found our original path and, surprisingly, the boys led the way down enthusiastically once I identified the beginning of the tricky path. Mark had to lower Brou down to the path. Other than that one instance, Brou flew back and forth between all of us with the élan of a mountain goat. Thanks to gravity, the descent was far more treacherous but we all made it down without any rodeo rides on the loose shale. Curiously, it was our four-leggers who made the immediate beeline to their favorite crash spots as soon as we got back to the rat trailer. Mark and I just sat quietly, awake and vaguely aware of mild aches setting in. It was a glorious day and trek indeed.

Next entry: In 2 or 3 days