Five Overexcited Dogs In The Wild Forest - Part 1

It was a beautiful day and I was in no mood to do any work, so I put the dogs in the car and drove down to Blue Mountain Road. The road began as blacktop, then narrowed to oiled stone, then narrowed again to dirt, then narrowed even farther to mostly sand. It was about 12 miles from my house to Blue Mountain Road, then about 13 miles of winding, backwoods road to the trail head. But as you can see, the scenery was spectacular:

The dogs were all excited because they knew they were going on an adventure. The three little dogs rode in the front seat, and the two bigger dogs rode in the back:

I parked and let the dogs out. They were overly excited and so happy that they were hard to control:

I'd call (yell) and get them to come to me, but then they were off and running again:

I kept seeing these signs, asking for people to report any Spruce Grouse sightings. With Ruffed Grouse so common, it might be difficult to tell them apart:

We started down the main trail but then quickly turned off onto a side trail, which I knew led to a beautiful wilderness pond:

Half the dogs ran forward, half ran back to the main trail and I had to do more yelling to get them all together with me. They didn't seem to mind, though - they're used to me yelling:

We arrived at the pond, but I couldn't get any closer than this because the greenery you see around the pond is a barely floating peat bog and each footstep sinks right into the water:

Daphne and Clover may be little foo-foo dogs, but they have the most adventurous spirits and love to run excitedly ahead to scout things out for the rest of us:

I managed to get us all together again and we walked back to the main trail:

This is spectacularly scenic boreal forest, so lovely it reminded me of a fairy tale landscape:

Back on the main trail, the dogs ran full speed ahead. They love to get out of their house dog existence and consider themselves canine wilderness adventurers. I, however, know there are bears, coyotes and other people (some with big dogs) to consider, so I work hard to keep my crew right where I can see what they are doing and control things:

They began to slow down after we'd walked a bit. But we were just getting started, and I'll post Part 2 tomorrow: