Camping with Blue - Backpacking with A & Paige The Dog

Our mountain. Well, the left half is where we were hiking.

All packed up, but we slept in a bit, so we didn't get on the road until a bit after 10. We parked the car outside Pine Valley, put the packs on the dogs and ourselves, put the dogs on long lines and headed up.

Start:
Lat N 37º22'59.265"
Lon W 113º30'25.269"
Alt 6695 ft


Of course, the dogs kept getting their lines tangled and after the beginning where the trail was pretty flat, it wasn't possible for me and A to walk side by side. After a while, we gave up and I harnessed both dogs to me. Dangerous, yes, with 80+ lbs of excited dog giving me a power assist up the mountain. But they got less tangled after they decided between themselves that Blue would mostly walk on the left and Paige would walk mostly on the right. They were very excited at all the new smells and jumping in the creek and drinking wild water and generally being galavanting fools.

Camping dogs on long lines.

The boy had said that we should go up until the Summit trail turned off to our right (to the SE on the second topo map toward Burger Peak) and then continue on toward Further Water (where there would be water) and back down the mountain on another trail. We passed one very nice campsite at about 8000 ft, but after consulting the map, we figured we had to keep going up, because we weren't nearly to the turn off yet. We also still hadn't found water. Some of the spots got a little crazy and after quite a long while, we decided to experiment with letting the dogs off leash. They were unbelievably awesome animals. They went even more crazy, but stayed mostly together and either came back down the trail to check in with us or came back when we called or I whistled.

Start of the trail at Pine Valley, top middle of this topo map.

Campsite 1 just north of the trail split in the middle of the map.

One of the very exciting things that we figured out was how to set our GPS so that the map actually provided information instead of just confusing little numbers. Hint: it helps to read the map key. Once we could figure out where we were on the map, we realized that the boy's ambitions for us were more ambitious that we really wanted to be. We decided to stop as soon as we found another campsite. The sky also looked ominous. Luckily we found a site after not too terribly long.

We were, however, very tired. We were also short on water, since we hadn't found any. We set up camp and A took Paige on walk when it was her turn to fall down. Not good. But not terribly bad, either. We pulled her shoulder back into place and I pushed ibuprofen and acetaminophen on her. The dogs got cranky with each other because they were exhausted and thirsty. We tied them up to appropriately separate trees and started working on dinner. Since it's not ok to go to sleep before 9pm, we managed to read our books until just past 9 and then went to sleep.

Sleepy Blue dog.

Campsite 1:
Lat N 37º20'05.795"
Lon W 113º30'24.191'
Alt 9008 ft

There was lots of thunder and lightning, but only a few sprinkles overnight. In the morning, however... It was raining very lightly when we got up. The poor dogs were licking the rain fly to get water. We made breakfast under the tarp set up over our kitchen area. We ate and pondered what to do for the day. We decided to day hike up to 10,000 feet, because we were so close, then hike back down to the nice campsite that we saw on our way up. Good thing we decided, because then it started to crazy rain. We were mean and left the wet dogs outside the tent while we hid inside and waited for the rain to stop. When the rain finally stopped, we filtered all the rainwater collected in the tarp and the dog bowls we'd set out. We packed up water and all our food, leaving everything else in the tent.

Screenshot from my GPS

The hike up was hard, but less so than with full packs. A had to work harder because she was carrying her backpack. The dogs didn't have to wear their packs and had a fabulous galavant up and down and up and down and...(you get the idea).

In the second topo map, you can see where we camped the first night, just north of the fork in the trail. We hiked towards Burger Peak. Some of the trail was very narrow with a drop off to the right that just went down the mountain. We decided that we were super smart not to attempt this trail with full packs. One or both of us would have needed to be med-evac'd out of there.

There was a beautiful campsite in a meadow up near the top where the trail really turned off to our left. A dropped the pack here, as we were not quite to 10,000 ft and some of the trail was pretty steep. We hiked up just.a.little.bit.further and suddenly the GPS told us we'd reached our goal. It only took about 2 hours to climb 1000 ft. "Only." We took some pictures at the top and climbed back down to the campsite where we had a snack before heading back down to where we'd left the tent.

By the time we got back to the tent, much faster than we'd climbed up, it was dry. We exploded everything all over the place, packed everything back up again and loaded up to head down to our second night's campsite. Going down the mountain was definitely easier going than up, but with heavy packs on (A's much more so than mine, because she had both sleeping pads AND the tent), it was still an effort. Paige kept coming back around, we thought to check on us, but it turns out that her little puppy paw pads had gotten rubbed raw in a few spots. Compared to climbing up, it took practically no time to get down to the campsite. Both dogs flopped down and fell asleep, though it was only late afternoon.

Blue pretending to be alert. She was mostly asleep.

PTD not pretending to be awake even a little bit.

Given that our water situation was somewhat bleak, A loaded up my pack with the water filter and every water receptacle that we had. She hiked down to the stream, which we could hear but couldn't see, to filter a ton of water and bring it back up. I set up our kitchen for the night and sat still and wandered around. I'm not sure really how I spent that hour she was gone. A said it was only about a third of a mile down to the stream. It was hard going up again, because she was hauling quite a bit of water! We fed and watered the dogs and started a gigantic dinner. There were two sweet rock campfire rings, so we decided to try to light a fire, but sadly we are bad arsonists. We got it going for a bit, but mostly it didn't want to. We retired to the tent with the very sleepy dogs and read for a tiny bit before falling asleep.

Campsite 2 with PTD sleeping on her yellow thermarest. 

This picture doesn't do our excellent camp kitchen justice.

Campsite 2:
Lat N 37º20'55.949"
Lon W 113º30'32.397"
Alt 8160 ft

On our final day we packed up and headed back down to the car. We couldn't believe some of the trail that we'd climbed up. It took us just over 2 hours to get back to the car. That was enough, though. We were tired. So were the dogs, who had to end their adventure back on their long lines because we kept running into other dogs (ok, so that only happened twice, but given that we'd just had two days where we had the mountain to ourselves...). Paige lay down in the parking lot and wouldn't get up. Blue wasn't very frisky, either. We drove back to down and got ice cream cones. Cleaning up was nice. Eating Mexican food was also nice. Scoring a job interview for Monday was especially nice (thanks, voicemail). Cupshakes are the bomb (a yummy cupcake blended with vanilla ice cream - we need this in Minnesota!). Now I can't remember if we went hottubbing before or after the movie we watched - I was that tired. I think before.

Last night in St. George:
Lat N 37°05'33.792"
Lon W 113°37'31.840"
Altitude 2770ft