Dog Pile

Someone's dog was gallivanting in Summersville Lake.  A sheepish pile o' fur and his stick, NRG.

Take Off

Cliff swallows & their nests, under the eaves of an abandoned house in the California ghost town of Bodie.

Extremophilic!

Meanwhile, I was taking in the therms at Yellowstone.  Its quite a bizarre place, but beautiful.  This is the Grand Prismatic Spring, and grand indeed it is.  The physiology/biology of the extremophiles that color these boiling pools is difficult to believe, to comprehend.  Life finds a way.

Arachnophobia

This big-ass spider (they're everywhere in the New River Gorge...or bigger ones) had that moth wrapped up tight within seconds.  It was a mighty spidey-pounce.

Haunches

As it says in the title.  Pig legs on the wall of a Chinese village.

Portrait of a Lion

D'awwww.

But, yes, that brown sploogy area on the left side of the picture is his body and, yes, this was taken shortly before he was to join us in the tent.

Hawkward!

Cause it's an owl.

Dog fight!

Two healthy-looking strays play fighting as we entered Namche Bazaar, in the Nepali Himalaya.  Mountain air does a doggie good!

Swarms

This isn't really great photography or anything, it's more of a Halloween post.  You see, swarms of anything gross me out in a creepy, Halloweeny way.  Doesn't matter if it's rats or people crawling all over each other, it's stomach-turning.  So you can imagine my consternation when, on a winter hike in the Poconos with boyfriend, I came upon an area of snow pocked here and there with holes FULL of swarming insects.  These are big holes, about a foot across, and there were at least a dozen of them.  That's a lot of bugs.  And they were all wriggling and squirming.  It's snow, bugs!  It should be pristine and pretty.  Stop making it gross.

Anyway, Happy Halloween.  May your snow be free of weird bug spawns.

The horror, the horror...

Today, I am going to the Exhumed Films 24-hour Horror Fest.  I went a few years ago (was in Nepal last year, poor me!), and it was pretty bonkers.  Its 3am, you're hopped up on candy, and you are watching some true, delirious insanity unfold on the screen in front of you.  Its usually an eclectic mix of movies, from the actually good (Cronenberg), to the classic (Suspiria), to the classic B-movie (the original Piranhas), aaand to the apeshit, shot-on-a-shoestring, Indonesian, cannibals-kung fu-special forces-orgiastic-pagan sacrifice-zombies whatthefuckery.

And in the spirit of this event and this holiday, here is one of many carcasses we saw piled along a half-mile stretch of the Bishnumati River in Kathmandu- an urban water source.  That is true horror.

In his house he waits dreaming...

Fancypants spider of unknown species (genus Aranea!), Kathmandu, Nepal.

A Gentle Eye

At a horse farm in the Poconos.

Bones

Yak vertebra at the edge of the receding Khumbu glacier, which we saw while crossing it more or less at random (trails are for...pussies?).  There were quite a lot of bones scattered around in the grass, enough for several yaks.  None of the cool ones, though.  Skulls probably get snatched up by tourists before all the flesh is gone.  (Gross)

Shake it

Been a while since I tossed my dogger up here; this is a waterlogged version.  I like this image because I caught his head at an almost perfectly neutral point in the wild flailing, so it looks like he is just patiently enduring the hard and bewildering personal trial of having his body go apeshit on him.

Dr. Doolittle

Boyfriend and a feathered friend at Crater Lake.

Hey you! Stop harassing that goat!

Mountain goat on the summit ridge at Quandary Peak.  On this hike we met a ranger-type who told us about a law that allowed people (rangers? cops? dog-vigilantes?  anyone??) to shoot pet dogs caught "harassing" wildlife.  Funnily enough, this goat was very nearly hassled by a tiny Boston Terrier, who made a valiant attempt at harassment but was unable to catch up enough to have a proper go at it.  Fortunately for dog owners and wildlife alike (but not, of course, for would-be dog shooters), most of these peaks were not particularly dog-friendly.  We only saw a few of them on the easier climbs.

Don't abandon your pets, assholes

Today was a beautiful day.  I went for a longish ride and felt better than I have in a couple weeks.  But all that feel-goodiness came crashing down when I encountered an adorable dog that seemed to have been recently abandoned in Fairmount Park.  It looked like maybe a sheepdog-terrier mix or something like that.  No collar, but cleanish, which makes me think it had been abandoned within the last few days.  I wanted to catch him and bring him home, but he had crossed the road and disappeared into the forest by the time I caught up to him.  Even spent a while clomping around the underbrush (Philly underbrush, meaning broken bottles, trash, and a jungle-growth of weeds) in my cycling shoes and calling "Here, puppy!" but no luck.

Anyway, don't abandon your pets, assholes.  If you can't take care of them anymore, there are ample resources for adoption or fostering.

To close this out, here are some pets.  I figured I posted too much dog up in here, so cats now: the late Perseus (or as I called him, Percival cause he was really not a Perseus by the time I knew him) and the current Poison.

Dolly Sods, West Virginia- Day Three (Sorta)

Joke's on you, neither of these are from day three!  Ha!

Day three was back in the forest and ended with a retread of part of the first trail. Also a snake!  Not the first snake of the weekend, but the most quiescent and observable.  Loki discovered it for us, although its debatable whether he ever actually saw it.  He was running down the trail ahead of us, and all of a sudden he yelped and did the doggie fear-leap.  Our first thought was- fuck, he's been bitten by a snake.  Visions of carrying his poisoned ass down the trail and struggling to find a vet in rural WV and a leg dissolved in a gooey mess of pre-digestive snake venom...  So we run over there and he seems fine, tail wagging, no more scaredies.  I start looking around for a snake, and lo and behold I see one coiled up under a bush.  But here's the thing- its really, really sluggish.  Like poke-ably, in need of solar-recharge sluggish.  Clearly, it didn't go biting anything.  In fact, Darco thinks the snake was just coincidentally there and Loki somehow scared himself.  I don't buy it- that dog rarely yelps and that's a pretty big coincidence!  Pretty sure Lokes caught his first snake sighting in his peripheral and jumped a mile.  Anyway, here's the reptile in question:

Limited Liability Country

Warning: unusually high word content.  This picture takes some elaboration to be interesting.


In my travels, I have noticed some countries take a much more lax attitude toward personal safety and organizational/corporate liability than Ol' Uptight Amurrica the Litigious.  Probably the best example of this is Russia, where things like traffic laws and regulations about what you can do while drunk seem to be considered unbearably sissy. 

But Nepal had its moments too, and I mean that in a manner distinct from totally understandable resource limitations.  Take the Kathmandu zoo.  This picture is emblematic- the best way to feed a rhino, by all accounts a dangerous, aggressive, territorial, and unpredictable animal, is obviously to just stick a guy with a bucket in his habitat, one half-assed rhino-charge away.  Obviously.

But wait, you say, maybe that rhino was entirely predictable.  Maybe it had been there for decades and had never shown the slightest bit of aggression.  Maybe it was best friends with that bucket-wielder and they had lunch together every day.  Maybe it was a paraplegic and was hiding in the water because it was embarrassed about its condition, okay?  Back off, you insensitive jerk! 

And I will back off; I will grant you the paraplegic rhino.  But lets just say the "enclosures" here don't really enclose much.  A dozen kinds of springy antelope or deer-like species?  How about a ground level paddock with a fence about five feet high?  Wolves, bears, cougars, and all manner of predator-types?  How about some cages with bars easily hand-with apart?  Boyfriend, would you like to stick your hand in the Himalayan bear's cage and try to pet it?  Of course you would!  Little bite-size children, shall you do the same?  Why not?

You might take from the tone of the paragraphs that I condemn these policies and animal-retention designs, but you would be wrong.  Amused, yes.  But I rather like the responsibility for one's safety in this situation being on one's own shoulders.  Its up to me to assess the likelihood of that bear going berserk and biting my hand off.  Empowerment!

I am tired. Here are monkeys.