Went on another hike this weekend – while camping up in the mountains. Good golly, you would think doubling your altitude would help your heat… alas – it did get to 44 or 50 degrees at night, but our hike still started out at 75 degrees at 9am! Definitely better than 90+ of the weekend before, but we definitely paid for making the monkies do 2 hikes in 2 weeks with a bit of pad damage the previous week. Did you know that pups could get blisters on their pads? Nope? Me neither!

Luckily a couple weeks ago hubs and I invested in a baby bjorn for security in case one of the pups got tired on a hike, Generally it was assumed it would be for Winston since he’s a bit more spastic and expends more energy pulling etc! We were wrong – Paco enjoyed approximately 2 miles in the contraption. Luckily mom and dad’s backs ere A-ok by the next day! Whew!

We were camping up above Silverthorn at the Blue River camp ground – i had printed out a few hikes and left it up the group to decide what to do. They decided Lenawee – a 6.75 mile hike would be the one.

We figured it wouldn’t be that bad… alas our first hike at altitude in over a year…  And the monkies with feet issues that we were not aware of definitely made this a hard hike. I burned more calories by hefting around an extra 20 pounds – and i’m not talking about my bootie!

The hike definitely started out interesting! 1.7 miles of dirt road with divits just to get to the trail head. Ooofa! Yup – left some nail imprints in my palm!

Once we found the trail head, we knew we were in for some fun – no other cars were there – so we had the trail to ourselves… oh dear!

The shade was nice, but it was definitely a quick ascent. 1000 miles in 1.5 miles. Oy!

Before we left the shade mr paco pulled on one of his popped blisters, so he needed to carrying. We strapped on the baby bjorn and kept on trucking! After we left the tree line the breeze was still blowing but it was getting hot. Winston was a troopper!

We kept on climbing and climbing and the wind was howling to keep us cool. And wow – the scenery was amazing!

Eventually we got close to 12K feet and thought we should be pretty close to the summit.

Alas, we still had the last 530 feet which included a scree field and a steep climb… We (the wilker clan decided to sit that part out since winston was still hiking without assistance) and I has started to enjoy a lovely blister. I know excuses, excuses!!

Second white spot at the top left of the photo was the top…  We heard is was beautiful, but are glad we sat it out! Enjoyed what we saw and what we did, but the pups were definitely hurting units!

If you get the chance and enjoy crazy dirt roads to trail heads, check this hike out!