OTR 12 is on, sort of

 

I cannot believe that it has been 10 months since I last posted. Time flies.

 

I have been purposely silent on my plans for this year because I was afraid that I would set my expectations too high. The truth is, I was hopeful and planning to get back onto the Donner Party Trail again this year, setting out this past Sunday.  That did not happen, primarily because of several unplanned interruptions in my condo, where I remain as president.  But because I have to get back on the road, my plan now is to head out to where my love of nature was rejuvenated from when I grew up on banks of the Hudson River in the foothills of the Catskills, the Shenandoah Valley.  Montag and I used to backpack in that beautiful valley most every fall weekend we could for about eight years and had some extraordinary experiences there.  If that bond between a man and his dog best set in anywhere, it is on a camping trip. The last time I was there was back in the early 1990s when I hiked the Appalachian Trail to a place called Jeremy's Run, where I scattered Montag's ashes, with Sonntag and Kessie by my side. Ten years later, Leben and Erde were by my side on the North Slope of Alaska as I scattered Sonntag's and Kessie's ashes there. Whenever I hear mention of those places, my mind goes back to those magnificent dogs.

 

My plan is to head out to valley over the next five weeks on Monday (i.e. Montag) mornings and stay till Thursday (i.e., Donnerstag), when I will head back into DC for four days. Unfortunately, there is no internet in the park so there will no blog, so to speak. But I will start this one (OTR-12) and maybe post once at end of each week.  But if there were a blog, it would be rather boring to read, but not to experience.

 

For better or for worse, there will be no backpacking on the schedule during these trips.  The National Park runs four campgrounds, and so that's where we will be pitching our tent. 

 

Although this was at first a hard decision, it is all for the better since I am going through physical thereby for a pesky walking problem I have been experiencing.  I will do what therapy I can in the camp and return to DCfor a session with my therapist on Fridays, and to take Donner swimming on Fridays and Sundays. He needs to do some recovering too, and he gets half the votes on where we go.  My guess is that if he could talk, he would probably agree with this plan.  I will try to keep up this routine for as long as I can until the end of October, when the campgrounds close for the winter.

 

Preparing for a four-day retreat on the road into nature in not the same thing as preparing for a six-week retreat for one reason: sometime those six-week retreats run on for as many as 14 weeks, albeit unplanned. And if the Defender gives out on this journey, a 160-mile tow is not the same thing as its breaking down in the Yukon just as the winter snows hit, 4100 miles from home.

 

Although this trip is Donner's, my mind will undoubtedly be on that magnificent German shepherd Montag, who was my shadow side for 14 years.  Our own road trips only took us to Vermont a few times, but I can assure you he was with me on all my road trips, along with Sonntag, Kessie, Leben and Erde.  And if in whatever afterlife there is only one dog at a time is permitted, Montag would be the first, so that I could give him the benefit of all the lessons on what it takes to be a good guardian for a dog that I learned with his successors.

 

Click here to read a piece I wrote about Montag the day after he was put down 35 years ago.  He is still on my mind every single day.

 

ED and Donner