OmegaMom

…because the dotter is sick with something flu-like.  The test came back negative for strep, negative for flu, but then the ped chatted up some other ped friends to discuss the sensitivity of the flu test, and given the dotter’s tendency to segue into she-should-go-to-the-hospital type pneumonia, the ped decided to treat it as if it were the flu.

Normally, I wouldn’t go hauling her off to the doctor right away after she got sick.  But given that there was a 10-year-old boy who died of H1N1 within a day after developing the fever up the road in Second Biggest City a few weeks ago, coupled with that aforementioned tendency to pneumonia, I figured it was time to be cautious.

The upshot is the doc prescribed Tamiflu.

(Don’t read the side effects for kids.  Just don’t.)  (I’m hoping we’re not any of the folks who get those side effects.)  (I mean, really, “may be at an increased risk of self injury and confusion shortly after taking TAMIFLU and should be closely monitored for signs of unusual behavior” just sort of raises the hair on my neck.  How creepy can you get?!?!)

The dotter has never done pills (really!), just liquid medicines and shots.   So when the doc asked, I said we should make it liquid…at which point it turns out there is no liquid form readily available, and there is just one local pharmacy that prepares the liquid form.

That pharmacy is, according to OmegaDad, The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  This is the result of him showing up at the pharmacy hours after we saw the doctor only to have them take half an hour to figure out that they didn’t have the faxed prescription, and more time thereafter to call up the doctor’s office.  OmegaDad was fuming when he got home, and said, in dire tones, that any further interactions were up to me, because he didn’t think he could keep from blowing his stack.

I call the doc’s office.  I offer to use pills, to introduce the dotter to the concept, so we can avoid dealing with this pharmacy.

The doc’s office calls back:  All the pharmacies in town don’t have the pills in the right strength, so we’re back to The World’s Least Competent Pharmacy.  But TWLCP can’t get the preparation done before they close. 

Oy!

It’s quite the distraction from the oh-OmegaDad-isn’t-going-to-step-on-Kai-on-his-way-to-bed feeling (Kai liked to sleep next to OD’s side of the bed).  The we-don’t-need-to-close-the-downstairs-bathroom-door feeling (Kai would eat the cat food otherwise).  The ongoing reminders.  Sigh.  Thank you all for your sympathetic comments; it has been quite helpful, actually.

In 1998, OmegaDad and I purchased our first house, in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, near Small Mountain University Town.  Our house had a fenced yard, and we said to each other, “Hey!  We’ve got a fenced yard now!  Now we can get ourselves a dog!”

Somewhere around Mother’s Day the next year, we were at PetSmart near GrannyJ’s house, and they were having an “adoption event”.  So we oohed and ahhed over the kitties, and poked our heads in at the dogs.  There was a puppy there, about six months old, who looked just plain kinda goofy.  He was cute.  His head tilted in that way puppies’ heads do.  We kept looking at him, and talking to each other, and looking at him…

And the next thing we knew, we had a dawg.

We named him Kayenta, Kai for short, because he was a rez rescue dog, a dog of uncertain heritage, one of a large number of unclaimed dogs and puppies that roam the Navajo Reservation, scions of working dogs that herd sheep on the mesas and plateaus.

We brought him home.  We took him out on hikes in the woods, through the Ponderosa pines.  We would stand at either end of a large meadow, and call, and he would run lolloping from one end of the meadow to the other, his tongue hanging out.  We took him to puppy training, and he learned to come when called (mostly), and to walk politely on the leash, and a few other things. 

He was a good dog, for us, but not a good dog for other people.  Our theory was that he had been beaten as a puppy, because if you moved just right, he would flinch, and he hated men.  Women he would tolerate, but men were Bad.  Except, of course, for OmegaDad.

He wouldn’t get into the garbage.  After the first few months, he learned that he did not get people food, and he was okay with that.  He did chew out the crotch of any pair of undies you left out accidentally, so we learned not to do that.  He didn’t beg the way many dogs did–he would just sit there erect, ears alert, and give you an “I am a Very Good Dog” look, one that said, “You know I’m a Good Dog, so you know I deserve a treat.  Don’t you?  Don’t you?”

He loved chew toys.  He would chew them down to frayed knots, and we would remove the knots when they got too smelly and icky, and give him a new rope toy.

When OmegaDotter came along, he didn’t really like her.  He never really liked her, and regularly growled and snapped at her…but he kept it within limits.  The good thing about her, he realized when she transitioned to real people food, was that she dropped food at the table, so she became tolerable.  Not one of his favorites, but definitely tolerable–enough so that she could hold the leash when we went hiking, enough so that she could lean on him (up to a certain point), and tug on him (up to a certain point).

When we moved to Alaska, he joined OmegaDad on the long drive up, getting to see bears and foxes and moose and other wild critters.  He put up with the Shoe Box and our cramped living there.  And when we moved into our new house, he delighted in the big back yard–though, since there was no fence, and we had a Mean Neighbor in the back who made singularly threatening noises the time or two Kai loped through the forest in our back into his yard.  The threatening noises included, at the end, something that sounded like “I’ll shoot him if he comes over here again!”, so poor Kai was thereafter confined to leash on his outings in the yard.

Last year, in May, Kai had a horrible bout of vomiting and bloody diarrhea that culminated in a large whitish chunk being upchucked.  We hauled him to the vet, who dissected the whitish chunk only to discover it was the knot of a rope chew toy.  We immediately threw out all the chew toys we had, and poor Kai was without them.

So we have no idea where he got the rope knot that got stuck in his gut this time.  It may have been while we were out hiking.  It may have been a piece of detritus from the previous owners.

The latest surgery didn’t work.  OmegaDad and I visited yesterday, and today.  When we visited today, poor Kai could barely walk when we tried to take him out for a pee.  When we returned inside, he slipped on the tile floor, and fell all splayed out, and didn’t get up.

The vet ran another blood test after we visited, and the results were bad.  His liver values–which were what prompted the third surgery, in hopes of finding a way to dump the bile that was accumulating–were going up again, instead of down.  The kidney numbers were surging.  When the vet put a catheter in to let him pee, nothing came out.  The end verdict:  renal failure.

So OmegaDad and I went back to the vet’s, and said goodbye to Kai.  We cuddled him, we petted him, we told him he wasn’t going to have to hurt anymore, and Dr. Shauna injected him with the two shots, and he was gone…just like that.  It was quiet, and peaceful, and we all cried, and then we came home to a house without a dawg.

For the past few years, OmegaDad has raved to me about “his” sandhill cranes showing up in the spring and fall, his special viewing place, ooh-ing and aahhh-ing about being able to go out during his (short) lunch hour, drive a few blocks, and eat his lunch while communing with nature, aka the cranes, and how pretty they were.

Today, he called me from work.  “I’ve got a very flat tire.”  Instantly, Super OmegaMom springs into action:  faster than a speeding bullet, she whizzes through the garage, grabs the battery-powered air pump, leaps into the car, and–

…waits for OmegaDotter, who had no school today, to collect all her worldly goods and chattels in preparation for an overnight with A., her best bud.

At which point, Super OmegaMom grabs the Halloween artwork done by OmegaDotter for donation to A.’s Halloween decorations, flips the back seats down, rolls out the bicycle, manhandles the bicycle up into the car, schleps the dotter and all her worldly goods and chattels off to A.’s house…

…and then goes to rescue OmegaDad.

As I delivered the air pump, I suggested we go visit the dawg at the hospital…

Oh!  Didn’t I mention this?!  One night home, and the dawg was once again throwing up everything, we couldn’t get any meds to stay down, we were worried yesterday morning, we called the vet, we took the dawg back to the vet’s, we got a call from the vet mid-day, we drove back to the vet’s office under a low, black cloud of gloom, anticipating that we were going to be told that he needed to be put down…Only to find out, once we were there, that the vets had made a mistake during the first surgery, and they wanted to do a third surgery to correct it.  The good news was that the dawg was not needing to be put down.  The further good news was that they were going to do the surgery for free.  The bad news was…well, three surgeries in a week is an awful lot, and the vet wasn’t sure that this would do the trick for our poor puppy.

But, anyway, the dawg is recuperating from his third surgery, and I suggested we go visit the dawg, which we did.  And then OmegaDad was hungry for lunch, so we grabbed a burger for him from DQ.  And while we were there, he said, “Let’s take a drive!”

“Turn right here.  Turn left here.  Drive straight here.  Turn here.  Slow down.  Slow down.  Just beyond those trees–can you see them?”

See them?!  Holy moly, there were some of the prettiest birds I’ve seen in a long time, and they were right by the road.  We could practically have reached out and touched them.  They had red crests on top of their heads, perched on long, graceful necks.  Their bodies were mottled brown and cream from one angle, an iridescent blue-ish from another angle.  They were just…beautiful.

And I didn’t have my camera.

After taking the husband back to work, I drove home (12 miles), grabbed the camera, and drove back (another 12 miles) just so I could get pictures of these beauties.

Of course, by the time I got there, they had moved much farther back into the field, away from the edge of the road.  This meant I had to zoom in with my point-and-shoot’s all-of-3x-optical-zoom.  Which meant that all I was getting was lousy pictures.  I got out of the car, moved into the greenery by the side of the road–

–and the birds very quietly and gracefully moved an equal distance further away from the road.  It wasn’t like they were scared, or really noticing at all; it was almost as if it were a force of nature, like gravity or magnetism, except repelling rather than attracting.  I move forward, they drift backward.

Bah.  The pic at the top of the post is the very best I could manage.  I ache to have better pictures of those birds.

Obviously, I need a new camera, one with more oompf.  None of this twiddly, pixellated digital zoom, thankyewverramuch.  I want some STUDLY OPTICAL ZOOM, dammit!  So this is my new quest:  cruising CraigsList for a nice used 10x digicam.  The dawg has eaten up a lot of our PFD check, but I think I can swing a 2nd-hand good digicam…Just so that next year I can get better pictures of these guys.

So, after two surgeries and many days recuperating, the dawg is back home again.  We had all been missing him something fierce–even the dotter, who the dawg doesn’t get along with, and who, therefore, doesn’t get along with the dawg.  So he’s back, he’s ensconced downstairs (no stair climbing for a while!), he smells extremely doggy (no doggy baths for a while!), and we have managed to get him to eat and keep down a tablespoon or two of freshly baked chicken and some rice.  Given that he’s hardly eaten in a week, this is monumental.

In the meantime, as soon as the autumnal equinox passed, our area of Alaska plunged directly from late fall into almost-winter.  Typically, the early winter snows creep downward on the mountainsides, first dusting the tops (”termination dust”), then moving on down bit by bit. 

Last week was vintage autumn:  clear, vibrant blue skies, the kind that you can lose yourself in forever, with the sun glittering in etched yellow along the edges of leaves.  We had some winds, and they loosened the fall leaves, which would shower down to the ground like a handful of golden coins tossed into the air.

Then came gray days and rain.

Then came the cold snap, along with more rain.  We had no snow hereabouts, but you could tell the mountains were getting it.  This morning, when the dotter went off to check her chickens, the back stairs were icy.  This afternoon, when we motored off to the vet’s to get the dawg, the sun was out and sparkling from every damp spot on the trees and the houses and the underbrush.

And surrounding the valley, the mountains were covered with snow, two-thirds of the way down.  Yesterday evening, I had caught a peek or two that showed that the snow came almost down to our level, but the sunshine today must have warmed things up enough to melt that snow back.

The mountains seem suddenly more immediate, more immense, more looming, when they are covered with snow; I don’t know why.

Right now, it’s a beautiful sight.  I actually can’t wait until our first snowfall down here.  Remind me of that in January and February, when I am bitching endlessly about the never-ending wintertime, eh?

We got to see the dawg at the vet’s office today; he was totally stoned on pain meds, but even so looked much better than he had yesterday morning.  So we loved on him and snuggled with him, and then left, with promises of being able to check him out tomorrow morning, and maybe take him home.

Mom is out of the hospital, yay!

And I?  Am worn out.  Just plain tuckered.

It has been a bad few days.

A few days ago, I noticed the dawg wasn’t eating much, or drinking much.  Then yesterday a.m., early, the dawg started barfing.  And barfing.  And barfing.  And soon, there was nothing to barf up…but he was thirsty.  And he couldn’t keep that down, either.  At which point, dawg-worrying became intense enough to have us call the vet.

The dawg doesn’t like vets, so we needed both OmegaDad and myself to be there to calm the pup down for an exam.  Then x-rays.  Then blood work.  Then shots (an anti-emetic and an acid suppressor).  Then instructions to wait until evening, then try him on water, then white rice & boiled chicken this a.m.

We walked out having spent $380.  Ack!

The dawg stopped barfing for a bit.  Then we tried him on water later that night, which he slurped right down.

And then promptly threw right up again.

All through the night, the same thing:  drink water, throw it up.

So we called the vet again this a.m., and the vet said it was time for the barium x-rays:  fill the dawg with a barium-spiked fluid and trace the movement to see where the blockage was.  So I schlepped the pup off to the vet again, and dropped him off, with an estimate of another $300.  Ack!

Two hours later, the vet calls, saying that the barium didn’t move more than an inch beyond the end of his tummy, and the only thing to do was exploratory surgery, and here’s the estimate:  $1000 to $2000.  ACK!  ACK, ACK, double ACK!

At which point, the qualms start.  Ooookay, we’re talking serious bucks here.  Ooookay; if it were the dotter, we wouldn’t be balking at the cost, but scrambling to find ways to cover it.  Ooookay; there are people in the U.S. who need that money to get health care.  Ooookay; a dawg is worth it/a dawg is not worth it.  Oookay; there are people who would think we were nuts to even think of paying for it.  Ooookay, there are people who would think we were cruel and horrible for even thinking of not paying for it.  Ooookay; we don’t have the extra bucks right now, but we will have them when our PFD check comes through in two weeks–and yeah, we wanted to buy some toys with the money, but isn’t Kai worth it?

Et cetera.

It was a very odd feeling.

The end result:  A “Care Credit” card, a credit card offered for paying for vet bills.  You can apply over the phone.  Oh, goody.  Just what we need…

So we signed and the dawg went in for surgery, OmegaDad and I went out to lunch, and then I went home.

To be confronted with a message on our phone from a friend of my mother’s saying “She’s ALL RIGHT, but your mother is in the hospital, just released from the ICU, and here’s the phone number…”

Oh, shit.

Two days of ongoing worry were suddenly replaced with frantic panic.

Talking to my mom, and then talking to her doctor, reassured me (currently).  Seems she went in for day-surgery for a blockage in her leg; all went well.  She stayed with her friend for the night, and in the night, her leg and foot started hurting.  She couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t go out for her regular weekly breakfast with her buds, so she finally called the doc and asked is this was normal.  He immediately told her to hie herself off to the emergency room.  When she got there, the ER folk all panicked about her heart flutter and kept talking about how she needed a pacemaker right now.  Her doc finally got them straightened out on that (she has had the flutter for quite a while, and has a “strong heart” according to two cardiologists aside from the flutter), but she was admitted to ICU for observation and testing.  While she was there, some bloodwork came back indicating she might have internal bleeding, but everything else was okay; they moved her out of ICU into PCU (?!) and decided to keep her for another day or two.

The end result:  I have been on the phone now to fifty kazillion people for hours.  (I tried calling my Unka Bill in Australia, but when I got through, he couldn’t hear me, so I had to email him [Unka Bill, check your email!].)  Our finances are in a holding pattern.  I’m tired.  I want my mommy.  My mommy wants her camera and a laptop because she’s bored out of her gourd…

Oh, yeah, and mom’s friend says that she’s due to go back for roto-rootering of her other leg in 10 days…

Oh, yeah, and I finally talked to the vet’s nurse, who said that the surgery took longer than expected (that means more $$), they had to take out a piece of the dawg’s intestine, and there was a blockage which looked to be the knotted end of a rope chew toy.  At which point, I was amazed:  we haven’t given the dawg a rope chew toy for more than a year, when this incident happened.  The nurse scoffed.  She said it wasn’t possible.  Well, I can tell you that we removed the dawg’s chew toys that very afternoon, May 17, 2008, and haven’t given him one since, and he’s not allowed out unless we’re with him…sooo…where’d the chew toy come from if it hasn’t been sitting in his stomach since then???

Wah.

So.  I have taken the dotter hiking Saturday.  And Sunday.  And today.

Ahem.

Well, look.  We live in an area where when it starts to rain, it rains and rains and rains and rains.  Not hard, mind you, just a continuous dingy gray drizzle that makes everything soggy and the moss grow and mushrooms thrive and my mood sink.  So when we get Nice Weather™, I feel duty bound to actually get out and do something.

Yesterday’s hike was on a trail alongside the Mamahuska River, starting out in Small Town Alaska.  Looked easy, looked interesting, so I printed out the file from the borough recreation site.  Then things started going wrong.  Firstly, I confused north with east on the map (no comments from the peanut gallery, please), so thought that taking Large Raptor Street to the end of the road was what I was supposed to do.  We did that, parked, got out, started walking towards the river beside the high school, only to discover that the path we were on just died out at the top of a very steep bluff.

Um.

Okay, so we head back to the car.  I get out the map.  I read the directions.  It says “the intersection of Large Raptor Street with The Big One Street”.  I drive back towards the highway on Large Raptor Street.  We find The Big One Street intersection.  There is no path leading off; there is, instead, a large 2.5 acre vacant lot that is for sale.  Riiiiight.  We continue on a block, and behold, a path leading off north.  We park.  We head off that path.  It leads up and into a beautiful meadow filled with tall grass covered with sun-ripened seedheads and fireweed fluff.  But the river–our destination–is far off to our right.  Surely this is not correct?  So I march us to our right…And we find ourselves at the top of a steep hill overlooking the aforementioned 2.5-acre lot, through which a faint track wended its way.  So we slid and tiptoed and bounded down the hill to the faint track and started following it.

It led us right back up the bluff to the other side of the track which we had just been on.

Luckily, as I was standing there wondering what we were going to do, and why the #@!$*% the borough recreation department hadn’t marked the damned trail, our dawg and another dog started getting close & personal, and I was able to ask the owner of the other dog where the heck the trail was.  Once we got our trails sorted out, he pointed us in the right direction, which turned out to be on the other side of the wide meadow down where we had been.

I loved the trail.  The dotter didn’t.  We thought it would be down by the river banks and sunny; instead, it was up on the bluff and deep in the shady trees.  It was mysterious and dark and smelled damp and rich and filled with greenery and vegetation that was mouldering away, and there were oodles of mushrooms and fungus.  We could see glimpses of the river between the trees, with the sun sparkling and dancing off the lacy braids of water zigzagging across the riverbed.  The excitement of the trail was when some horseback riders came along–I pulled the dotter and the dog off to the side of the trail, to avoid the dog getting over-excited by the horses, and this turned out to be a mistake:  the horses, thinking the dawg was a bear, went into a panic.  Luckily, all we had to do was step out into the trail so the horses could see that we were not carnivorous monsters.

The end result:  dotter wanted to be down there, not up here.  Sigh.  And, since she really, really wanted to be able to play in the water–any water!–I drove us down to the Kmik River for a bit of wading around in ice-cold water.

The view from the darkness:

Some bright white berries that caught my eye:

Some beautiful bright white mushrooms popping in the darkness (they were huge!):

A clump of mushrooms displaying their undersides and looking voluptuous:

The dotter playing in the water:

Today’s hike was to Eklutna Lake.  The lake is utterly gorgeous, and this hike was bright and sunny, and easy, and fun.  There were certainly a lot more people on this hike than our other two, because it’s so near Big City.  But I think I’ve overloaded the girl with hiking.  Maybe I’ve overloaded myself with hiking?!  Anyway, I think it’s time to do other things for a while!

The lake:

Some sunny autumn color:

And some more sunny autumn color:

Playing at the water’s edge at the lake:

Many thanks for all the compliments on my weight loss pics.  I must admit, I chose the least flattering pic of me from our summer trip, so that may have helped make the difference more noticeable.  And, as Blog Antagonist asked, I am petite–5′2.5″–so a small weight loss looks bigger on me.  (The converse is also true:  a small weight gain looks bigger, as well.)  I will keep plugging away at it, but will only update once in a while on the ol’ bloggeroo.  The goal is another ten pounds, I think.

When I visited GrannyJ in Arizona back in June/early July, and hung out with my bro and his family, I realized–with a sort of bemused horror–just how much weight I had put on.  My mom took many, many pictures, and there I was in them, looking zaftig.  Or maybe more than zaftig. 

I found it wearing to climb the steps of her house, so I was out of shape, too.

The pictures, and the lack of energy, made me take stock.  Then, too, there was the fact that all of my summer clothes were just too tight–my shorts, my T-shirts, my sleeveless shirts, everything.  I felt awful.  Fat, fifty, out of shape–I felt like an archetypical Amurrikan.

So after we returned home, and after OmegaDad’s brother’s visit ended, I decided to Put An End To That.  I started “dieting”, which mainly consisted of no longer eating entire bags of Fritos at one sitting, no longer snarfing down three to four Frappuccinos each day, eating more fruits and veggies, eating more slowly at each meal, and cutting back on the multiple helpings of carbs at dinner time.

I also started exercising, using some DVDs I had lying around, always meaning to get around to doing them; I’d do cardio one day and toning exercises the next, with a day off on the weekend.

It’s been slow, but kind of steady.  OmegaDad claims he has noticed.  My “fat jeans” are now loose (one pair I can no longer wear, two pairs are baggy in the butt and loose on the legs, and one pair I can pull down over my hips while it’s still buttoned and zipped).  I was able, today, to squeeze into my old size 10 jeans in preparation for a hike with the dotter.  (Yes!  We went on another hike!  I will report on it tomorrow.)

While we were on the hike, OmegaDotter took the following picture of me:

(It really should be a picture of me in those same shorts, but while it’s been nice and warm for Alaska, it hasn’t been “shorts weather” to me.)

It’s not a lot; about ten pounds over the past two months.  But I intend to keep going.  I feel a lot better, I can run up and down the stairs without feeling like I’m about to expire on the steps halfway up, and it definitely looks like I’ve lost weight.  I especially like being able to clamber up and down steep hillsides with the dotter, and run around the back yard with her kicking a soccer ball around.  In addition, some ongoing aches and pains in my neck, arms, and hips seem to have disappeared, which is all for the good!

Here it is, the fifth of September, and we are well into autumn weather and colors here in Alaska.  This is Labor Day Weekend, three days off, and the Kozmik All has graced us with beautiful sunshine, sparkly clear skies, and (relative) warmth.  The dotter wanted to spend her time today watching TV.  I said, “No way, Jose!”, and dragged her out into the backyard to kick the soccer ball around a few times.

And then I dragged her on a hike.

Lately, she has been quite down on the idea of hikes.  All summer long, at summer camp, she avoided most of the hikes because her gymnastics class was scheduled in the middle of the day, ending after the kids were bussed off to wherever that week’s hike was.  When she did go, she pooh-poohed the experience.  My heart sank each time she did that–I love to go hiking, and she seemed to be deciding that Nature, and walking, and looking at the beautiful world around her was just BOR-ing!

Well, bah humbug, says I.  That’s no way to grow up!

So there we were, and it was a glorious day, and I pretty much told her to suck it up, we were going on a hike.

We grabbed the dawg, motored on up to Margaret Pass, where the Little Lady River runs, parked by one of the trailheads, and headed up the lower reaches of Gummint Peak.  The trail was wide and open, alongside a creek that joins the Little Lady River, with many little offshoots of the trail leading to the creek.  The dotter paused to look for rocks to throw:

The trail crossed a neat wooden bridge; I’m not sure why it was built that way, with the two parts:

Then the trail suddenly became small and narrow and steep, heading up a ridgeline very quickly.  I warned the dotter that we would have to come down the trail on our butts because it was so steep, but that only made it more attractive to her.  I tried to take pictures of how steep it was, but none of them showed it properly.  Here the dotter is clowning around on a rock on the trail ahead (and above) me:

There were oodles of fireweed in full fluff, and with scarlet leaves:

The fireweed are splendid wildflowers.  They bloom bright pink flowers all along their stalk, above green leaves; then, when they’re all done blooming, the stems to the flowers turn dark pink, the leaves turn scarlet, and the seeds covered with fluff burst open.  When the wind picks up, the fluff from the fireweed dances off into the skies.

When we got up to a bench on the ridge, we stopped, rested, rehydrated, and took pictures.  First, a vista:

I took the landscape pictures, then the dotter demanded the camera.  First she caught the dawg resting, looking Noble:

Then she did a self-portrait.  Note the faint orange mustache from her Gatorade:

She took a picture of me, but I’m not putting it in here, ’cause it shows my impending wattle, yuck.

Then we turned around and slid back down the trail.  The dotter wanted to go back up and slide back down, but I nixed that idea; the butt of her blue jeans was getting pretty damned grubby by that time, and I was afraid that any more grinding action would engrain the dirt to the point where it was impossible to ever get out again.

On the way up and back down, I was constantly clicking the camera, grabbing shots of autumn colors.  Some more fireweed:

Some berries (not edible, I think):

Purty fall colors:

Once we were back at the trailhead, we crossed the road to the Little Lady River, and played on the rocks and in the water.  The dotter collected a large number of speckled rocks, which she proudly proclaimed were river dinosaur eggs, and that the eggs needed to be right at the edge of the water to hatch, so that the baby river dinosaurs could just swim away when they hatched.

Then we went home.  On the drive home, the dotter informed me that she just loved hiking, and could we do it every weekend?  Har.  My nefarious scheme is working!