High Sierra Topix

the recent thread in the backpacking forum about taking dogs along made me itchin for some adventure dog photos! show me your most majestic mountain dog photos!

here's one of my two, Lucy, in Canyon Creek (Trinity Alps) a few years ago



Sawtooth Peak and Lucy! by Maia Averett, on Flickr

It appears to me that the saddlebags look pretty wide on that dog. I hope they aren't as heavy as they look. Does the dog tear up the saddlebags because of the width?

dogs learn about their width. Simba picked up on it right away. We train with two poly bottles full. One in each saddlebag.

bobby49 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 24, 2019 2:36 pm It appears to me that the saddlebags look pretty wide on that dog. I hope they aren't as heavy as they look. Does the dog tear up the saddlebags because of the width?

The dog is 75lbs, saddlebags contained 4lbs of food (2lbs each side), her fleece, and her rain jacket, so they look poofy but are pretty light. Total less than 10% of her weight I trained her since she was a puppy with the harness, then empty saddle bags for an entire year before putting any weight in them. She is totally used to the width and doesn't snag them on things.

Here is our Border Collie, Lupe; she weighs about 43 pounds and is 6 years old now. Here she is at Suzi Lake in Desolation Wilderness on her first overnight backpack when she was just a little over a year old. The trip mangled her tender puppy paws due to the sharp rocks on the trail. At that time I did not even think about booties, because we walked her every day. I did not put a pack on her because of her age.
Here she is on her second year's trip in the Wind Rivers in Wyoming, at Enos Lake on the Wind River Indian Reservation. She loves fishing and knows that one of those fish will be hers. This was a 9 day trip. We brought booties but she never needed them. Trails were much less rocky.
Trip into Humphreys Basin. Crossing the stream above Upper Golden Lake.
At Dingleberry Lake in Sabrina Basin. This is a good paw-friendly place to take a dog. She gets in water every chance she can. Loves to swim too. I was carrying her pack because we were just heading up to Fishgut Lake where she would have to scramble up rocks and in some brush.

Nice photos, Daisy...

What a cutie, WD! I grew up with a border collie and think that my Lucy is a border collie mastiff mix. They are excellent companions!

Your dog is also black; do you also have problems with overheating? We have to be very careful to take a route where Lupe can regularly go into water to cool off. If I were to specifically get a backpacking dog, it would be lighter colored and short haired. Hey, but we love our furry ball so we just deal with it.

Here's Shadow on a couple day trips into the Emigrant.

Here are my two from Lilly Lake TH a few years ago. Yellow is Scout, black is Finn. They are tough mountain dogs, no tents or booties for them.
In addition to their own food in their bags, they carry a beer (or 6).