Monty's 2001 Trip to California!



		Down to LA, well, north where one is not in the icky city ;-) It was a long drive that evening from Death Valley to the desert north of LA, but with my handy GPS I was able to make the trip uneventfully. Well, there was one point where the map program had me going straight south. Turns out it is a 30+ mile gravel road through the mountains 4wd high profile vehicle only type of road. Even if I did have a 4wd high profile vehicle, I would not have ventured on this thing in the dark - besides 30+ miles at 20- MPH is a whole lot slower than going 50 or so miles out of the way to get where one is going... I took the long route. A very nice road too - no traffic, the lights of Parump in the distance. I found that a Ford Escort can achieve 105 MPH, but it began to smell funny so I slowed back down to a more reasonable 90 or so ;-) I was off to visit Nicole who is a dog trainer and author of two books (one just about to be published) on how best to work with wolfdog hybrids. Nicole has always had an interest in such animals and has become quite proficient as a trainer of dogs and wolfdogs which she helps owners better prepare for if they have already acquired one. She has a website www.phantompub.com which was not working last night but hopefully is back on line by now. I really like her house dogs, Mojo & Soko, especially Mojo, he is really sweet and despite being a bit of a airhead, is very well trained to do fun things, like turn lights on and off ;-)

The next day we headed over to a wolfdog rescue facility. Den Pals. It is so sad to see so many animals, even when well cared for, which nobody wanted for any number of reasons. Most of the animals were very low content, basically dogs, some from shelters, some from other rescues who felt that they were not worth keeping either... Most were very friendly, some shy. All were obviously well loved as best one can when they have so many....

This guy was running loose in a forest area. He was there for nearly a year and a half, and was very, very wary and shy when they got him, but is now making friends and becoming more and more social. A lot of work is being done to help socialize and train such animals and the more which is done, the better the quality of life an animal has. He can now be taken out for a walk on a leash and is even being worked on so that he will ride in a car.

Indy was given up by his owner, left at a shelter, extremely ill. Nicole was able to get him from the shelter, and lots of vet bills later ended up at one rescue and then to Den Pals. He was soooo happy to see Nic, so I took a bunch of photos. Of course I am not too happy with chain link backgrounds so I had a some adjustments to one and set them in a canyon at Death Valley that I shot the day before ;-)

Some of the animals they have really did not look or act like they had any wolf in them at all. A number of these came from shelters. The animals were considered wolfdogs by their owners, so once deemed part wolf, it is like a death sentence for a shelter dog since shelters do not adopt them out to the public -- so they ended out here, like this recent really nice white dog, Orion. He was very, very sweet and just wanted a home and an owner ...

They also had a lot of house dogs, pugs mostly, but some bulldogs and a few others... I love this photo of these two sitting on a chair. I just set the camera to use ISO 400 and was able to hand hold this with the natural light which was coming through the window. It looks like I had a dog portrait studio set up or something ;-)