Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Huckleberry Hikin'

I'm a bit behind in updating our adventures. This "hike" happened the last weekend of August. I put "hike" in quotes because these berry-picking outings don't really involve all that much hiking. First, you have to drive up to the mountains as if you are going to go for a real hike.

You will see pretty flowers like these.

And wispy things like these.

And red seed-pod things like these. Together, the red, white, and blue was so stunning.

You do have to walk across some of the alpine fields to get to the berries. The pups like that part a lot.

My three best friends enjoying the warm sunshine. The temps were perfect this day, and while there were several other cars parked along the forest road, we had the fields to ourselves. So peaceful!

 Some of the berries were up high, but mostly they were very low-growing this year, and we could practically sit in one spot to load up our buckets. We had gone in search of huckleberries, but found far more blueberries ready. By far more, I mean we came home with 7 lbs. of mountain blueberries.  That wasn't the best part of the day, though.

This was the best part. Otter finally got to go again. At 13.5 years old, he has had to sit out the hiking for awhile now, but today he was able to come along and enjoy the mountains again and more than a few berries. My sweet huckleberry hound.