Getting Back on the trail

After a four month duck hunting sabbatical, we are once again hitting the trails.  Usually, duck hunting doesn't interfere with hiking here, because it's usually not good enough to completely monopolize all the time off, but this year was different, in a good way.  Ranger and I are now ready to get out of the river and back on the trail.  Sue is always ready for a hike and Ceilidh helped us to pick up all the decoys, so we're now ready to shift gears and get out in the woods again on the weekends.

We haven't been completely away from the trail, there were a couple of short jaunts with our Lab buddies, but then it was back on the water for more hunting and blogging just didn't seem to happen.

One fall evening, the Labs and Tollers loaded up and headed out to Saddle Rock riparian area for one last after-work hike before the end of daylight savings time.  The canyon was ablaze with gold on the cottonwoods, and the weather was just this side of perfection for hiking. Part of the trip was spent testing out the new GoPro video camera.

The GoPro also got tested at the duck blind, but we're still on the learning curve with this new toy, so experiments abound.

Currently, we've limited our jaunts to hikes in the Tyrone area, either behind my house or across the highway behind where our Lab buddies live, but we did take one road trip down behind Separ mountain, near the Arizona/New Mexico border.  It was really a quail scouting trip, but our hiking buddies don't have to know that.  It was a great hike with great weather. The icing on the cake was when we discovered some pictographs in a small cave. No quail though, there are just not any to be found this year.  Here are some pictures from that journey: