Category: Life’s Adventures

Well, August is just around the corner. Lots has been going on (as always) so here’s an update with plenty of pictures.

Evie took a full time position at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix which, works out pretty well in that it’s a 9-month on 3-months off arrangement. We’ll be living in Scottsdale and finding a place to escape to during the summer, hard to beat that.

Summer Travels

The Grand Junction & Carson City Off-Roads did not go quite as planned. A flat tire in Junction and a failing back at Carson City didn’t result in great results, but still fun places to hangout and ride. Thanks to good friends for the accommodations and fun.

Prior to Carson City, Evie and I had our bikes stolen. I eventually got mine back (miraculously), but Evie’s is still at large in Albuquerque.

My dad and I went on a pretty spectacular hiking trip the week after Carson City. We hiked down to the Gunnison river at the Curecanti Needle and then up above 12,000 feet to Ice Lake which, was still covered in snow making for a tough last mile or so, but me made it.

Filling in the gaps of our travels were a few trips to Trestle to ride DH, Tucson and Sunrise to scope out the courses for the MBAA enduro series this fall, and spending time in Colorado Springs with the niece and nephews.

Lucy Update

Lucy is doing better, her leg is healing, but her side to side stability will probably never regain full strength. She is running and jumping and swimming so that’s been good to see. We will keep working with her and monitor her legs.

Here is a collection of pictures from our summer adventures…

Last week Lucy injured her rear left leg while playing ball. I had to carry her home from the park and it lay limp for the first few days afterwards. The vet gave her some Vetprofin to help with inflammation and we took her to a orthopedic doctor yesterday. The doc said it’s a partial Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CCL) tear and also thinks her other leg experienced a similar tear years ago.

Surgery was presented as an option, but she is likely to end up with some arthritis when she gets older either way. After doing a little research we found a number of cases where the dog healed without surgery back to near full strength.

After 5-7 days she has started showing signs of improvement, but has a long way to go. Since ligaments are not living things they won’t grow back, instead scar tissue will develop around the knee area to stabilize it. We are going to give it 6-8 weeks and see if we can rehab her, then reassess to see if surgery will be needed.

I’m hoping her days of trail running, swimming, and ball chasing aren’t over just yet. At 4-1/2 she has a lot of years still in her. In the meantime, we’ll try and keep her from running and will need to crate rest her for quite some time.

The last two weeks are my favorite two training weeks of the year. Big rides means adventures and exploring! My goal for my big weak this year was to get in 30k feet of climbing in 7 days. I finished the week at ~24 hours and 35,000′ of elevation gain. Here are some photos from my adventures (and yes, they’re all from Arizona!)

Now the fun and games are over and it’s time to get down to business!