Today’s hike was “hiking lite” – a very short hike on well groomed trails at McIver state park. It is close to home, and since it is raining hard, and Thor tends to get carsick easily, I thought it would be good to stay relatively close to home and try and see how he did on a short hike.

We left after noon (late since I had to work late last night) and shortly made it to the park. That is a BIG park! I think it took almost as long to find the parking area as it did to drive to the park! The plan was to hike up and down the river a bit – I didn’t want to go too far since Thor is only 19 weeks old and I wasn’t sure how much stamina he had. I figured these trails would be easy and we could walk as far as we wanted and then turn around.

We started at the River Mill Dam:

The water was flowing fast over the dam due to all the rain and it was pretty loud. He got a bit scared when we got closer to the viewpoint, but he did OK. We then continued west along the river. I had to take a picture of him exploring the muddy trail – he was sniffing all over the place – so many new smells:

We went down to the river at one point where it was less turbulent (but still moving pretty quick):

We walked a little farther – to the road crossing. Thor looked like he was getting tired, so we turned around and headed back. When we got back to the road and we saw the truck, he started pulling on the leash like he was saying “C’mon Dad! Hurry up! We are almost back to the truck!”

We ended up hiking around a mile and a half – probably good enough for today. We piled back into the truck and headed home. One tired puppy:

We’ve had some trouble with him getting carsick. The good news is that he didn’t get carsick this time. I think it is due to nerves and hopefully some more trips to fun places will cure him of getting sick.

A very nice, but short day in the woods.