When people hear that I travel without a guide book I often get the most bizarre looks. The reality is some of my best experiences have been getting lost, the guidebook is travrler while I am a Traveller. The Traveler is the anti tourist.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Thursday, April 7, 2016
Campo (mile 0) to Laguna (mile 41.5)
March 29th PCT update:
So by 3/28 -- I made it 42 miles to mt. laguna by 10:30am to meet my dad, daughter kim, and gravy (dog) for the first resupply from my trail crew. 2608 miles remaining, temporarily delayed due
to weather.
My crew arrived a bit early and got to experience the awesome pct hiker culture that I've been immersed in. We went into the only cafe+tavern in town where the owner explained they are normally closed but open during PCT hiker season and serve hiker oriented foods. Interesting fact: apparently 100% of hikers say "yes" to whip cream on their hot chocolate and mochas, whereas about 70% of non-hikers say "no thank you". The vibe in the resturant is one big community, the conversations move across tables since it's one hiker community.
By the time I arrived my crew already had situational awareness on where everybody was and what was going on. I had left early in the morning and so throughout the day other people I'd left behind
started arriving in town. Nobody could leave because there was a storm coming, and everybody was hoping it might miss the mountain.
By noon we knew it wouldn't miss and we'd have a night of 100mph winds + snow (aka "type 3 fun"). Most hikers either got a room at the lodge, often sharing with others, sleeping on the floors, etc. or hiked another 4.5 miles off trail to a semi-sheltered campground.
I'm a pretty social and fun guy so I've already made a lot of friends, which is very easy to do
when you happen to be walking with somebody for a few miles at a time, or sharing a small campground with them. My new hiking friends got to meet my family and dog who they'd heard about. My dads logistical knowledge of the local area geography, history, and flora was appreciated by all.
After that I followed advice I had received in Lake Morena from Reebo and went to see Dave at Laguna Mountain outfitters for help reducing my pack weight/eliminating things I don't need.
Laguna Mountain outfitters is a little store in the mountains with a cooler outside full of free cold beer and soda for thru-hikers, and a well equipped hiker box. Inside it's packed wall to wall 10 ft
high with every piece of gear you can imagine. this store sells all the serious ultralight packs made out of materials like sail cloth, etc. Even the bathroom is packed full of gear.
Dave and his staff have each done the PCT several times they are all rock stars in the PCT community. Dave and his team are considered "must see" gurus for proper gear shakedowns. A great guy, super patient, and we spent a few hours going over my pack configuration with various friends coming by and offering their advice. During a shakedown your entire life (pack) is laid out on the
floor and you need to justify each piece of equipment. The goal is to reduce my gear volume BEFORE selling me a smaller lighter pack. He'd like to make sure everybody who he outfits is able to finish and have a great time.
The optimal goal weight to be considered "ultra-light" is to be below 15 lbs gear, including pack,
before food and water.
Ultra-light (as I learned from Heath) makes the hike so much easier on the body,
thereby allowing the body to avoid take such a beating while walking.
The running joke on the trail was that REI loves to sell big packs because they are so easy to
fill with crap, and so shakedowns are a pretty common thing for him. He offered to send all my
crappy REI gear back to their returns dept. by mail which was very tempting, and it was nice to
have that option. I think figuring out how to get crap out of my pack is sort of a metaphor for life, and ultralight hiking seems to great for teaching lessons of simplifying life. I had just done my own shakedown in the back of my truck so my configuration was pretty lean and so there wasn't a lot for him to do.
Dave did NOT like my tablet, but was supportive of me working on the trail (he said he'd only met
one other guy 'a graphic designer' who had actually done it). Dave suggested I put tabby in
a bounce box which is a basically a 5 gallon bucket with a lid that i send from town to town ahead
of me and then pick up from the post office. I explained I planned to work at night from my tent,
and he was even less of a fan since it meant i needed a bigger and more sturdy tent than the 1 lb
ultralight tarp that uses my treking polls for infrastructure. Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
While in the outfitters other hikers are coming and going, most of them I'd already met,
everybody was waiting to see if anybody else would be fool-hardy enough to brave the storm.
In the afternoon the Forest service stopped by to learn if anybody was out there.
(Interesting note: Dave and his staff are often the ones who need to go out and save lost+frozen
hikers on Mt. Laguna.)
Dave had told me earlier in the day that this was going to be one of the worst storms he'd seen
and that I should *absolutely* under no circumstances contemplate leaving.
Since this was only my third day of backpacking -ever- I have nothing to prove,
and 100mph winds+snow seemed more than a little advanced for my meager skills.
I'd risk losing at least a few thousand dollars worth of gear, possibly my life.
So I'd be staying at the lodge, or getting a ride back to valley center.
Several other hikers asked if I wanted to share a hotel room at the lodge, $75/night -- split X ways. I'm not really into sharing rooms, or campsites since it's been my limited experience tired hikers often snore. The slow mountain dsl internet was overloaded due to 3-4 hikers per room and frankly with the number of people coming behind me and the fact i had an 'easy out' made me feel it was more responsible to grab a ride home leaving room for somebody else. I'm sure the hiker parties in Laguna would have been fun.
But was even more happy to be home, and surprise my 95yr old Grandmother and share my
wonderful tales of adventure with her and eat a few more of the cookies she had baked for my trip
that I couldn't bring due to weight.
The plan is to be back on trail Friday morning at 6am, the remainder of the "A" section is
only about an hours drive from my parents house.
Although this was only day 3 of hiking, I realize I'm stronger and more fit than most of the people
who are currently doing the PCT, although I'm not hiker ripped yet, so if I put my heart into this
in a month or two I'll be a badass able to do 30-40 miles per day. My body and heart are already
ready for that, my feet and pack weight were my only limiters, otherwise I could have run.
My starting body weight was 199 lbs/90kg and I'd really like to drop about 50 lbs/22kg. So far I dropped 4 lbs in 3 days while eating candy and other crap. I'm going to switch to healthier more natural foods for the next leg. I need to find healthy food that is about 100 calories and ounce
and not too bulky.
I'm happy to be home for a few days and reflect. I started this hike super early in the season
so these types of delays are more or less expected. I would have liked to have gone further but my
feet can heal up. Several trail names have been suggested for me including "the office", "snake
sweeper" and "duct tape", though I'd like to go for a few hundred miles before choosing.
Taking breaks is totally allowed on the PCT, as long as I hike the whole thing within a calendar
year I'm still considered a "thru hiker" (instead of a "section hiker" who does different sections
each year) .. and at this point I can't wait to get back.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
PCT 2016 starts in 4 days -- wow!
So I'm mostly ready to start my PCT through-hike in 4 days (March 26th).
I say mostly ready because I don't know that anybody is ever actually "ready" for this type of thing unless they've done it before.
My starting pack weight will be approx 45 lbs which includes about 10lbs of water, and 10lbs of food.
The plan:
Day #1 -- hike 19 miles to Lake Morena which is my first day goal .. if all goes well I'll be there Sat. night. .. after that I'll gauge distance, etc. and communicate further plans.
Water:
I'm starting with ~6 liters of water, that includes a 1.5 liter camelback bladder and 5 1L smart water bottles. This should get me 19 miles to Lake Morena with a few liters to spare.
Food:
If all goes according to plan my "goto" meal on the trail will be tortillas, peanut butter, nutella, and bananas - quick and easy to prepare. I'm also bringing 5 days worth of oatmeal, some various candy and gu packets, and two days worth of MRE rashions as well as tiny plastic bottle of cholula hot-sauce.
Gear:
I'll revise this later, certain pieces are still in flux. I'm bringing a 65L backpack.
Camping:
Until I know my distance over various terrain. Likely camping spots include: Lake Morena, Julian, Agua Caliente, and eventually Idlywild which I intend to make within 10-14 days (around 200 miles).
If you're in San Diego and you're interested in meeting up/camping whatever drop me a line on facebook http://www.facebook.com/brian.horakh
Friday, February 26, 2016
A fun night of Sushi & Whiskey with Dan J.
When I rolled into San Diego I posted on Facebook that I'd love to
reconnect with old friends.
Dan J reached out to me and said my life seems to have gotten interesting and he wanted to reconnect. When we originally met about 8 years ago I was under a lot of stress and didn't really put the energy into the friendship (or any) that I should have. At that moment in my life I was running Zoovy, I was depressed and isolated. I felt the entire world was always against me, and for that reason I had avoided all personal relationships. Zoovy had taught me that everybody I trusted would eventually hurt me, and I worked all the time, so I didn't really have friends outside of work. Dan was a system admin who came in after Eric Z left. Dan had his own consulting company, and agreed to come on as a consultant/backup. I always thought he liked the elegance of our architecture, and Zoovy was probably more technically savvy and had more fun problems than most of his other clients -- he was a great mentor+sounding board for Nick D.
We agreed on Thursday and Dan suggested sushi and told me he had a place which was great. We met at a restaurant called Sushi Tadokoro, it's sort of right outside old town, but fortunately avoids the parking mess. I enjoy sushi, but I'd self assess that I'm probably less snobbish than most of my other friends who enjoy sushi. I love pickled ginger (or pickled anything), I enjoy playing with wasabi, chili, ponzu, and the other sauces. I personally enjoy the game of finding the right combination of sauces to take boring sushi and making it epic.
Dan's a regularish at Tadokoro which he said was one of only two authentic Japanese resturants in San Diego, it definitely had a different vibe. He ordered a carafe of a cold sake "Gino" I think, which I think was extremely good, but I'm not a sake expert. (note to self: need to do more sake research) Then a new experience (for me) happened, we were both asked to choose an ornate sake cup from a wall with probably 50-75 different cups of colors, shapes and sizes. I'm not sure what the meaning of this was, but I immediately knew which one I wanted and was very happy with my choice, Dan asked for his regular cup I think.
Dan seemed to know what he was doing at this place so I asked him to take point on ordering. He grinned knowingly, and announced the plan is we would let the universe decide aka "all chefs special" so we both had no idea what we were getting, we'd both get served the same dishes. He also assured me it'd start tame, and get progressively more and more obscure/interesting and amazing.
Since we last met (probably 8 years ago) Dan has grown emotionally a ton, he's lost a lot of physical weight as well, I told him he got younger, and most distinctly he has a budda-esque inner calm about him that wasn't there before (or at least I couldn't recognize it last time). As dinner progressed I learned we shared an eerily similar relationship with the universe, and we had a lot to talk about/catch up on. We both like to mentally spar with the other and so there was a lot of quick witted fun going back and forth as we became personally acquainted.
Dan shared he's got a great job at a large Linux open source company (who I won't mention, but you'd know), he works from home about 3-5 hours per week which he squeezes in between cooking gourmet meals and masturbation. He is focusing on his lifelong goal of being a full time author, he's doing quite well financially, thinking about buying an apartment building. I wondered if he'd actually enjoy being a landlord of apartments or if it would be a distraction to his chill life, but I kept the thought to myself.
Dan has decided he would like to solve distributed democracy (blockchain voting) problem and we spent a bit of time dissecting that .. it's his lifelong project, he wants help, it sounds interesting but it's still very rough and clearly requires technology that as far as I know hasn't been invented yet. I told him I'm going to introduce him to Jay because I think Jay will have some excellent ideas on the project, it works in way similar to bitcoin, I also think they'll get a long.
I showed Dan a little about my gigomatic idea and he had some helpful ideas. Dan told me his special skill (what I would call a superpower) is the ability to figure out the next step(s) in a process, it's just easy for him and I told him that was "very cool" and immediately wanted his help with Gigomatic since I find myself stuck all the time. He explained how he did that, so now all I need to do is ask myself "What would Dan tell me to do" -- and then worst case I can phone a friend. :-)
I was entertained by him explaining a paradox in the book Moby Dick, did Ahab really die. Dan's was entertained by my Trail Shenanigans game and hopefully will be sending me some books to read on the trail (including his own published sci-fi book). After he took me through how he does his research and writing process, and learning how his brain processes -- I'm definitely excited about reading it, I'm sure it will be good. I'm thinking this PCT trip is going to be epic.
The dinner was great, one of the best sushi dinners I've ever had. It started with various standard stuff like tuna and halibut sashimi .. all meat that I recognized by sight, but by the third or fourth plate it delved into the obscure. It was amazing -- UNTIL the chef served the live prawns (which I've had before, but not for a while). After the prawn was put on my plate, within a few moments I found myself mentally communicating as if by ESP (the "E" is for emotional). The prawn told me his name was Spike and he was very scared to be on the plate, he didn't know what was going on but he couldn't move. I told Spike things didn't look good for him, he couldn't move because his tail was sitting adjacent to him AND that *I* was supposed to eat it, and eventually eat him as well. Spike said "what the fuck dude" and wiggled a bit, he asked for his tail back and to be released into the ocean. At that moment I realized I was communicating with a crustacean. Dan had noticed my hesitation had come to the conclusion I had a fear of eating live food and told not to worry about it. I explained I wasn't afraid, in fact I've eaten live sushi before.
I explained the situation and introduced Dan to Spike. We concluded at this point I was a bit more in tune with the universe and the level of violence and torment towards Spike seemed unnecessary to me. Spike was sitting on the plate listening to us talk about him. By the end Spike's tiny crustacean brain had accepted he was going to die, he knew it, but he still didn't want to watch me eat his tail, at the same time, I didn't want to waste his tail, he told me to eat it, quickly .. so I quickly dipped it into some ponzu and ate it as Spike and Dan watched on. Dan then asked the waitress to have Spikes head cooked, which I ate as well, but I definitely did not enjoy eating my fried friend. Having to tear into Spikes thorax made me sad, I imagined him swimming through the ocean, until one day he was caught. I ate two more tasteless dishes and realized I was overcome with guilt and asked Dan if we could get the check and continue our discussion at a whiskey/therapy bar. Dan said he wasn't a whiskey nerd, and I explain I wasn't either, in fact I'd never been to whiskey bar, but that it was a bucket list item for me that I wanted to explore and I thought it would be fun. He agreed.
Authors NOTE: I realize that the crustacean is effectively a bug, and bugs have no ability to process pain and they will all eventually die, probably a brutal death. I felt like the presentation was unnecessary. Dan picked up dinner and told me I could buy the whiskey, and I must admit I felt better knowing he was the one who paid the sushi chef to brutally dismember, and then subsequently cook my recently-deceased friend spike. RIP spike the prawn.
We went down the road to Aero club which advertises itself as a whiskey bar, but it's basically a dive bar not far from the airport. Upon entering there were hundreds of bottles of whiskey from around the world. I know virtually nothing about whiskey. Dan made a bee-line for the restroom told me to buy the whiskey and "not the cheap stuff", and I went over and made friends with the bartender (Barbara). She handed me a book with probably 75 pages of whiskey and descriptions, I explained I hadn't studied and was unprepared for the test. I explained I was there with a friend who had just treated me to a wonderful and expensive sushi dinner and so we wanted to explore "the good stuff". She laughed and told me what I wanted was a "not jameson" whiskey. Barbara the Bartender took great care of us .. they had hundreds of types, and so it was a lot of fun and I left with a lot more confidence in my ability to discern different types of whiskey's from all over the world. .. at various points I was also really drunk, but after an hour or so I was okay to drive, one of the advantages of coming down from the mountains is my liquor tolerance has increased or I've simply trained my liver to deal with it. I think we had probably 7 or 8 glasses each over the course of a few hours. I've got photos of the bottles I liked, but the Bastille French whiskey was certainly one of my favorites. She told me I was the most fun customer of the night because I wasn't like the other whiskey snobs she usually gets, I actually wanted to learn something.
Afterwards I drove Dan back to his place and walked Gravy all around mission hills while discussing so many nerdy topics I wouldn't even know where to start. Lots of fun, got home about 1am and crashed. I still need to work on Vita and Gigomatic this weekend.
Dan J reached out to me and said my life seems to have gotten interesting and he wanted to reconnect. When we originally met about 8 years ago I was under a lot of stress and didn't really put the energy into the friendship (or any) that I should have. At that moment in my life I was running Zoovy, I was depressed and isolated. I felt the entire world was always against me, and for that reason I had avoided all personal relationships. Zoovy had taught me that everybody I trusted would eventually hurt me, and I worked all the time, so I didn't really have friends outside of work. Dan was a system admin who came in after Eric Z left. Dan had his own consulting company, and agreed to come on as a consultant/backup. I always thought he liked the elegance of our architecture, and Zoovy was probably more technically savvy and had more fun problems than most of his other clients -- he was a great mentor+sounding board for Nick D.
We agreed on Thursday and Dan suggested sushi and told me he had a place which was great. We met at a restaurant called Sushi Tadokoro, it's sort of right outside old town, but fortunately avoids the parking mess. I enjoy sushi, but I'd self assess that I'm probably less snobbish than most of my other friends who enjoy sushi. I love pickled ginger (or pickled anything), I enjoy playing with wasabi, chili, ponzu, and the other sauces. I personally enjoy the game of finding the right combination of sauces to take boring sushi and making it epic.
Dan's a regularish at Tadokoro which he said was one of only two authentic Japanese resturants in San Diego, it definitely had a different vibe. He ordered a carafe of a cold sake "Gino" I think, which I think was extremely good, but I'm not a sake expert. (note to self: need to do more sake research) Then a new experience (for me) happened, we were both asked to choose an ornate sake cup from a wall with probably 50-75 different cups of colors, shapes and sizes. I'm not sure what the meaning of this was, but I immediately knew which one I wanted and was very happy with my choice, Dan asked for his regular cup I think.
Dan seemed to know what he was doing at this place so I asked him to take point on ordering. He grinned knowingly, and announced the plan is we would let the universe decide aka "all chefs special" so we both had no idea what we were getting, we'd both get served the same dishes. He also assured me it'd start tame, and get progressively more and more obscure/interesting and amazing.
Since we last met (probably 8 years ago) Dan has grown emotionally a ton, he's lost a lot of physical weight as well, I told him he got younger, and most distinctly he has a budda-esque inner calm about him that wasn't there before (or at least I couldn't recognize it last time). As dinner progressed I learned we shared an eerily similar relationship with the universe, and we had a lot to talk about/catch up on. We both like to mentally spar with the other and so there was a lot of quick witted fun going back and forth as we became personally acquainted.
Dan shared he's got a great job at a large Linux open source company (who I won't mention, but you'd know), he works from home about 3-5 hours per week which he squeezes in between cooking gourmet meals and masturbation. He is focusing on his lifelong goal of being a full time author, he's doing quite well financially, thinking about buying an apartment building. I wondered if he'd actually enjoy being a landlord of apartments or if it would be a distraction to his chill life, but I kept the thought to myself.
Dan has decided he would like to solve distributed democracy (blockchain voting) problem and we spent a bit of time dissecting that .. it's his lifelong project, he wants help, it sounds interesting but it's still very rough and clearly requires technology that as far as I know hasn't been invented yet. I told him I'm going to introduce him to Jay because I think Jay will have some excellent ideas on the project, it works in way similar to bitcoin, I also think they'll get a long.
I showed Dan a little about my gigomatic idea and he had some helpful ideas. Dan told me his special skill (what I would call a superpower) is the ability to figure out the next step(s) in a process, it's just easy for him and I told him that was "very cool" and immediately wanted his help with Gigomatic since I find myself stuck all the time. He explained how he did that, so now all I need to do is ask myself "What would Dan tell me to do" -- and then worst case I can phone a friend. :-)
I was entertained by him explaining a paradox in the book Moby Dick, did Ahab really die. Dan's was entertained by my Trail Shenanigans game and hopefully will be sending me some books to read on the trail (including his own published sci-fi book). After he took me through how he does his research and writing process, and learning how his brain processes -- I'm definitely excited about reading it, I'm sure it will be good. I'm thinking this PCT trip is going to be epic.
The dinner was great, one of the best sushi dinners I've ever had. It started with various standard stuff like tuna and halibut sashimi .. all meat that I recognized by sight, but by the third or fourth plate it delved into the obscure. It was amazing -- UNTIL the chef served the live prawns (which I've had before, but not for a while). After the prawn was put on my plate, within a few moments I found myself mentally communicating as if by ESP (the "E" is for emotional). The prawn told me his name was Spike and he was very scared to be on the plate, he didn't know what was going on but he couldn't move. I told Spike things didn't look good for him, he couldn't move because his tail was sitting adjacent to him AND that *I* was supposed to eat it, and eventually eat him as well. Spike said "what the fuck dude" and wiggled a bit, he asked for his tail back and to be released into the ocean. At that moment I realized I was communicating with a crustacean. Dan had noticed my hesitation had come to the conclusion I had a fear of eating live food and told not to worry about it. I explained I wasn't afraid, in fact I've eaten live sushi before.
I explained the situation and introduced Dan to Spike. We concluded at this point I was a bit more in tune with the universe and the level of violence and torment towards Spike seemed unnecessary to me. Spike was sitting on the plate listening to us talk about him. By the end Spike's tiny crustacean brain had accepted he was going to die, he knew it, but he still didn't want to watch me eat his tail, at the same time, I didn't want to waste his tail, he told me to eat it, quickly .. so I quickly dipped it into some ponzu and ate it as Spike and Dan watched on. Dan then asked the waitress to have Spikes head cooked, which I ate as well, but I definitely did not enjoy eating my fried friend. Having to tear into Spikes thorax made me sad, I imagined him swimming through the ocean, until one day he was caught. I ate two more tasteless dishes and realized I was overcome with guilt and asked Dan if we could get the check and continue our discussion at a whiskey/therapy bar. Dan said he wasn't a whiskey nerd, and I explain I wasn't either, in fact I'd never been to whiskey bar, but that it was a bucket list item for me that I wanted to explore and I thought it would be fun. He agreed.
Authors NOTE: I realize that the crustacean is effectively a bug, and bugs have no ability to process pain and they will all eventually die, probably a brutal death. I felt like the presentation was unnecessary. Dan picked up dinner and told me I could buy the whiskey, and I must admit I felt better knowing he was the one who paid the sushi chef to brutally dismember, and then subsequently cook my recently-deceased friend spike. RIP spike the prawn.
We went down the road to Aero club which advertises itself as a whiskey bar, but it's basically a dive bar not far from the airport. Upon entering there were hundreds of bottles of whiskey from around the world. I know virtually nothing about whiskey. Dan made a bee-line for the restroom told me to buy the whiskey and "not the cheap stuff", and I went over and made friends with the bartender (Barbara). She handed me a book with probably 75 pages of whiskey and descriptions, I explained I hadn't studied and was unprepared for the test. I explained I was there with a friend who had just treated me to a wonderful and expensive sushi dinner and so we wanted to explore "the good stuff". She laughed and told me what I wanted was a "not jameson" whiskey. Barbara the Bartender took great care of us .. they had hundreds of types, and so it was a lot of fun and I left with a lot more confidence in my ability to discern different types of whiskey's from all over the world. .. at various points I was also really drunk, but after an hour or so I was okay to drive, one of the advantages of coming down from the mountains is my liquor tolerance has increased or I've simply trained my liver to deal with it. I think we had probably 7 or 8 glasses each over the course of a few hours. I've got photos of the bottles I liked, but the Bastille French whiskey was certainly one of my favorites. She told me I was the most fun customer of the night because I wasn't like the other whiskey snobs she usually gets, I actually wanted to learn something.
Afterwards I drove Dan back to his place and walked Gravy all around mission hills while discussing so many nerdy topics I wouldn't even know where to start. Lots of fun, got home about 1am and crashed. I still need to work on Vita and Gigomatic this weekend.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
The dog talker.
My life is really awesome these days, I have an airstream trailer, and a great job/career, I get to travel full time with my awesome dog Gravy. I use the Tinder app for meeting local single friends in a new area, especially for finding doggie playdates.
I'm still amazed (especially in San Diego) how many cute, available single ladies have dogs. I'm also upset how many of those are dogs are termed "misbehaving" and they can't take them on walks, etc. One of the sexiest things for me is a person who has a great relationship with their pooch. I believe all dogs want to be good, and when they aren't I think it's a reflection on the owner.
My pooch Gravy came from an Akita rescue, and had a reputation in his foster home for being a horribly misbehaved dog. People who knew him would tell you that his nickname was "bolt" because if he got outside without a leash on he'd be gone, and he could run for miles. We'd usually need to wait for somebody to find him and call us.
Gravy would pull me everywhere, and pull hard, to the point he was choking himself.
He would challenge/attack every single dog on a hiking trail, if it was a male dog that was intact it would be ugly, he'd do his back up, juke, and get out of his collar and attack. I'd have told hold him as tight as I could by the collar and wait for the other dog to pass by (which rarely happened without incident). At dog parks he would immediately find the dog with the tallest legs and immediately start trying to hump it, male or female didn't matter. He didn't listen to any commands, he would not pay attention, if let off leash in a big park he'd just run ahead until he was lost. There was no recall command.
When we moved to the beach we learned Gravy couldn't walk near or around sewer grates, which are basically on every other block. He would get skiddish, start backing up, his collar would come off his thick neck and then he could run away, out into the middle of the street and away much faster than I could muster. I never wore flip flops on a dog walk in fear I'd have to chase him down.
Gravy's also smart enough to open most gates which aren't locked or child proofed. He's ridiculously stubborn. This was my life, this was my dog. I couldn't take him anywhere.
This is the story of how I met Ben the dog trainer. My girlfriend at the time said that Gravy wasn't allowed to go to the beach with her dog anymore. I knew that being excluded from fun activities would make him frantic and even worse behaved.
I resolved to redouble my efforts in getting him trained. I found Ben through an advertisement he had posted on Craigslist. I emailed him, Ben called me back. We had a quick phone call, I explained the situation and problems, he said it was really common, he'd fixed these before, and he could most likely fix all my issues in one 90 'initial' appointment for $70. I was in disbelief and very skeptical, he offered me a money back guarantee if I wasn't completely happy.
At this point in my life I had Gravy for almost 4 years prior to meeting Ben -- I'd tried countless other trainers, shock collars, etc. I couldn't resist the opportunity to pass it up, but I was sure this guy had no idea what he was in for with my problem dog.
Ben came over, and immediately his presence was noted by both our dogs. He put a leash on Gravy and took him for a walk, talking to him and critiquing Gravy. I walked behind him with my girlfriends dog. Ben's technique was spot on, within a few moments of arriving he had established dominance, and within 15 or 20 minutes Gravy was starting to get with the program. After 60 minutes Gravy was effectively "fixed" .. and Ben then spent 30 minutes with me showing me how to do what he had done with Gravy.
Since then Ben and I have become friends, he's a great guy with an amazing skill.
I've told him that he has an amazing skill and he should raise his prices, etc.
I don't know if he still does the money back guarantee. Anyway if you need a dog trainer, I'd highly recommend him.
Monday, February 22, 2016
The PCT Games
I need to update this blog more, I've been using Facebook as a bit of a journal, but friends tell me they have a hard time seeing these updates so I'm going to try blogger again.
I’m departing from the southern terminus of the PCT on Mar 26th. 2016.
I'm in the last few weeks, and as I start prepping my final list, ordering food, etc., it’s now time to publicly share some of my eccentric PCT plans. I’ll provide updates as these events progress via Facebook (feel free to friend/follow me), I hope you all enjoy them and share.
If you can see this message - YOU ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE (and feel free to share with others). Let me know if you'd like to Meet Up, Section Hike w/Me, Glamp / Epic Camp, or play TRAIL SHENANIGANS. (more below)
Saturday, January 30, 2016
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