Fun little daily-ish sketch by Nicole.
Literally Another Shitty Morning
At nearly four in the morning, the bedroom light switched on. When my eyes opened I saw my wife heading out the door. There was a mumbly verbal exchange between us. I didn’t know what she had said was going on. All I knew was the light was on and there only one dog on the bed.
By the time I got up and walked toward the door she was in the hall holding onto Bleu, the guy pictured above. You may remember him from this post. Well, Bleu was it again! Although this time he did us a solid and broke out his old trick/conversation piece. He did all of his business in the bathtub.
That is right, when our dog needs to have an unscheduled bathroom break, he will sometimes use the bathtub. It is feat he developed on his own when he was a puppy. In those early days, we would put him in the bathroom when we had to leave him at home. When we got home it was quick and easy to clean up the tub.
He is a smart guy. To keep him in the bathroom required two baby gates, a flattened cardboard box, three shoes and a hanger. We would erect this contraption each day, once we found out that not only one, but two baby gates were not enough to keep him in the bathroom longer than five minutes. Why didn’t we simply close the door? Because his big brother, Jake, would have chewed through it to get to him.
Back to almost four in the morning Monday morning, I walked into bathroom and flipped on the fan. The smell was awful. Then I started to clean the tub as quick as possible. There was a lot, more than this little dog has ever produced. For a moment I wondered if Jake, his big brother from another mother, had done all this. I decided that since Jake had never done this once in eleven years, the he wouldn’t start now. The only other logical explanation was that some other dog had snuck into our place and had pooped in our tub. I totally bought that for a moment before I realized how idiotic that sounded.
While I cleaned the tub, my wife held Bleu at arms length and told me how severe the situation was. I interrupted her story by asking her rhetorically, “Why is it on the walls? How pressurized was he?” That is when she repeated her story. It was four in the morning, no one comprehends well at that time of day.
So the bathtub trick is usually excellent for cleaning up. However this time, it had a negative impact. Upon exiting, Bleu, had slipped and fallen back into the mess. Which explained the weird smear on the top of the tub and the walls. All that commotion was enough to wake up my wife. As Bleu strolled into the bedroom, she realized what had happened. She caught him right before he launched onto our bed. Which would have made the day even better!
Now I understood it all. That is why I was bathing Bleu and she was mopping the floors at four in the morning. Oh well, we still love him. Somebody has to. He is fine now.
Parkhurst Ruins
A few meters in we came across a wooden plank and we both took that as a good sign and a mark of the former settlement that we were looking for. Within the next minute we rounded the bend and my wife said she saw a building. I looked up and there was Parkhurst. A year in the making! I don’t think I have ever been so happy to find a busted ass building, a shit house and two even more busted ass buildings in the middle of no where. There was also a car, which seemed to serve as a village gate marker or a city limits sign. However, the car seemed to be a later model that was just left behind years after the site was abandoned.
Parkhurst from the trail
Clearly people have been there and have had a few parties, but some items from the collapse seemed to have been left behind. A rusted kerosene can and oven seem to be from the appropriate time. There is also a bathtub, which looked a little to modern, but could have been a part of Parkhurst. Deeper in the woods there are more vehicles that were left behind, however, we decided to leave those for our next trip.
As we took photos of the main house, it began to shower and I thought, What if this is a down pour and we are forced to hang out in this old house for a few hours. Honestly, I thought it would have been pretty neat. Sure it wasn’t the cleanest place, but I have seen worse. It was such a tiny house. I guess it would be the size of an IKEA display room, but one would have to go outside to use the bathroom. There seemed to have been two bedrooms and a common area that perhaps had been a kitchen as well. Perhaps the collapsed building just outside though had served as a mess hall for the entire camp though. The toilet was just outside the door, in a small building conveniently labelled “Shit House” by a helpful graffitti artist.
Parkhurst’s only resident seemed to be a chipmunk who I first believed to be a rat. I think the chipmunk was offended by, as it climbed into plain sight and sat on collapsed building. It was then that I realized that rats are more of an urban animal, which suddenly made the ruins around us feel a lot cleaner.
Parkhurst’s only resident, a Chipmunk
My wife told me that she had seen the water spicket on the way in, before the car that had distracted me from the sound of running water. Lo and behold, there it was! Clean and continually running water. Right out of the pipe. Over seventy years old and no one has shut it off and Nestle hasn’t found it. My wife walked through the water and kept going into the woods. I followed after her. She had found at least one more derelict building. This one had mostly been reclaimed by nature. Only a wall somewhat remained upright. Such a little portion of a building that no one had even seemed to care to tag it.
With such success we decided to head back and leave the tractor that is closer to the shore of Green Lake for another trip, perhaps next year. We are thinking this trail could be a yearly thing. It is gigantic and actually leads to Whistler and beyond.
National Dog Day 2015
Today is possibly the happiest holiday there can be and therefore, the best. Just a bunch of people telling their dogs, “Happy National Dog Day!” Maybe giving their best friends some treats or taking them for extra special walks! Heck, maybe some people can even bring them to work. All the while dogs just wag their tails like crazy and do something cute. As they are vessels of endless joy.
The boys on the trail
These are our two boys, Jacoby and Bleu, brothers from other mothers. Jake was about a year and half old when Bleu came along. According to the little man, Bleu, they are inseparable. There was one little spat, but that was just working out some logistics in dog. If we take Jake to the vet, Bleu will lie by the door and wait for his return. Intermittently emitting his nasally moan, “Mmmmmmmmm.”
Bleu with his crazy ears
It stands to reason that Bleu is a big fan of Jake. As a mutt, Jake has herding, retrieving and pointing instincts. A blue collar dog with no pretensions who is truly a dog’s dog. The kind of dog that likes to swim, chew bones, and play fetch all day long. The kind of dog that may prefer to sleep on the couch, but can take a nap anywhere. Jake seemed to teach Bleu how to be a dog. Aside from swimming – Bleu loathes water – little man learned it all.
However, it isn’t just Bleu who has benefited from Jake. Little man helped out the big guy in a huge way. Jake suffers from separation anxiety. Seems to be from the blue heeler or the need to have a pack or herd present at all times. Having a buddy around has really helped him stay calm over the years. The positive effects were almost immediate.
Jake chillin’ on the couch
Both are now considered seniors or as we like to call them, the George Clooney years. Where they get that salt and pepper look that makes them irresistibly handsome. They may get tired a little quicker, but they still maintain a youthful energy.
Parkhurst: Last Year and Now
Exactly a year ago, so exactly it was almost down to within the hour, my wife and I attempted to find Parkhurst, a ghost town just north of Whistler. We had briefly read the directions before going, but got a little confused on the whole keep the railroad tracks on our right part. So instead we decided to take the more trodden trail. We spent all day on the trail and tried many of the offshoots which lead to a logging base and several dead ends. We climbed some big ass rocks and sat for a bit. At the end we thrust our feet into the glacier fed river. Which is now an annual tradition. While we had a great time, we never found Parkhurst.
This time we read the directions a little better. Since we already knew all the ways to not get there and that literally keeping the tracks on your right leads to a dead rail system, we had hope this would end better. We knew now to walk over those tracks and keep the straight ones on our right. We passed a group of returning hikers and found the sign and pink markers not to long after that. For the next couple of hours we would not see anyone else.
I know that the term ghost town sounds far more eerie that it actually is, but the trail to Parkhurst, at least this route was eerily serene. Moss covers almost every square inch of forest floor. The detritus on the path is so incredibly spongy that we felt like we could walk on it forever. Sinking and bouncing with every step. Not far from the trail head we came across a refrigerator door, which gave us the feeling that we were on the right path. There were still several kilometers left to hike though.
Fridge door outside of Parkhurst.
Last year, the sun had been out and it was a scorcher of a day. On this day, we were sporadically visited by showers and clouds hung overhead the entire time. The weather kept us cool and added to the eerie gloom of the woods. We rarely heard birds and saw no other animals almost the entire time. A gargantuan moss covered rock sat to our rights. Clearly it had once long ago belonged to the mountainous formation to our left. Of course whatever had happened, happened long ago as the forest had grown around it, on it, and even under it as the hollow implied.
Parkhurst Loop
Trees grown far apart shot straight up. One could simply walk in almost any direction and not be impeded by the foliage. However, the terrain would cause some issue. We continued on and while the path was almost always clear, we could tell that not too many people had come this way. There were points where it became interpretive and other points were challenging to traverse due to being no more than the width of a foot or rocky. We really felt like we were truly far off the beaten paths and alone.
After climbing a grade for what seemed like an eternity, I figured we should be getting close. I have to admit, I was more than a little concerned about screwing it up and not seeing Parkhurst yet again. My head was constantly turning to the left and looking up the slope and turning to the right and looking down for any indication of the remains of the town.
Our trail finely spit us out on the a bit of larger trail and we saw the huge pink band wrapped around another tree, but there was another fork in the road. After a brief discussion and a bit of agony we decided to take the trail on the right, which seemed to run mostly parallel with the one we had been on. To the best of our knowledge, this seemed like the way to Parkhurst.
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