It was late morning when we left, but Christian didn't want to stay a moment longer with the psycho pup. We originally was supposed to stay the weekend and leave Monday morning, but it was just getting miserable. So we decided to brave the weekend traffic over staying longer in Oregon for all the reasons I outlined in my last post.
We knew that there is no way to make it home in one push safely while starting out so late, so we planned to take the scenic route back and camp in the Mono Basin area. We decided to head east in Oregon and travel down to California from there as we have never gone through there before. We drove to Ashland and headed over to Klamath Falls. It was a beautiful drive. We enjoyed it very much. Christian seemed to even breath easier by the time we got to Ashland.
I don't know if it was the mountain air or that maybe he is even allergic to dogs but he seemed to revive shortly after heading back out on the road. The dog thing didn't seem likely as he grew up with dogs but they generally lived outside and we've even spent the night where they had dogs in the house before, but we never spent that much time with a dog living in the house and he did seem to get sicker and sicker the longer we stayed, so it might be a possibility. He had some lingering symptoms of his sickness when he got there but it was much improved. By the time we were out on the road, he was back to just having some lingering affects again.
A couple of older people in our ward died of a lung infection recently and while we were away, another person died, but we were not made aware of who it was or what they died of. Either way, there seems to be something new going around.
We stopped by to check out Glass Mountain. We wanted to come see it last year with Caitlyn but there were a lot of fires here that mostly closed the area. It is a big mound of obsidian. We scrambled up a little way but did not venture far from our vehicle. The volcanic rock were really sharp and you didn't want to take a fall on this stuff.
We had dinner in Susanville and found our camping spot near Mono Lake. It was a bit trashy as other people definitely used this spot a lot for camping, partying, and target practice. But we were tired and it was sufficiently out of the way for us to rest for the night. We did not plan to stick around.
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It was a pretty pleasant night when we stopped but shortly after we got up he next morning, the wind started blowing again. We quickly packed up and explored some more roads on our way home. We found some neat rocks we are considering returning with the kids to climb.
We took the Casa Diablo trail that let out near Bishop. It was a really nice trail and I would love to return there some day...hopefully when it is cooler because it was quite hot out by the afternoon. We were enjoying ourselves so much, we considered staying an extra night out in the Sierras and return Monday after all.
While traveling down the trail, however, we found a lost sheep. It was either hurt and/or lost as we passed a flock of sheep five miles back and this one was sitting despondently on the side of the road. Christian tried to give it some water and it sucked a quart of water in no time flat. When Christian tried to walk away, it finally wobbled up on it's feet to try to follow Christian. We gave it another quart of water and decided to go back to alert the shepherd of his missing sheep as we gave it almost all of our water. We forgot to fill up before leaving Oregon and figured we would refill in Bishop.
We had passed a bunch of trucks that we thought might be in charge of the sheep, but they turned out to be a big pack outfit taking tourists down the trail on horseback. They were taking the trailers out ahead of the pack and leaving water and stuff for the horses. They had noticed the sheep as well and tried to give it water too. When they heard that we had given the sheep all our water, they offered us some of theirs. We took it for the sheep.
We continued on to where we saw the flock being watered by a truck but there was no one there. Some of the sheep had wandered off. Some were sitting under the truck with a few sheep dogs trying to hide from the relentless sun. We saw a trailer not far away and decided to see if the shepherd was in his trailer. He was, but he was a Mexican guy who didn't speak a lick of english. Christian tried his best to relate the information to him. He seemed to get the gist of the information...kind of. As he closed up his trailer and started walking down the road towards where we indicated his lost sheep was. Unfortunately, he was walking and had no way to really rescue the sheep and he didn't even take any water for himself so he was likely to end up needing to be rescued as well. We tried to tel him the sheep was five miles away, but we are not certain how much he understood.
We only had two seats and the back of the Jeep was packed to the gills so there was no way to offer him a ride and could not communicate the situation to him clearly since he didn't speak any english and we did not know enough Spanish to explain the situation to him. We were very frustrated but there wasn't anything else we could do. We returned to the sheep and gave it another half gallon of water. It got up and tried to follow Christian a bit, so he thought many he could just walk it back partway and meet the shepherd down the road but it would not walk more than a few steps before slumping back down on the ground. It was then that we knew for sure that it was suffering from heat exhaustion as we do not know how long it was separated from the rest of the flock and it was really hot out. It wobbled back up on it's legs and limped over to the Jeep. It tried to get under our Jeep for some shade but it was next to the hot engine block and couldn't really fit anyway so it was in a bunch worse position.
We couldn't just leave the sheep there though because now, it was in the middle of the road. In the end, Christian build a little shade for it with some tumble weeds and bushes. We cracked open another little small bottle of water and gave it little sips to lure it across the road to the other side and into the little shelter next to the road. It took a while, but it finally managed and slumped into the shade where hopefully the shepherd would find it. After all the water it got, we hoped that by the time the sun went down, it will have revived enough from sitting in the shade to be able to move on it's own.
It was a pretty crazy day so far. We had a headwind the entire way up to Oregon and a headwind half the way back down. I'm not even sure how that is possible. The hardtop on the Jeep doesn't fit really well so when the wind hits it just right, it makes it really loud and obnoxious in the vehicle. We had a headache by the time we reached Oregon from the noise. We figured that since we had a headwind all the way up, we might have a tail wind on the way down, but it was not to be. In the end, we stopped and put duct tape across the top where the top meets the windshield and it made it tolerable again.
If it was not for the infernal wind, I think we might have stayed an extra night out there.
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