Ted's Blog

Susan sent me some information about the Georgia Dog Hiking Club. They hike a trail near the dam at Lake Allatoona every Sunday morning.

From Creative Loafing:

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-08-28/happs.html

The home page of the guy who runs it (with info towards the bottom of a very long web page; this guy didn't appear to be there today):

http://home.aol.com/DrBatch/

So we tried it out. I sent an e-mail to the owners of Lucy (formerly Penny a.k.a. Little Katie) so we saw Lucy and Matt out there (I also saw Lucy with both Matt and Rachel last weekend at Stone Mountain for a hike). Today there were probably 20 dogs that came. It was funny seeing all the different dogs (many of them off their leashes which is just as well because you get tangled pretty quickly). Once we started everyone let their dogs off the leashes and pandemonium ensued, but the dogs all got along and our dogs didn't go running off with the others at least.

The first part of the hike was almost straight up a mountainside. In fact it is like walking up the stairs of a 60-story building as you nearly double your elevation above sea level from 700 to 1350 feet at the top of Vineyard Mountain (according to this USGS map). Susan wasn't feeling well at all (she thought she would have to turn back) so we got behind pretty quickly. We caught up or passed other people and their dogs and caught up with the main pack while they were playing in a part of the lake. The dogs thought this was the greatest thing ever. Then we got lost some more, came across some other people with dogs, and finally made it back to the car after 3 hours of hiking (everyone else was gone at this point). It's definitely worth doing and was a lot of fun, but also a major workout. I'm going to need to borrow Jeb's geiger counter next time so I can record the trail.