California Wildfires

(Bonita/Ramona, CA) The drive from our campground to the agility trial held in Ramona is a little over an hour. But it was an interesting drive. As it turns out, the trial is held in the hills where the big California wildfires were just a few months ago. In fact, the fire went right through this person’s property.

I don’t know how many acres of property they actually own here but I know it’s in the hundreds. They have hundreds of horses and a lot of buffalo. All the barns were burnt to the ground as was their house. Fortunately they managed to save all the horses. The buffalo all scattered to surrounding areas. Amazingly they were able to round them up. I didn’t see any buffalo but with as much property as they have, that’s not surprising.

The only thing that didn’t burn was their very large aluminum arena. This meant we could still hold agility trials there. While we are very happy for this, it is so sad to see the devastation first-hand that these massive fires did when they ran through here. Notice how the hill behind the area is baren - just black rocks and no vegetation.



Today the trial started at 1:00pm with two runs, Hoopers and Weavers. Only the girls were entered in today’s events. While it was really nice and warm outside, it stayed nice and cool inside which is just perfect for the dogs.

We started with Hoopers and Wazzu truly was running as fast as I’ve ever seen her go. She was so eager to do agility! It really is fun to see such a big smile on her face. There were quite a few dogs there for today’s runs. And you want to know how fast Wazzu was? She got first place! Second place went to a very speedy Sparkie! That gives you some idea of how fast my girl was moving! Way to go Wazzu.

Weavers was next and I wasn’t sure if I should run Wazzu or not. But she seemed so happy that I thought I’d give it a try. Man alive! Who was that dog I was running?! She flew around that course. In fact, she entered the first set of poles so hard that she just about knocked herself out of the poles. But somehow she managed to stay in. She did every set with the perfect style and speed. Wow, that was FUN! Needless to say, she got first place in her class.

Sparkie was a weaving machine…like always. Weaves have become Sparkie’s most reliable obstacle. She can enter from anywhere and go way ahead of Mike. Due to the fact that she uses the two foot hopping style (that’s all she can do with her body type), she can’t quite keep up with the very fastest of border collies but she was right on their heels, coming in 3rd by less than a few tenths of a second.

Boogie still isn’t old enough (nor skillful enough) to do agility yet. But he wanted to let us know that he can jump with the best of them. He proved this by jumping out of the 36” tall ex-pen. No running start – just a straight up and over jump. Great, what a helpful skill….NOT! I guess we have some new training to do.

Debbie
2/8/08