Dogs in trekking

I was reading the November 22nd Times of India about an article titled : Can’t take your dogs hiking ? Now hire a professional. The article was about working man’s blues in New Jersey when they left behind their dogs in cramped apartments and the dogs became listless and bored !! The dogs would be taken to the countryside woods for a three hour excursion or to a mountain reservation and how the dogs would react by wagging their tails whenever they saw their ride appearing near their pick up points. 

                          Reading the article I was reminded of Daffy the Boxer girl with brindle striations who started out early in my life as a pup in January 2006. Then was my other baby Leo who I acquired in Feb 2011 and both were brought up in a Delhi Vasant Vihar flat and twice a year would travel to Sattal and Mukteshwar. But that I felt wasn’t enough but what was I to do married to my job at IGI airport’s T3 terminal ? Alas one day I retired on the 1st of September 2015  and most people on retirement feel down in the dumps as if all meaning of life had deserted them. 

                         Instead here was a person overjoyed like life had a new meaning and purpose ! Having been bound by familial responsibilities like getting the son educated in a premier engineering college and being the typical hunter gatherer here was a new way of life. Of course I had to still pay the EMI for my Kolkata flat. Got the Leonine hairy boy’s manes cut as I knew the journey from Delhi to Gwaldham was going going to be hot in the plains despite the a/c !! I laid the rucksacks and tents in the gap between the back seats and the front so that a continuous platform which was bolstered by REI trekking mats placed on top. 

                              The first trek was to Bedni bugyal followed by a drive to Chaukori and Munsiyari.

The return was somewhere around Diwali which my dogs too hated in Delhi and so off we went to the town of Saung now called Song where I left my small car for a hired Maxx Trekker SUV from the Mahindra stables to travel to Kharkiya the roadhead for Pindari glacier. In quick succession over the following months Kartik Swami, Deoriyatal, Tungnath & Chandrashila, Dodital and Dayara bugyal followed. So this was not a three hour hike left in the hands of a dog whisperer but the dad himself with a dynamic duo in the backseat which caused cops who flagged me down get their knickers in a tangle when the panting duo questioned ’em about their ulterior motives. Returning from Gangotri via Moriyana Top on the outskirts of Roorkee I was stopped by a duo with one of them with a steel rods in his hand but a growl from the alert Boxer and a sight of the St Bernard made them take off as fast as they had screeched to a halt in front of the car. The Boxer girl expired in Kolkata in the month of July 2016 and the moan of the bereft St Bernard made me take off for the hills of Sikkim but here trekking was organised by operators unlike the do it yourself treks I did with high altitude porters of the Western Himalayas.

                   So 2016 I was back to Uttarakhand and a crossing into Nepal followed followed by Himachal the following year which stretched to Ladhak, Nubra and the Zanskar. In effect we never returned and I guess after Leo’s sudden demise due tick fever this year May 2018 in Ransi I still ask myself did I give them the best life a Delhi bred dog could get ?