Indigo Mountain

I've been pretty sick and almost completely spaced that today the LDU group had a trip planned to head up into the mountains to visit Indigo Mountain Nature Center.  The women of Indigo Mountain rescue high content wolf dogs from around the country and bring them here to live out their lives.  These are wolf-dogs that are either too high content wolf to be pets or wolf-dogs that have had bad experiences with people and have issues.  They also have bears, which I didn't know.

Anyway, I was really surprised to see that many of their canines are very old.  That made me happy to see that they take them all and really keep them for life.  It's really an incredible place.  We got a long tour of the center and got to see many of the pretty dogs.  Many of them gave the wolf vibe for sure. Many of them are very high content and really are more wolf than dog.

The tour was very interesting but having been sick and up in the mountains moving around in the heat, I started getting really light headed.  I thought about pushing through it and not saying anything but I was pretty sure I was going to pass out.  So I sat down and a few people went back to the cars and brought me a snack and some water.  After that I bounced back up and was fine.  Knowing me and how sensitive I am to heat, it was kind of stupid of me to not bring more than one bottle of water and not to bring a granola bar.  But I just mooched off of other people and lived through it.  Good thing too because there were lots of other cool things we got to do.

We got to enter this large enclosure with a pack of four very high content wolf-dogs.  We wanted to sit and interact with them.  I had a bait bag on so I turned out to be very popular.  That was pretty cool because the shiest of the wolf-dogs actually came up to me and was eating out of my hands.  I even got to scratch his head.  The volunteers that have been there for over a year were pretty jealous because even they haven't gotten to touch him before.  Not going to lie, that had me tickled a bit.

The wolf-dogs would come up and scent roll on you.  Scent rolling means they bodily rub their cheeks and necks on you.  I got scent rolled twice and even though I was sitting, it almost knocked me into the ground.  Here are some pictures:

The shy one is the dark back you can just barely see here.

The other really cool thing we got to do was clicker train a bear.  Oh yes, you heard me correctly.  They are teaching the bears to stand up on all fours and move around to be examined.  The best way to do that with big or dangerous animals is through clicker training.  We use this cool clicker that has a ball on a stick on it.  The bear is targeting the little ball at the end of the stick and when she touches it with her nose (or more often, her weird reaching lips) you click and give her a peanut.  She ate the peanuts out of our hands through the fence.  It was so cool!  More pictures:

Although it sucked being sick, I am very happy that we went.  After a long day playing with wolf-dogs and bears, we headed down the mountain and had some pizza.  I love my ladies of LDU!  A day I will never forget.