round and round

After a wet and cold Wednesday (more on that later), Thursday was clear-ish and chilly in the morning.  We waited for the sun to come up a bit and then left around 9:15 a.m. to go to the MOAB Brand trails.  It was sprinkling a little when we got there so we puttered around for a while, finally hopping on our MTBs around 10.  We did our usual two rounds of cross-country trails (Bar M and Rusty Spur) for a total of 16.5 miles as the skies cleared - we watched it raining in Arches NP before the system moved off further to the east - and it turned out to be sunny and cool.

 Turned out to be a nice day

There were post-ride parking lot beers, of course, then we went back to get cleaned up.  In the afternoon, we took Milton to Moab's Bark Park.  He is such a friendly little dude and likes to meet other dogs, but he has no idea how to play with them once he's met them so we thought the dog park - if not too busy - might be a good opportunity for him.  There were about six or seven other dogs there when we got there and when we got inside, they all came up to check out the new guy.  A couple of them really wanted him to play, feinting and pawing at him, then running away so he could chase them.  But Milt just wanted to watch, leaning in close to us, and after about fifteen minutes we could see that he had had enough.

Post-ride

That evening was a quiet one.  When we took Milton for his evening walk, there were tons of swallows dancing through the air, catching insects near a small pond; we also saw three chunky mule deer, watching us from an in-town meadow, completely unafraid on that calm night.