Years ago when I was a younger, foolish man (also in better shape) I was doing a ski mountaineering ascent in the Chugach. It was a very long traverse across the flank of a mountain, crossing numerous steep chutes along the way. It was just me and my dog, who was still basically a puppy.
I was skinning up the mountain crossing these chutes, and on about the 10th one I got out into the middle of it, and the dog stayed back barking and whining at me—refusing to follow. I backed up a little to try to grab his collar and pull him, and he bit into my fancy ass North Face side zips and tried to drag me backwards out of the chute. Now I was pissed… I backed all the way out of the chute to give him a whoopin’, and WHOOSH! The entire thing let go and tumbled 2,000 feet down the mountain. It was about 8 feet thick, and every flake of it released all the way down to the tundra. It was a 40 degree slope and I would have been dead as fried chicken (or worse, horribly injured). There was no InReach or cell phones in those days…
We did summit the mountain and crossed several more chutes (I know, I know). About 7 or 8 chutes after this one, he again warned me off, and the chute slid just like the first one. By this point, I was watching him for clues, and had backed out of it with a little more margin.
That dog hated elevators, and in our first house (major termite damage) he refused to go into the master bathroom. He’d stand at the door barking and whining. When we finally demoed it to remodel, we realized that the vinyl flooring was all that was keeping the toilet from falling into the crawl space….
Good dog.
