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Mesa east of Durango, facing north. It's just outside Pagosa Springs.

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The Gunnison etched a vast, deep canyon into the Mesa over millions of years. It is called the Black Canyon because, at best, sunlight reaches its bottom for only 32 minutes a day. The local Native Americans avoided it out of superstition.

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The Collegiate Range, the second range just west of Colorado's Front Range. While the latter contains Pike's Peak is home to four 14'ers, the Collegiate Peaks rise off the valley between them with a line of 9 14'ers and another six 13'ers. It is an incredible sight of one massif after another, a wall of incredible peaks. Coming upon them going east after Monarch Pass takes the breath away. They are also home to the Continental Divide Trail.

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While on a run, I thought of Candace Burt's recent post about running with her dogs. Current research suggests that dogs were domesticated from wolves multiple times in multiple places as humans spread across the Earth. This suggests that the mutual benefits were strong. It is easy to see how homo sapiens or even his predecessors derived advantage from this partnership. Proto dogs brought increased visual, aural, and olfactory acuity to the relationship. Wolves and humans are nearly unique in their ability to trot and run across vast distances to hunt or, in the case of humans, gather. Some paleoarcheologists believe that running may have been humans' killer advantage in competition for scarce food. But, as I run and think of dogs as running companions, have to wonder if the partnership between humans and dogs might have been the actual advantage that propelled humans to the position of apex predator. Dogs extend human hunting senses far beyond our natural limitations. It is easy to envision how this was a strong selective mechanism on both species; we both ate well thanks to the partnership. When the night came, humans must succumb to sleep in a world of night time predators. Any dog owner knows what good sentinels his partners can be. Likewise, with our relative lack of need to sleep, proto dogs may have gained increased protection by remaining near human encampments.

 

As Canis Lupus slowly became Canis lupus became Canis lupus familiaris, it became the only animal that could actually read human facial expressions, as research now suggests. This would be valuable feedback to man's best friend as not all humans and not all human emotions are beneficial to dogs. There is some preliminary research suggesting that dogs can even communicate back to humans with facial expressions of their own, increasing the richness of the inter-species communication. One can view the human-dog relationship, at least in hunter-gatherer societies, as a symbiotic one.

 

In light of this, we can understand the human love for dogs and their mindless, instinctive need for us, no matter how we often treat them. We can also think of those who abuse them as something proto-human, sub-human.

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December 23. After holding on for two weeks the Marine garrison on Wake Island was overrun.

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With exercise we discipline and perfect our body; with study we discipline and perfect our intellect; with meditation we discipline and perfect our desire.