In the afternoon, we traveled to a pasture land to explore.  On the drive up we got to see beautiful rivers and mountainsides.

  This region was at such a high elevation, we began to feel freezing rain.  However, the landscape was just too beautiful so I didn’t care.

The rest of the group decided to stay in one of these white yurts in order to stay warm.  However, four of us chose to have an adventure!  It all started when these two pasture dogs started to follow us.  They were incredibly majestic!

They even posed with us for a group shot. We didn’t even have to coax them.  They just plopped down in front of us.

The dogs kept running off then coming back to us.  We decided to follow the general direction in which they were running to. They ended up guiding us up a mountain!  It was extremely steep but once we were at the top it started to snow!

By the time we made it back down the mountain and rejoined the group, we knew we had to name these dogs.  The one to the right is 圆圆 (Yuan Yuan) which just means round because he was a small, cute little fluff ball.  The one of the left is 宋花 (Song Hua) which is just one of the characters in our Chinese text book.  I’ve said it before in previous blog posts but since coming to China, I’ve discovered my love for hiking.  It’s one-of-a-kind experiences like these that make me want to hike everywhere!