Doug Mahugh

Jamie Samoyed

Jamie's Highway

When people ask where I'm from, I sometimes answer "I-90," because I've lived my entire life within a few miles of I-90 in Washington, Illinois, and Montana. So it's no surprise that I-90 has played a big role in the lives of

health

Time for a new knee

My right knee has been a problem for a long time. When I was 19 years old, I fell off a scaffold at a construction project on the Yakama Indian Reservation and tore it up good, resulting in a complicated surgery at the old Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital that left

Restoring Grandpa's chess table

My Grandpa Mahugh worked with his hands. He was one of the 10,000 workers who built the Fort Peck Dam, and after the dam was completed in the late 1930s he went to work there as a mechanic. In the 1950s, he moved to Bremerton, Washington to take a

Building a crosscut sled

Last week, I mentioned on the Jamie Samoyed's Pack group that I had finished building a crosscut sled. I should have realized that would be confusing, because that's a Facebook group about the lives of our sled dogs. So I've put together this post

Retirement: Year 1

As of this week, I have already been retired for a full year. Time flies! This post is a look back at some of my favorite memories from my first year of not working and focusing on just enjoying life. I was expecting to play more music than I did

Jamie Samoyed

George at 6 months

As of today, June 7, George is 6 months old! For each of our other dogs, I've done a blog post shortly after their arrival, covering the story of our decision to get a dog and showing lots of cute puppy pictures. With George, that didn't

Jamie Samoyed

Jamie Samoyed's Pack

As of a few minutes ago, we have rolled out the all-new Jamie Samoyed's Pack page on Facebook. The goal of this change is simple: more fun, less spam! You can find it by searching Facebook Groups for Jamie Samoyed's Pack, or by following this link:

Going Private

I had been planning to change the Jamie Samoyed page on Facebook from public to private today, and I had started putting together this post together to answer a few questions that came up about the details of the change. But after spending a few hours researching the details, I&

Jamie Samoyed

Amazing Alice

What a girl. I don't know how to talk about Alice without using superlatives. She was the greatest example I've ever known of simply embracing life and diving into every single day enthusiastically and fearlessly. Her death yesterday (December 29, 2023) was sudden and unexpected, but

Building a Workbench

Another long blog post. TL;DR version: I built a workbench, it was fun and I learned a lot, and now I've started using it. When I retired in July of this year, woodworking was high on the list of things I was looking forward to spending my

Jamie Samoyed

Isaac's 2023 road trip

In the fall of 2023, Isaac and I took a road trip from Butte to visit some friends and family and woodworking shops in the Midwest. Isaac had previously traveled to a few Western states – Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California – but this was his first experience of

The Reality of Retirement

I'm sitting on the deck with the dogs, on day 105 of my retirement, and I've decided to write a blog post. Not sure where this is headed, but blogging was one of the things I was looking forward to doing more of after retirement, and

Jamie Samoyed

Sauk Mountain

Nine years ago, I had a post on my old blog entitled "Alice Knows What To Do," about an incident that happened on a hike at Sauk Mountain in the North Cascades. In this post, I've included the full text of the original post and added

Jamie Samoyed

Being Jamie

This is a post from the past: a blog post we published in 2010 that got deleted when this blog was migrated to a different platform in 2015. I've recovered the text from a backup, and added a few photos from the month when it was originally posted,

Jamie's Legacy

One year ago this morning, Jamie and I went for a short walk. He had been moving slowly ever since our trip to Eagle Guard Station (a Forest Service cabin in the Elkhorn Mountains) a few days before, but he seemed to be doing a little better that morning: happy,

Settling down in Butte, America

How can I be turning 65 years old in May 2023? I still feel like I'm trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up, but I'm about to officially become elderly. In keeping with the tradition of old people blathering on

Jamie Samoyed

Finding Jamie's Photos

I take a lot of dog photos. After spending nearly 13 years documenting Jamie's life, since his passing I've been continuing to document the shenanigans of his pack in a similar manner. These activities have led me to publish tens of thousands of photographs on the

Big Butte

Two striking landmarks come into view when you drive into Butte on I-90: the massive terraced walls of Berkeley Pit, and the rounded peak of Big Butte, the hill towering above the west side of town. Berkeley Pit is a relatively new phenomenon, an artifact of Butte's shift

Jamie Samoyed

Life without Jamie

Thirteen years ago today, we picked up an 8 week old puppy from Summerhill Samoyeds in Canada and drove him south across the border to his new home with two humans and three cats in Seattle. Megan named him Jamie. This post contains a few memories and thoughts about Jamie

Jamie Samoyed

Isaac in the Highlands

Last night Isaac and I spent the night at Hells Canyon Guard Station in the Highland Mountains south of Butte. Originally built as a line cabin for local ranchers in 1906, the cabin has been owned by the Forest Service since 1910. It was first used as a guard station

Jamie Samoyed

Taking Jamie Home

We scattered Jamie's ashes today. It was fun to bring Isaac to this place that meant so much to Jamie and Alice, and it was also nice to bring Nancy back – she had only been there once as a pup. But most of all it was fun to

Jamie Samoyed

Nancy's Seattle Days

After seeing the way Jamie welcomed and raised Alice as a pup in 2010, we were eager to see him welcome Nancy into the pack a decade later in 2020. It was everything we expected. Looking back over the photos of Nancy's early days with the pack, I&

Jamie Samoyed

Through Jamie's Eyes

I was always fascinated by Jamie's perspective. I wanted to see what he saw. In hindsight, it's now clear to me how posting on social media "as Jamie" became an outlet for my obsession with seeing the world through his eyes. Jamie and I

Jamie Samoyed

Raising Isaac

Jamie raised Alice at first, but they're close enough together in age that after a year or two their relationship was more like siblings than a pack hierarchy. When Nancy came along, she was fiercely independent and looked up to Alice as the older female, so Jamie didn&

Jamie Samoyed

Exploring the Highlands

During the last year of his life, Jamie and I spent a lot of time exploring the Highland Mountains (aka the Highlands), a small mountain range 20 miles south of Butte. Just as Jamie's pre-Alice road trips long ago helped prepare us for all the road trips the