Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

One of our goals during our adventure was to visit Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, UT. We've been members for a few years and really admire this organization. The Sanctuary is about 3800 acres adjacent to another 30,000 leased acres of BLM land. At any given time the sanctuary has 1500 dogs, cats, & other animals. Once they're at the sanctuary, nothing bad will happen to them. Hopefully they'll be adopted by a family, but if not they have a home for a lifetime. This is the welcome center. Each year about 20,000 people visit the sanctuary and take a tour.

During the tour, we visited the many different areas devoted to the different animals that are currently at the facility. That includes Dogtown, and the new dog area, Dogtown Heights.

The buildings are designed specifically for the dogs and include exercise areas, and agility areas for training dogs for stairs, cars and other everyday obstacles. The areas that contain the dogs include an inside area with a bed and warm floors. There also an outside area that the dogs can access at any time through a doggy door. Each dog is evaluated and given a collar that defines their sociability. Green collars for very social dogs, purple collars for dogs that are sociable with adults, with other dogs at different levels.

There are other similar facilities for cats, birds, bunnies, horses, and wild animals that are being rehabilitated for release to the wild. They also have rescue operations during emergencies such as Katrina. Every weekend they have adoption events in nearby areas like Las Vegas & Phoenix. This is a large non profit organization with over 400 employees and many volunteers, which this week includes Linda! She plans to work for the week we're here to learn more about the Best Friends, and their mission.

If you would like to see all of the photos of Best Friends, please click on the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jchuber1/BestFriendsAnimalSanctuary

Thanks for reading our adventures!

We Arrive in Kanab, UT

We left Hart's Ranch on Sunday for the long drive to Southern UT. On the first day we made as far as Rawlins, WY. It was a stressful day, because we had 30-40 MPH winds mostly from the side, but some head on. We didn't make as much progress as we wanted to because of the winds. We overnighted at a Flying J truck stop, a first for us, but we didn't have many choices in WY.

The next morning was cold, and as we drove west on I-80 it got colder. In Rock Springs it started to snow, which broke one of John's rules about never having snow on the roof of the motorhome! It didn't stick to the freeway, but it stuck to the windshield. It continued to snow on and off until we reach the UT border when it stopped. It's a long down grade into Salt Lake City, where we merged onto I-15 south. We overnighted in a Wal-Mart in Cedar City UT where it was sunny, but cold enough overnight to put a coat of ice on the motorhome and pilot. When we tried to start the pilot, the battery was dead. Luckily, since we were at Wal-Mart it was easy to purchase a new one and we were on our way. By mid day we found our campground in Kanab, parked the rig, and headed on to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary for a visitor tour. Linda's going to volunteer for a week at the sanctuary while John going to explore the area and catch up on some chores.

More on Best Friends in our next post. Stay tuned, it'll be interesting.