I’m a twenty-something (…okay, fine, a ‘nearly-thirty-something’) millennial who is just trying to figure out life. And as if slogging through the absolute mess the world is isn’t confusing and overwhelming enough, I’ve also got a laundry list of mental illnesses (who doesn’t these days, am I right?): a super fun anxiety disorder, recurring depression, ADHD to keep things exciting and a sprinkle or two of other problems.

Come 2019, I decided that having a service dog would improve my life tremendously, and so Sirius came into my life. But plot twist! In a cruelly ironic twist of fate Sirius ended up developing anxiety to match my own.

But we were stuck with each other though, like two anxious peas in a pod. So we pushed onward and with my partner Tamara by our side battled our way through Sirius’s anxiety, reactivity, and hypersensitivity. Our journey is still a work in progress, but life always is, right?

Over the last few years, we’ve grown into quite the adventurous bunch itching to explore more and more of what the forests, mountains, and valleys of Austria (and beyond) have to offer. 

You see, at the end of 2023, I decided to make a New Year’s resolution. I don’t really put a lot of stock in these and had previously only made half-hearted jokes about their pointlessness. But, that year, I made one anyway: in 2024 I would tackle a proper alpine hike with Sirius. Only one problem: living in Vienna and later Lower Austria, we were not quite up to scratch on the mountaineering front. Trekking to the peak of our alpine mountains, even the “small” ones, isn’t something to do on a whim when you’ve spent the last decade hiking big hills rather than mountains.

Of course, a lot of googling ensued. And while there is tons of information and resources for adventuring with your dog in general, I found something important missing: what about adventures with “problem” dogs? So, I figured the obvious thing to do is to just make my own blog. 

And this is the four-legged fur ball of nerves that inspires all of this: