Skye Valley Ranch: Pet-Friendly Camping Under the Stars

I only went camping once as a child — a Girl Scout overnight. I didn’t have many friends and ended up in a tent with three other girls I didn’t know. The only way for me to sleep was at their feet and there was a very uncomfortable tree root that cut across my back. In the morning, I found I had been pushed out of the tent and rolled halfway down a hillside. After that? Camping? Yeah, no thank you.

It wasn’t until we happened upon some perfect camping spots at Skye Valley that my outlook changed. I had been wanting to stay in a small spot on Skyline for a while so we waited for a good night, set up the tent, went about our day, and came back when the sky grew dark. And this is what we saw! Oh, beautiful Milky Way! How I love you! 

We gazed at the stars for what seemed like hours. Roxy stayed close and as our eyes grew heavy, we climbed into our sleeping bags and had the most peaceful night of sleep imaginable. We heard some crunching outside in the wee hours of the morning but it was too dark to see anything. We guessed it was a deer so we said hello and went back to sleep.

We woke up with the dawn and Roxy went out to explore. I captured this shot of her from inside our tent.

We stepped outside and watched as the rising sun lit the mountaintops in the most glorious golden light.

Soon, the sun reached our little slice of the world. I love Roxy’s face in the shot below — oh my goodness, it’s beautiful!, she must be thinking!

Greg and Roxy sat on the lookout (you can see them if you look closely in the photo below) and had some quality time together.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, we packed up our tent and took a final look at our morning view.

We headed back down to the ranch house to spend the morning with family, friends, and good food! We had eggs over-easy from home-raised hens, bacon, sausage, and pancakes with homemade maple syrup from a friend’s backyard in New York (sooooo good)!

There’s never a shortage of food when we all gather at The Ranch and the dogs know it. This is Sage waiting patiently for her pancake breakfast.

After breakfast, we did some off-roading and enjoyed some hammock-time down at one of our lakes. Skye Valley is such a special place for humans and animals and I am just so grateful we can call it ours.