People love dogs, love 'em to pieces, love to watch them blast off docks and love to watch them pinball around obstacle courses.

The ESPN Great Outdoor Games make this patently clear. The loudest, most crowded events last year in Lake Placid's Great Outdoor Games all involved doggies. Maybe it says something what fans like in their athletes: physically impressive, coachable yet a bit unpredictable, egos as mild as a catnap.

Last year, one fellow caught one of his one-inch aluminum spurs in the wrist, slashing an artery.

Not that the games lack hardcore elements, not when competitors fire shotguns and arrows, and chainsaws assembled from guts of motocross bikes rage through pine logs. Even the Big Air dogs, in moments of faltering cuteness, will snarl at each other, their owners nearly joining in.

In the Speed Climbing event, men scale a 65-foot pole and then plunge down with only a loop around the log and fancy foot bouncing to soften the free-fall. Last year, one fellow caught one of his one-inch aluminum spurs in the wrist, slashing an artery. He went to the hospital and was back that afternoon to watch the event's finals, iodine still blotched yellow around the bandages on his arm.

The 14th green at Augusta, this isn't. No doubt, these games are a throwback, in more ways than one. Families swoon for a black lab leaping into a lake then into her owner's arms, but a great deal of the human competitors bring the same classic appeal.

What we have here is a confluence of sometimes-dangerous sports, low-profile athletes and a high-profile venue. Competitors who don't medal may not meet their expenses. They are professionals, yes, but most have other jobs when they're not competing (like many of the pro baseball and football players of 70 years ago). They risk injury with only a fraction of the exposure or security of other pro athletes.

Course, it's always been that way for these outdoor sports. Shooting and fishing go back as far as the first arrowheads and woven nets, and once upon a time in this country, those who couldn't shoot didn't eat.

The sawing and chopping events likewise still thrive in pockets around the continent. The goal, generally, is to chop and haul as much wood as you can before nature intervenes with cold, dark or fatigue. Keeping time to the hundredth of a second is just gravy.

These are the sports that, before they were sports, built lives, before there were such things as ATM lines and Botox and microwave burritos. Maybe it's not surprising that people come out of the woodwork to go back to the forest now and again.

It's cool to climb trees, to play with your dog, to catch fish. People being people, we still want to know who's doing it best. The Great Outdoor Games give us some idea who is. Turns out that often as not, it's someone with far more upper-body strength than attitude.

There is something about the woods, where silence is actually just human silence, that make people get all, you know, poetic.

Dead white males such as Emerson and Thoreau did it as skillfully as Americans ever, in part because they knew that stripping away everything manmade so often gives a fine sense of what a person actually is.

Alone in the great outdoors, a person feels a void that nature, in abhorring a vacuum, tends to fill.

Whether a modern, regulated, made-for-cable TV production such as the Great Outdoor Games can fully capture the nature of nature is a matter of individual taste. What is pretty clear, though, is that the athletes who accept challenges descended from pure survival don't abandon the simple dangers of the original activities.

Foremost among those are the dogs, which maybe weren't intended to jump off docks but do fine all the same.

Whatever natural appeal the Great Outdoor Games have, not much can surpass the appeal of the most wild of competitors.