Turkey season around the corner

It's not too far off to be planning now. Hopefully Isaac will pass his hunter's ed. class and we'll make a trip over to Nebraska for his first turkey. Eric's son is taking the class also, so they may come along too. Of course the whole trip will have to be centered around the two boys getting their first turkey. I'll have to make a covert scouting trip w/ bow in hand the week before we go. Their archery season opens early and I want to try and wack one with my bow.

Of course the entire trip could be out of the question if Uncle Sam doesn't feel we've paid in enough this year. I normally get a big refund, but I've restructured my witholdings so I'm a little concerned I'm gonna owe money this year. I'll set up a tax/ turkey hunt relief fund that each of you can donate to before April.

It has snowed a couple three inches each of the last couple days/nights. Not sure if we are going to try and ice fish this weekend of get out and ski. May try both. I'll try and get some good photos of either and post them here. Isaac and I skied last Saturday and it was a really nice sunshine day that would have made for some great photos of the Sawatch Range in the background but I forgot the camera.

Recent Photos

Here are several recent photos taken around Leadville. We haven't had any big snows up here lately, but none of the snow we've had is going anywhere for a while. The first picture is during a very short ice fishing trip with Heather and the kids just south of town (same pond Joe and Dad both fished while they were here). It was colder than I thought and the trip lasted long enough for me to manually auger everyone a hole to fish over and the kids to cry they were cold and ready to go home. I'll be buying an ice fishing shelter soon.


This is Mount Elbert from Leadville. Elbert is the highest peak in Colorado and is part of the Sawatch Range. There are quite a few 14,000 ft plus mountains in Colorado, but this is the highest of those. It seems like it is always snowing in that range. I think in this photo it is mostly clouds and blowing snow. While this photo is not from our house, we can see this mountain from our house.

This is Notch Mountain. It's in the 13,000 ft plus range. I drive by this everyday on my way to work.
Here are photos I took of our new puppy. I took these while Bow and myself were on one of our walks. This is the closed road around Turquoise Lake just north of town. We were walking in powder, so if you look close you can see tracks from my snow shoes. These were taken at 13 wks of age. He is now 14 weeks old.



This is a herd of cow elk that Eric and myself were trying to get a shot at. Actually, I was working my way to them with the purpose of Eric getting the shot as they moved away from me. They are on the wrong side of the Town/NF boundary for me to shoot at this point. When they crossed over they were too far for me to shoot. This is only a portion of the elk. There ended up being around 27 cows and two spikes. When Eric was done shooting there was one less cow in the herd (see last photo). This is Eric's first animal of any kind, so needless to say we were very happy.

Since Eric didn't know anything about quartering an animal, I quartered the elk while he helped. Then two guys we know showed up and helped us pack it out in one trip. The pack was't very far, maybe half a mile, but it was straight down then straight back up. We were wearing snow shoes in about four feet of snow. Eric shot the elk at about 10:30 am and we had it packed out by 5:30 pm. We had already agreed to split whatever elk we killed. I took the elk to my garage and hung the quarters then butcherd it through the week. I bought a grinder and we made a lot of burger mixed w/ beef fat and made a lot of breakfast sausage mixed w/ pork.