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.

Christmas Photos

These are some of the photos I took on Christmas morning. Several of the photos are blurry. I just bought a new, more complicated, camera and have not figured everything out yet. Mainly that I have to open the flash up for it to work. I'll get it right eventually.

Christmas

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. We had a great one here in CO. The kids got more gifts than they needed of course, but we had a lot of fun playing with their new toys. I spent half Christmas Eve night and part of Christmas day assembling games. Of course our new puppy, Bow, has made Christmas even more eventful.

We drove to KS last friday and picked him up Saturday morning. The drive out was awful in 40 mph cross winds and snow. I was beginning to believe the storm was a hint to turn around and forget about a dog, but we made it there and back safely. We had stopped there on our way back to Colorado from our Thanksgiving visit and told the kids I knew the people and wanted to visit. The kids had played with the 7 males from the litter of 11 puppies. They thought my "friends" just happend to have a litter of puppies.

When we pulled into their drive Isaac remembered it was the house with the puppies and they were all hoping the puppies were still there to play with. Olivia said, "I bet the two with the blue and green colars are already gone." They had no clue the green colar was to mark our puppy. We went in the house and our puppy was inside waiting for us. We let the kids play with him for 10 or 15 minutes before Heather asked them if they wanted to take him home. It took us almost as long to convince them that he was our puppy and was going home with us and that he was ours when they played with him the first time. From there all the way back to Colorado was a never ending argument over who got to sit in front of the kennel that Bow was riding in.

So far he has been a good puppy. I've been using the kennel to house train him and I think he is going to catch on pretty quick. I've been reading several books on trainging pointing labs, by the way he is a pointing lab, and have started the early stages of retrieving. He loves to chase after the bumper and bring it back, but only give him a little and then put it away while he is still exited about it. We'll see how it goes, but I think the only thing that will hold him back will be my patience for training.

I have several Christmas photos of the kids to post, but haven't downloaded them to the computer yet. I'll get them up in the next couple days.

Happy New Year!

Dec. 8 and 9 th

We skied on Saturday at Ski Cooper. Ski Cooper is a much smaller area than the resort we skied last year, Beaver Creek, but it is plenty big for us and there are no crowds. It was snowing pretty hard while we were there but we still made several runs. Isaac and Olivia picked up where they left off last year, but Boyd needs a couple more times out to get back up to speed. He tired out pretty quick. Heather had a couple falls that I missed while keeping track of the kids, but I could tell she planted her head into the snow by the amount of snow wedged between her goggles and helmet. Last weekend we had around 15" of snow and from the 6th to the 9th we had from 12 to 18 additional inches of snow.

On Sunday afternoon we cut our own live Christmas Tree. Permits can be purchased from the National Forest Service for $10. The trees they allow you to cut are scarcely better than a "Charlie Brown Tree", but Heather and the kids enjoyed it. I kept waiting for a light to shine down on the perfect tree like it did for Clark W. Grizwald in Christmas Vacation, but I never saw anything more than snow. The tree was probably around 12' tall prior to me trimming the bottom off. Boyd was the only one who would help decorate it once we got it trimmed and stood up in the basement (our artificial one is in the window upstairs). Heather, Isaac and Olivia set around and watched. I guess the fun was gone once it was home.

Thanksgiving in IL

First things first, I killed this doe on our Thanksgiving visit back home. Someone, I think Cheryl, asked me to quit showing hunting pics and show pics of the kids. So, this picture is for you Cheryl. HA!
Boyd and his "wohawk".

Olivia and Uncle Bubba.

Pegram Kids at Thanksgiving.
Dad, enlightening any audience he can get.
Grandpa, almost asleep from listening to Dad.

Which one is Eli?



Eli after a hard day of Christmas shopping.

Sam and Isaac searching for their brain.



We had a great trip home over Thanksgiving. The trip seemed short due to all the driving it required, so we plan to make the trips a little longer in the future if possible. I got in about four hunting trips and was only rained out on one. I killed the doe the first morning I went. Olivia got to go with me on my last hunt and her favorite part was watching a group of does run when they saw us. That wasn't my favorite part. Olivia counting down the last five minutes after I told her "only five more minutes" made me laugh and was my favorite part of the hunt.

We didn't get to visit with as many people as we would have liked due to time constraints but we did enjoy the short visits had. If we didn't make it to see someone, it wasn't because we've forgotten you.

It has finally started snowing here, so I'll try to get up some snow pics soon. We thought we were going to ski this weekend but the mountain we have passes for isn't open yet because of the lack of snow.

I have another tag for a cow elk that runs from Dec. 1 to Jan. 14. This tag is a rifle tag, so maybe I'll finally shoot an elk, but I wouldn't count on it.