The Grandkids Found Us

This week has been busy between working our normal days and visiting with our daughter, Kelly's, family on our days off. They arrived in Grandby, Colorado, for a vacation on Saturday.

They were excited to visit us here at the Refuge to see where we are living. Shawn's reaction was "Wow, this place is really out there." We walked the Nature Trail in hopes of seeing a moose.
After looking around the Refuge, we drove to Steamboat Springs for lunch. After lunch we walked around the Yampa River Botanical Garden enjoying all the native trees and flowers. It is a short drive out of town to the trail head for Fish Creek Falls. This is a short mile long trail to the falls overlook. We finished the day by walking around the downtown area and visiting some of the small shops in Steamboat. Of course, we stopped at our favorite candy shop, Fuzzywigs, and everyone got a little bag of their favorite candy assortment. You talk about being a "Kid in a Candy Shop". This place has it all.

Tuesday morning we met them in Grandby for a day of fun at Winter Park. There is a chairlift, alpine slide, zipline, mini-golf, bungi jump, maze, and rock climbing. The kids favorite was the alpine slide. I think we rode it 7 times, each time faster.

Finishing Up at Arapho

The time has flown by with only a couple of weeks left to work. We plan to leave for Missouri right after Labor Day. In Missouri we are scheduled to attend the week-long 2012 ESCAPEE Escapade in Sedalia and do some sight seeing around Kansas City and Branson. This will be our first Escapade and look forward to seeing what that is all about.

This summer has been very enjoyable and interesting. Our prior year of experience here was helpful, since the refuge had a large turnover in staff during the winter months. We were able to use our new ATV training for various projects such as fencing, veg sampling, water flume signage and boundary sign maintenance. We also have been using our skills with the Trimble GPS using ArcPad for mapping an invasive species, yellow toadflax, and plotting points for signs and gates on refuge property in Colorado and Wyoming. One day we even mapped White Tail Prairie Dog colonies using the Trimble on ATVs.

Ongoing biweekly duties include, filling the brochure racks and downloading the data from the four vehicle counters around the refuge, monitoring lake levels by taking piezometer readings, counting cows to insure ranchers are not overgrazing leased areas and maintaining a half mile nature walk by mowing and cleaning information signs.

Celebrating 35th Wedding Anniversary

We celebrated our 35th Wedding Anniversary, by driving the highest road in North America. Mount Evans, one of the fourteeners in Colorado, at 14,130 feet. We experienced our first snow of the season, when an afternoon storm blew in.

We chose to have an early dinner at The Peck House, the oldest active hotel in the state of Colorado. It is located just north of I-70 on US 40 in the small town of Empire.


Kurt enjoyed a very special oyster and beef pie made using a very old recipe. Virginia savored a strip steak done to perfection. We received a complimentary dessert in honor of our special day.
As we were leaving, our waitress noticed the Texas logo on our charge card. We learned she was a former school teacher from Plano East High School, in north Texas. It sure is a small world.

www.thepeckhouse.com/