Exploring Ridgway

The sunrise on Wednesday, July 21.

It was very cool when we woke up. The temperatures in the evenings go down around 55 degrees and during the day we enjoyed 70 degree temps. This is a big difference from the 100 degree heat that we are accustomed to. We loved every minute of it.

This is the view from our deck. Simply amazing.

 On the distant mountains you can see there is still snow at the peaks. The first thing that I noticed was how quiet it was here. I believe I only heard two planes total during our entire trip. Pine trees as far as the eye can see that filled the air around us.  It was like sleeping in an X-mas tree lot.

 This was our great room which contained the living room, dining room, kitchen and access to both decks. During the day we were instructed by the owners of the house to open both doors to let in the fresh mountain air. I asked Ron, "how do you get rid of that pine smell?" LOL... he fell for it. 

Lucie enjoying a nap on the couch that she claimed as hers.

The clouds burned off quickly in the morning and we enjoyed a beautiful afternoon of Earl Gray and tea cakes. Actually it was chips and a coke.

Lucie watching some of the wild life wondering around. When we had arrived the day before, the owners of the house had advised us not walk Lucie after dark stating that there were some animals in the area. Specifically, a bear and a mountain lion with 2 or 3 young cubs and a hippo. Guests that stayed in the house prior to us actually saw the the mountain lion and cubs from the deck. At this point we had not seen any of these animals but we had seen a bunch of deer, rabid chipmunks and even some rabbits.  At night we had to build a large fire to keep the carnivores at bay!

This was the view from our other deck.  Can you see the hippo?

"If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them."  - Jack Handy

Late in the afternoon we headed out for a walk around our neighborhood. The camera that I had with me on this walk was brand new and I had not really done much except panoramic shots with it. We were in the last house on our dirt road which made our walks very secluded. We came upon these deer at the start of our walk.
Ron shot one and we fed off of delicious venison for the rest of the trip, we still have some jerky left.

That's a lie.......we're all out of jerky  ;)

As we finished up our walk, we came upon more deer.

This is the first time that Lucie has seen deer and she thought they were really cool!

At this point I didn't realize that I was using the record function wrong on my camera.  I blame the engineers at Sony!

Again, I still didn't realize that I was using the camera wrong. What I didn't record was as Lucie approached the deer, they all took off running except on huge deer with enormous antlers. This huge deer never broke eye contact with Lucie. Lucie was not too happy with the deer staring at her. At one point she dropped down into a play bow after which she sprinted back behind both of us. We made a point to keep our distance as we made our way back to our house and the huge deer finally took off into the woods. Once I looked at my camera back at the house I realized that I was not using the camera properly. Just my luck!

Coming Soon - FJ Summit and our first Sunset