Golf Outing at Grandote Peaks Golf Course

Since this would be our last day in La Veta, we decided to have a golf outing at one our favorite courses. Grandote Peaks was designed by Weiskopf/Morrish and is in a spectacular setting! Hard to keep your mind on the game while you take in all of the sites. Behind Barbara is Grandote (the Mountains).



Unfortunately the course is not in the best of shape this year because of the drought! They are on strick watering restrictions and it is only June! Here is another of the wonderful rock outcroppings.





This guy was trying to keep from laughing at my golfing attempts! We saw several deer and one beaver in one of the ponds.








This picture will show the condition of the course. It is still playable but it is turning brown rather quickly. We come to La Veta mostly for the chance to play this course. (Also the ball flies a lot farther at 7,000 feet altitude!)

Side Trip

We decided to take a side trip out into the hills to test the navigation system on our new Tahoe.

We headed west out of La Veta on Hwy 16o over La Veta Pass and then north towards Gardner on back roads then around through Walsenburg and back to La Veta.

The system is just great! We could track ourselves on even the most remote of roads and not worry about getting lost in the hills! It is surprising how many houses are built way back away from anywhere. The house shown above is at the very end of the electrical line. It has a wonderful view and is very secluded. Just a bit of heaven in Colorado!
When we turned north from US 160 onto the dirt roads we came accross a staging area for the fire fighters working the forrest fires. There is a pond to the rear of the area and the Choppers come in with their buckets to fill them up and then head out again. Could not get close enough for a better picture.

All in all it was a neat trip and we saw alot of back country.

Forrest Fire near La Veta, CO

As the series of photos above show, it is very dry here in La Veta, CO! The fire is north of Highway 160 and south of the Great Sand Dunes National Park. It is close enough to the highway to cause it to be shut down to traffic. There are some houses south of the highway that have been evacuated.

Some 270 fire fighters are trying to get this blaze under control and have been at it for several days. Just when they get it calmed down the wind picks up and they have to try to calm it down again.

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of weather coming to help the situation. It is as dry here as We have ever seen it. Streams that normally flow this time of year from the snow melt are dry as a bone. Not a good situation for
the people here as the depend on wells for water and it surely will not last the summer which will cause them to have to haul water from elsewhere. Rationing is already in affect.

Playing Tourist in Dodge City, KS

We elected to stop in Dodge City on our way to Colorado for the summer. It seemed like a good chance to see the sights and get some of the history of Dodge. One of the first things we did was to take a tour on the trolley through the historic areas of the town so we could be oreintated properly.

As you can see from the above photo, we got to the main area of Front Street just in time for the shootout! The men did a good job of it and when they started shooting the babies and young children began crying!

Above is a view of Front street just prior to the gun fight. These stores have a lot of historic information in them as well as an informative museum along the entire street. One of the museums has over 200 period firearms in it. There are others that depict the buffalo hunts and growth of the area as well as the arrival of the Texas longhorns.
Here the adversaries are "Pumpin' the Lead"!
The house above is called the Home of Stone. It was built in 1879- 1880 for the John Mueller family. John Mueller came to Dodge to open a bootmaking shop and parlayed that into three cattle ranches.

The construction of the house was done by a German stonemason out of stone quarried 12 miles north of Dodge. They drilled a series of holes and poured water into the holes. When the water froze it split the rock and they had a stone the size that they wanted and all they had to do was to surface it to get rid of the ridges.

In 1886 there was a terrible blizzard that wiped out the entire cattle herds in the area. This brought the Mueller fortune to disaster and the house was sold to Adam Schmidt for his family. The Schmidt family lived in the house until 1965 when it was sold to the county to be preserved. It is in excellant shape and a wonderful place to visit.

During the Trolley tour of Dodge we were taken to this area to show the feed lots for the fattening of the cattle for the processors in the area. As you can see the feed lot stretches to the horizon! There are a number of processers in the area, the largest of which process 6,000 head of cattle a day and one that does 4,600 per day! That is a lot of beef!

Wild Trip West

We got a nice rain on Sunday which allowed us to leave the farm on Tuesday, June 13th without a lot of dust getting into the coach. The trip out to Dodge City, KS was uneventful and quite enjoyable with no wind to contend with and clear sunny weather. Once we arrived at the campground and started to set up everything, I discovered that I had not packed the Internet Modem! I had everything else, even the electrical cord to it. It is an example of "Old Timers" disease!

We contacted Doug who looks after the property while we are absent and asked him to go out and get the modem and mail it to us. We recieved it the next day and all was well, except for the high winds that day. The antenna was kept down so as to keep it from being blown off of the top of the coach!

Thursday we headed out on our way towards Colorado. The entire trip had some wind to contend with and at about Lamar, CO we were hit with a huge gust of wind from the south and the wind increased. At that time our front right windshield began to seperate from the coach at the top right corner! We put the flashers on and limped on into La Junta, CO at 35 MPH until we got to the KOA campground.

The campground recomended a glass company and when we called them they came right out and replaced the window in a very professional manner. The worker took extra pains to make sure the job was done right and that was a pleasant surprise at that stage of the trip.

No sooner than the window was reinstalled we were again hit with a huge wind storm! It knocked down trees, blew out store fronts, etc. I would have to say it was a micro burst and the speed of the wind was in excess of 90 miles per hour! There was an enormous dust cloud with the wind and then a light sprinkle of rain! That fixed the wash job I had done on the coach before we left Kansas!

Friday we drove over to La Veta, CO in a light rain and arrived without further drama!

Kansas Harvest

The winter wheat harvest has arrived here at our farm. The wheat was cut on June 7th this year which is one of the earliest dates that I can remember. With the lack of rain the wheat, what there was of it, matured early and was very short in stature and yield! We got about one half of a normal crop out of it.

Watching the harvest this year brought back many memories for Barbara and I.

Barbara reminisced about the many harvests she particpated in on her family farm while she was growing up. She spoke about the number of people that it took to get the harvest in back then compared to today. She said that they had 14 hired hands for harvest which she had to cook for starting at the age of 13 as her mother worked in the fields along with the men. In fact she was given a special drivers license which allowed her to drive to the grocery store to buy food and back to the farm at age 13!
Now we watch as our farmer and his two sons harvested our farm in about 4 hours. They stopped for dinner which was brought to them by the farmer's wife, who owns funeral homes in the two adjacent towns. She stopped at the burger joint and loaded up on burgers, onion rings and large cokes. What a difference today!


I remember the harvests of 45 years ago as I was working at the local CO-OP. Back then the farmers used small (we thought of them as large) farm trucks to bring in the wheat. They would be lined up for a block trying to get in to get unloaded. To unload them we had them drive the front wheels of the truck unto a hoist and then we lifted up the truck and opened the tail gate to allow the grain to come out. You had to scoop the corners out as they would not drain so it took some time to do all of this. Now they use semi trailer trucks with bottom gates that allow for all of the grain to come out without help from a hot, tired, sweaty worker with a scoop shovel!

You have probably seen the grain cars used by the railroads today. They are purpose built and empty just like the semi trucks I mentioned above. Back when I had to load out a load of wheat it was into a standard box car! The railroad provided us with as many cars as we felt we would need. In each car was a set of Coopering (not sure where the name Cooper came from) material. That consisted of heavy flat steel rib reinforced cardboard and some boards. You would nail the material accross the entire doorway on both sides of the car and leave a little bit open at the top. Also you had to inspect the entire floor and walls to patch any place that might leak on the trip. The next step was to load the wheat in with a chute that you had to direct from side to side trying to fill the car up. Of course you had to scoop it into the corners where the chute could not get the wheat into. After you had it loaded you scrambled out of the space you left for the loading chute and closed the boxcar doors! You can imagine what the person who did this looked like on a hot day with all of the wheat dust!!! Yes, I was that person too many times, and they call those the "good ole days"!

Can you believe that I quit this job to go to college??