Colorado Camp 9,033' cam July 16 - mostly calm, cool, and collected at camp - several large wildfires continue to burn, but so far we've only had one really bad day with a few hours of smoke now and then. My lovely bride and I spend our days locked away in our little computer shed working on MAPS for the guidebook. The elephant is getting smaller each day! MIA has gotten a little better each day (a LOT better overall), and while she remains fragile, she is able to get around OK on her own and wags her tail a lot...

SOMEONE has been eating all of our wild roses! (This photo was taken from inside our camper.) My lovely bride has named this guy Gary - he's been coming around now for a month, at times standing within 10 feet of the camper. He's one of SEVEN mule deer bucks that originally were hanging around, but now we mostly just see Gary, and maybe one or two others. His antlers are getting larger by the day..

07/01/25 When I arrived at our campsite in Colorado in early May the landscape was covered with 1-4 feet of new snow (our campsite only got about a foot, and it was mostly melted by the next morning.) My job was to get our campsite ready to receive our camper that’s been stored for the winter a few miles away. I had four days to get ready, no problem!

Turns out there would be a couple. First I need to get our wooden shed moved back bout 15-20 feet. No problem - I had hired an Amish shed moving company to do that and they would arrive in two days. The only problem was that I needed to move everything that was behind the shed out of the way - 11 years of stuff we had piled up out of sight back there. Some of it was pretty heavy - like a wrought iron spiral staircase that came from inside the camper trailer we bought last summer - it took Pam and I a bit of time get it removed from the camper a couple days after we bought it - via a side window. It was way too heavy for me to move alone, but I figured out a way - stood it up and sort of rolled it on its base - and that worked great! So I got everything moved out of the way. CHECK!

Next I was reminded by the Amish shed movers that I needed to remove EVERYTHING from inside the shed - literally EVERYTHING! They assured me that if I didn’t, something was going to get broken. OK, that chore was a little more difficult for me to do. The shed contained just about EVERYTHING we’d brought out in the past 11 years, including, well, including a LOT of heavy stuff! But I was up for the job and got it done in record time. The only real issue was that some of the stuff would need to be moved more than once, and I had to figure out where to put it in the meantime where it would not be in the way of the shed movers, or the camper movers.

OK, CHECK #2 - I had stuff piled all over the place on the side of the pad and in the woods!

OOPS, before they could move the shed I also had to disconnect two different electrical connections - one being the 30-amp plugin for our previous camper (buried cable), and the second was the 100 amp electrical service from our main electrical box to the shed (the shed is wired). That wire was buried a foot underground in conduit. Turns out that would be a major issue for this old geezer since I had to dig it completely up first! Somehow I managed to do just that - dig it all up - and I must say that was quite a job for someone to do at 9,000’ elevation on his 70th birthday!

The Amish arrived and got the shed moved just fine - took them about ten minutes. And oh brother am I glad I got everything out of there - basically they lifted the shed several feet in the air, moved it, then raised it up several more feet into the air, then just DROPPED it - the BANG echoed through the valley. And nothing was damaged inside, whew...

NEXT I needed to widen our campsite pad - turns out last fall when the RV guys drove a special giant forklift up here to back our camper off the pad and onto the road, they tore up their forklift, and would not be able to use it again. They would need more room to maneuver with a pickup truck, and I needed to get that done before they delivered the camper! No problem, I have use of a neighbor’s small tractor with backhoe and thought I could get the job done in a few hours. Oops, it took me two days, but I DID manage to get enough dirt moved to satisfy the RV movers (an hour before the camper arrived), and FINALLY our camper was moved in without issue as scheduled - YIPPIE COYOTE!

Now I had ALL the stuff that was in the shed scattered everywhere and needed to bring it all back and pile it in the shed. CHECK!

Only one minor issue with our big camper van - turns out the big electric hot water heater didn’t work. Took me a while to troubleshoot that but I finally got it going - we only used it three months last summer, so basically still new. My lovely bride arrived and all was well - DOUBLE YIPPIE COYOTE!

36 hours later I had to leave and head back to Arkansas. Partly because I had some major waterfall guidebook (the elephant in the room) to get done, and partly because I needed to get our dogs out of the way - Amber’s (and her Bo, Dayton - we really like him),vand her two dogs were coming for a visit and our dogs have never been trained to like any other dog, so we could not have them together.

A couple of days after the pups and I got back home I got word that the hot water heater in the camper failed. Cost me $280 to find that out - then they wanted $1,800 to replace it. That news was disappointing to say the least. I respectfully passed on their offer and ordered the identical unit to be delivered for free, $399 from Home Depot. In the meantime, my lovely bride was without hot water but was able to shower at the cabin across the street we had rented.

THEN just as it started to snow/sleet/hail at least once a day, the propane ran out and Pam’s camper heater stopped working in the middle of the night (I had just filled our two propane tanks before I left). She was able to go out in the dark and swap tanks, but she had to do that once every couple of days - our camper has nine foot ceilings of mostly solid very-thin glass and zero insulation - just a fact of life. There’s a small electric fireplace in the camper, but it wasn’t working either! My poor bride - she managed just fine without any complaints.

BACK HOME, as an absolute giant stroke of LUCK happened - an entire mountain (Mount Magazine) that I REALLY needed to become FLOODED so that I could take pictures of a few key new waterfalls for the guidebook, became flooded big time. And I spent an entire day clawing my way through some of the most difficult jungle I’d ever encountered to get all the photos I needed, and some really great ones too! (six different waterfalls for the new book)

Oh yes, another reason I was back in Arkansas is that both me and the dogs needed doctor visits - the pups for their annual checkup and me for a dentist appointment. Turns out that BOTH of us needed additional doctor visits before we could get back to the mountains - Mia had some high numbers they wanted to check again in two weeks, and I had two crowns and a bridge that needed to be replaced, plus I had a follow-up visit with my regular doctor to check on some high numbers of my own, two weeks later. Mia’s visit showed all was OK. My dentist visit cost me $4k. My other doctor’s visit turned out better than expected - my high numbers had reversed and had gone down. (Hum, my eye doctor’s checkup numbers a month before had also gone down…)

Back to Colorado I went, and while it took me a couple of days to get the new hot water heater installed (THANKS to help from my bride!), finally we were all whole again. TRIPLE YIPPIE COYOTE!

My next project was to get the 2026 Arkansas calendar put together and off to the printer in Montana. CHECK - we hope to have them available in the next week or two.

It was finally time for me to get into the MEAT of eating that big old fat elephant, and so for the next couple of weeks I locked myself into our shed that got moved and worked day and night and night and day and got SOMETHING accomplished on that project - like a couple of bites out of a chunk or two of the elephant. In the meantime something happened to Mia - was did not know - and still don’t know - what has happened with her but all of a sudden she became almost totally immobile, fragile, could hardly move, and we had to lift her up stairs, etc.. She’s not one to complain, so it was hard to figure out what was up - and we still don’t know - but she would get a little stronger each day and so far, so good (she is back to chasing chipmunks all over the place). Pam had to travel back to Arkansas (she is still there), and so the three of us have been batching it here until she returns in a few days.

I still have something like 60% of the work yet to do on the new guidebook, but I am making progress...

07/03/25 FIREWORKS in the sky early this morning, and a very warm 56 degrees - warmest it's been so far this summer at dawn. Our little community of South Fork always celebrates on the 3rd with a parade, rodeo, annual volunteer department fund raiser fish fry, and a huge fireworks display tonight. The pyrotechnics are so massive that I'll have to take our pups far away up into the mountains to get away from the shock waves, and will return to camp after supper.

07/10/25 So far THIS is how many scans our new 2026 Arkansas wall calendars have been through since shipping from the printer in Montana last week (start at the bottom of the list and work your way up to see the towns they passed through - each time they were moved into a new truck. Got to the Harrison depot early this morning but for some reason they never left. Hoping they will be delivered tomorrow.

07/11/25 WILDFIRE season has begun in the high country! We have at east three wildfires started by lightning burning in our area - the first of many to come no doubt Makes for colorful skies and interesting landscapes, but NOT so good for our lungs. My lovely bride arrived a couple of days ago (YEA!!!) and we have begun an intensive ten days of map making. Most of our days will be spent locked in our little storage shed. (Pam is the map maker, I get her draft and add more details, looks up road numbers, and add a bunch of smaller stuff. We have 49 new maps to create and about a dozen previous maps to update. The ELEPHANT in the room is getting a lot better tasting now that PAM is here to dine with!