Horseback riding at the Deerwood

Finally, proof that I went horseback riding.  This Friday I had the day off so I got to ride from campout back to the Deerwood Ranch.  This ride was beautiful.  We saw a moose on the drive up, but we couldn't find him on the ride down.

The View of the Deerwood Ranch.

Another view at the top, while riding my horse.

Tucker, one of the Wranglers, and some of the guests at the lookout point.

Dan, the Wrangler, and some of the guests.  Dan was riding the coolest horse, Harley.

My trusty Steed and I.  This horse is named Two Bars.

More of the guests.  This part of the ride was overgrown, as you can tell.

The guests and their horses rest at the top of the hill.

Brent, the lead Wrangler tells stories as we rest.

Dinner at the Vee Bar

For Dad's last night here in Wyoming, we ate Lasagna at the Vee Bar.  Before dinner, they did a sheepdog demonstration that was absolutely amazing.  He has trained his dogs by voice and whistle to bring the sheep to him.  I had never seen anything like this before.  Then after dinner we went for a walk around the property.

The view off the balcony of the lodge.

The Lodge is in the background.

Cute.

A rainbow after dinner.

This is a video of the sheepdog demonstration.  This dogs commands are whistles.  Make sure you have the volume up.

This is a video of the wranglers herding the horses out of the corral back to the pastures for the evening.

Hiking the Snowy Range, Father's Day Weekend 2011

Over Father's Day Weekend, Dad came out to the ranch to see what I have been up to.  Since I had most of the weekend off we drove up into the Snowy Range and found some hikes.  The pass is still very much under snow, so we found some hikes just outside of Centennial, Wyoming before you get up high into the mountains.  As part of my job at the ranch I will be leading guests on hikes, so we decided to go scope it out so that I know where I'm going when I get up there.  We had a great time.  Here are some pictures from our cameras.

The trail.

Dad with beautiful aspens.

This is Corner Mountain Trail.  Somebody built a teepee up here.  There is no shortage of wood up here; there are downed trees everywhere.

Corner Mountain Trail has several small loops so that you can make this hike as long or as short as you want.

Me in front of Corner Mountain.  It was hard to see very far as the trail is covered in trees.

We found lots of cacti on Corner Mountain trail.  They are very small, so it is easy to accidentally step on them.

Moose tracks are everywhere, but where are the moose?

These are fallen all over the ground.  Mom, I think you would think these are pretty cool.

This is the top of a natural spring.  Where is the water coming from?

This is one of thousands of dying trees.  You can see all of its bark has fallen onto the ground.  These trees are being killed by beatles.

Dad at the beginning of the hike.  "How beautiful is this?"

Happy Father's Day!

Prime Moose country, however, we never saw one.

This water comes from the same spring.  This is just a little further down stream.  That is a lot of water from one little spring.

This is the clearest water I have ever seen.  We found this natural spring coming right out of the ground.  It must be snow melt, but we could not tell where is was coming from.  The ground around it was very soft.

It turned out to be a beautiful day, Happy Father's Day!

We came across this pond on the Meadow Trail of the Little Laramie Trails system.  I am sure that most of this is from snow melt, but it was littered with aspens and very beautiful.

On the trail...

This trail crossed the river several times, not to mention half of the trail was water itself from all of the snow melt.  The river is raging right now.

Another of several ponds that we encountered on our all day hiking extravaganza.  I cannot believe we spent two days in this wilderness and we didn't even see any moose.  The probably knew we were hunting them.  This entire area seemed very suitable for moose as there was tons of marshy areas surrounded by willows.  We saw a lot of moose poop and tracks, so I know they are out there somewhere.

Wyoming Sunset at the Vee Bar

These pictures were all taken by Dad the night he arrived at the Vee Bar.  This is a typical Wyoming Sunset.  It is very colorful and beautiful here in the evenings.

The front yard of the lodge.

The driveway to the lodge.

The entrance to the Vee Bar Ranch.  What a sunset!

What a neat picture.

Obviously this is not at sunset, but I thought it was a neat picture of the sign at the entrance.

More Hiking with Dad

We spent a second day hiking the Little Laramie trails.  This is one of the trails I will be taking guests on, and also, my favorite so far.

There is a lot of water up here from the snow melt, so we used this log to cross.

Rest stop at the top of a mountain.

I think this is a great picture of Dad.

You can see all of the trees in the background.  It was kind of spooky up there.

After our hike we drove up to Lake Owen.  There is a trail that goes around this lake that I may be taking guests to.

Due to all of the beatle kill, they are cutting down all of the logs and selling them.  There must be millions of them.

We found this on our Little Laramie hike.  We could not figure out what kind of animal it was.  It looks as though someone hunted it and hung it up to gut it and left the bones.  I have no idea.

This is another view of Lake Owen.  This lake is also flooded as you can tell; we couldn't even get to the end of the pier.

Eagles at the Vee Bar

Dad and I went out to see if we could find the eagles.  They have a huge nest which the mother usually stays in.  Then there are two males that can be seen near by.  Today, we got to see all three of them, which is pretty rare.

One of the male bald eagles.

The mother bald eagle in the nest.

The same male bald eagle warning us we are getting too close.

Drive to Saratoga, Wyoming via Snowy Range Pass

Dad and I took a drive over the just recently opened Snowy Range Pass.  It is only about 10 minutes from the ranch.  The Mountains are called the Snowy Range because of the large amounts of snow that reside on them throughout the summer months.  There is still tons of snow up there, so use of the area is limited.

This is along side the road up the pass.  It is like this on both sides of the road.   No wonder it took them so long to open the roads.

This is a view from the top of the pass.  There are lots of wide open spaces out here.

These trees at the top of the pass look like they died from either wind or snow.

Its the middle of June and there is still plenty of snow for snowmobiling.

Medicine Bow Peak at the top of Snowy Range Pass.  The mountain is just over 12,000 feet tall.  The pass is about 10,000 feet.

Medicine Bow Peak and several others.  In front is lake Marie.  You would never know, would you.

After we crossed the pass we came into Saratoga, Wyoming.  This is the North Platte River and it is huge.  You can see all of the sandbags lined up in front of the houses in preparation for this flood.

The town of Saratoga.  We got out and walked around, but there is not much to it.  The downtown area is probably 1/5 of the size of Durango, if that.