Thanksgiving trip continued

To continue to recap my trip at Thanksgiving:
On Friday morning, my immediate family (with families) all met at the zoo. We enjoyed our time there. Nora especially enjoyed the penguins. Here are pics of Nora with the goats and Joshua & Nora together (note how close they are in size though they are 2 1/2 years apart in age):



After the zoo we met at St. Louis Bread Co (Panera everywhere else) for lunch and then back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding.
My cousin Greg married Amy in a beautiful ceremony. We all had lots of fun partying at the reception, too.
Cousins! Karen, Jill, Me & Laura

The happy couple

Laurie, Amy, Greg, Kristin & Todd

Busy season

It's been so long since I posted, that I'm not sure where to start, but since I'm putting a link to this blog in my Christmas cards again, I figured I better get something up here. Welcome to those who are visiting for the first time! I do much better during hiking season with getting frequent updates.

Over the week of Thanksgiving, I travelled back to Leavenworth for a few days and then on to St. Louis for cousin Greg's wedding and finally to Illinois for a little time with the Woods. I'll start the trip in this post and finish it in the next one or two.

Since Mom & Dad were working on the Monday after I got home, I took advantage of some nice fall weather to go hiking in Missouri and finish up a series of geocaches that I had started a year and a half earlier. My nine mile hike took me all over Weston Bend State Park and into the town of Weston, MO. Here are a couple of pictures from my hike of a question mark butterfly and a view of the Missouri River:



On Thanksgiving Day, Mom & Dad and I drove to St. Louis where we had family Thanksgiving Dinner at the Mueller's church with about 50 people - all related somehow (mostly). Cousin Matt prepared all the food and it was delicious!

Mom (grandma) with the twins.

I'll get picks from the rest of the trip up soon!

Daddy's little girl

Watching a baby gorilla grow up in its family group is very exciting and entertaining, but one of the best things has been watching Tumani's relationship with her father, Rafiki. This guy weighs about 475 pounds and has the strength of at least 6 men, but he can play with Tumani with such gentleness. It may not always look gentle when he's flipping her around and "wrestling" with her in such a way that she probably thinks she's winning, but it is. His powerful jaws that can easily crack nuts and chew up tough vegetation can playfully mouth her tiny belly, tickling her and sending her into gales of gorilla laughter. Yes, gorillas do laugh, orangutans, too, actually, but gorillas laugh audibly. You have to be really close to hear it, but it is one of the coolest sounds in the world.



These pictures will also appear soon in CMZ's new blog (link on the lower right on my blog page)

Last hike?

The thing about hiking in Colorado this time of year is you never know when it's going to be the last mountain hike of the season. Sure, there are plenty of places in town where you can do a winter hike without much snow, but when it comes to hiking on a mountain, once the snows come there will be places where it won't melt until spring (or even summer). So with temperatures last Monday close to 70°, I planned a hike with some altitude. There are several geocaches on top of Blodgett Peak which is on the northwest edge of Colorado Springs. I've been wanting to get up there for years, so on Monday that's just what Sherrie and I attempted.

We went up over 1000 feet in elevation in almost 2 1/2 hours of hiking and were within 450ft of the next geocache, but I had to be somewhere by 6pm, so we had to head back down. That 450 feet was also across a boulder field that would have taken a long time to cross. The "trail" we were on was probably at least a 45° incline. Here's a pic of Sherrie coming up part of that slope:

The really bad part about that slope was that we had to come back down. My knee is still recovering. We met a guy with two dogs coming up just as we turned back. He had been to the top before on the real trail. He described how to get there, so next time we'll go that way.
We still found 6 geocaches and enjoyed some very nice views. The weather must have been perfect for flying, because there were plenty Air Force Academy training gliders in the sky.
Here is the view toward the south, including Cheyenne Mountain way in the distance from one of the caches:

Here is a pic of an AFA glider in tow and then 2 pics of the glider overhead:



So, I don't know how many more hikes I'll get in this year, but it's supposed to be in the 30s and maybe snowy next Monday.

Poor Dog! (+ some other stuff)

Yesterday, while I was scratching Logan's incredibly soft ears, I noticed that one of them was swollen. He had a hematoma on his ear. I called Em to see what I needed to do, and she advised me to take him in to the vet today, and that he'd probably need minor surgery to fix it. He didn't need surgery, at least not yet. They drained the hematoma, bandaged the ear and fitted him with an Elizabethen collar. He is quite miserable with the collar on and needs to wear it for a week. Draining it was about $400 cheaper than the surgery, so hopefully it will work! Here's Logan in his collar:




We've had some cold weather and winter can't be far away, so very soon I won't have any insects to photograph. Is it wrong that I'm already looking forward to spring? I did get a good photo of a Painted Lady this week (and a fly):


One last photo is of the pumpkin that I carved for Boo at the Zoo:

Bee mine

I just wanted to make a quick post to show off this picture of a bee that I took yesterday while caching in Monument Valley Park.

It's a female long-horned bee (Svastra obliqua). I only got this one shot before it took off, so I was pleased to see how clear a shot I got, and I love the color of the flower and the bee.

Fall Colors

Last Monday, Sherrie and I and Pastor Doug went on a hike to the Crags to check out the aspens. The timing was pretty much perfect. There were still some green leaves in some areas, but the majority of the aspens were in full yellow and some were already losing leaves. There were even some red aspens. With a winter storm blowing through some parts of the high country tomorrow, most of the leaves will probably come down.
This was the first time I'd hiked the Crags. I'm not sure why, I've just never gotten there. It's certainly a trail I'll be back to. I'm sure the wild flowers there in the spring and summer must be awesome.
When we got to the top, these gray jays were posing nicely for us:


Here are a few pictures of the aspens:






Since I haven't posted in quite some time, here's a picture of a bee fly that I took in Waldo Canyon a few weeks ago. It's one of my favorites of the summer.

Catching Up (Balloons & beautiful babies)

I haven't posted for a couple of weeks, so I figured I'd catch you up before I get any further behind.

Labor Day weekend in Colorado Springs means hot air balloons. I headed over to Memorial Park before church on Sunday to watch the balloons take off. The weather was perfect with almost no wind. The balloons went up and hung around. The lead balloon even came back around and did a second "splash & dash". Prospect Lake is just south of the takeoff field and the balloons try to skim the top of the water and take off again. This is called splash & dash, and it makes for some great picture opportunities.
Here are a few of my favorite balloon pics:






Last weekend, I drove to Amarillo for the twins' baptisms. I went down on Saturday and came back on Wednesday. Everybody else from out-of-town left on Monday, so I had a couple more days to spend time with Joy and Jacob (and Joshua, Laura & Jeff). I only wish I lived a little closer, so I could spend more time down there! Here's a few pics from the visit:
Jacob with his blanket and puppy.
Joy with her blanket and lamb.
Me with Jacob and Joy.
Joshua :-)

Butterfly survey

I spent today helping the U.S. Forest Service survey sections of National Forest for the threatened Pawnee Montane Skipper. This skipper is a very small (1 cm wings) butterfly found only in the South Platte River drainage area in the mountains of Colorado. It is considered a threatened species and much of its habitat was burned in the Hayman fire of 2002. Our zoo has selected several conservation projects to devote time and money to this year, and one of those is butterfly conservation for native Colorado butterflies. Helping with this survey is a way for us to do some hands-on field work. I rode up to the site with another keeper early this morning and we met the Forest Service employees and the researcher doing the study at a park near Trumbull, CO.
After an orientation to go over what exactly we'd be looking for and recording and safety, we divided into 3 teams and headed off to our transects. Each team had 5 transects to survey. Each transect was 400m long and 10m wide. We walked each transect and counted skippers (both the Pawnee and the more common Comma), blooming Liatris stems (a favorite flower of the skipper) and in the case of our team, we also counted dead trees. Every 50m we stopped to record the number of flower stems and dead trees in the last 50m and to note the presence of blue gramma grass, which is the grass the skippers lay their eggs in.
Gayfeather (Liatris punctata)
We also noted the presence of other species of butterflies, mainly to show that the conditions were good for butterflies to be flying. Temperature, wind and cloud cover were also recorded periodically. The hiking was a bit tougher than what I usually do, since we had to follow straight lines up and down ridges.
This photo is looking back down one of the transects - not many ridges showing in this one, but they were there!
As we headed to our last transect, we got a radio call from one of the other teams that their car was stuck. In case you were wondering, Honda Fits probably are not good off-road vehicles. We hiked back to the park to head over in one of the Forest Service trucks to help. He had tried to turn around and got the front end high-centered on some soft sand. The front end was being lifted up enough that the front wheels had no traction whatsoever. They had been digging with sticks, but we had shovels. It still took quite a bit of digging before we could push them out.


We went back and surveyed our last transect before heading into town for some ice cream. I have a day of professional leave next week to go back up for another day of surveying. Next week's surveys are on more rugged terrain in the burn area. Hopefully, next week I'll see some Pawnee skippers.

Fountain Creek

With weather forecasts still somewhat unsettled, Sherrie and I decided to stay close to town for our caching/hiking today. We did a couple of caches along the Fountain Creek Regional trail and did 5+ miles. Bugs were plentiful and I got decent shots of several species. I think I submitted more than 10 pictures to bugguide.com today. This adorable whitetail fawn was about 20 yards away from us, across a drainage ditch. It kept bolting off in a little circle and then would come back and look at us, almost daring us into a game of chase. Very cute!

These juvenile barn swallows were peering down at us from their nest inside one of the observation shelters.

Here are a couple of bug pictures:
First of all is an ambush bug. Ambush bugs wait motionless on a flower for another insect to come along. Then they pounce on them, often catching and eating species much larger than themselves.
This is a milkweed beetle. It was on a ... yeah, you guessed it, a milkweed plant.

Family and Fundraising

I took a couple of days off this past week to spend time with my cousin, Karen, and her family, who were in Colorado on vacation. They got into town Wednesday night and spent part of a cloudy, dreary day on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway while I was working Thursday. They came over to my house Thursday evening for spaghetti.

On Friday, we went to the zoo. It was cloudy and drizzly all morning, but the clouds lifted enough in the early afternoon, that we took a ride on the new Mountaineer sky ride before leaving the zoo. Next we went to Seven Falls where we climbed the 240 stairs to the top of the falls.

We did a little hiking at the top of the falls before heading back down the stairs. Then we took the elevator inside the mountain up to an observation area where we could see the falls in their entirety.

After Seven Falls, we stopped by church to look around and then headed to Solo's restaurant for supper, where we opted for in plane seating. I tried to include an active link to Solo's website here, but can't get it to work. Cut-and-paste http://coloradoeats.com/solos/ to see it. After dinner we headed to a Sky Sox baseball game. We had a few sprinkles, but overall it was a nice, cool night for a ball game.

Saturday morning started out nice and clear, so it was decided to drive up Pikes Peak to see it without the clouds that marred the view on Thursday. By the time we got to the bottom of the toll road, clouds were starting to build, so the folks at the gate recommended we drive straight to the top and make any stops on the way down. The views on the way up were great. There were clouds at the top that blocked any views toward the east, but there were still great views to be had toward the west.

We had some heavy rain on the way down, so our timing was good, but we didn't make any stops on the way down. Unfortunately, we didn't see the herd of bighorn sheep on the way down that we passed on the way up. Next we headed to Garden of the Gods. It was pouring down rain when we got there, but we planned to eat lunch first anyway. We found a dry table under the covered patio at the Trading Post cafe. By the time we finished eating, the rain had stopped and we had sun shining. We drove to the main parking lot and hiked around the central garden and up one side trail. The dark skies made for some dramatic photos.


After Garden of the Gods, we stopped by the Olympic Training Center. We missed the last tour, but enjoyed the interactive exhibit, the gift shop full of Beijing merchandise and walking around the grounds. They have an Olympic flame that they lit at the same time as the one in Beijing and will remain burning during the Games.

We came back to my house, where Karen made sloppy joes for supper. They had to leave early the next morning, so we said good-bye Saturday night.

Sunday evening, our chapter of the American Association of ZooKeepers (AAZK) held our annual Art on the Hoof fundraiser. I'm co-chair for this event, which always brings plenty of stress. I was worried about ticket sales, but some last minute sales made the event a success. We raised over $5500, and I didn't have to bring home much unclaimed art.

The continuing story of the caching injury...

A little update on my finger (and a chance to see how many people I can gross out):
My finger injured last Monday (see last post) was really sore and swollen by Tuesday. Tuesday night, I used a red-hot paperclip to try and burn holes through the nail to relieve the pressure. I was really sure I got all the way through, but I was unable to get anything out. Wednesday morning, I went to my doctor hoping they could help and concerned about the fact that the purple color had spread to the skin around the nail. I was only able to see a PA and she said they didn't have the tool needed to cut through the nail. She gave me a referral to an orthopedic hand surgeon who should be able to help me. I tried all afternoon to get an appointment with them, but the referral hadn't gone through. Here's a couple pics of my finger on Wednesday. You can see how swollen it was.


I tried the orthopedic office again Thursday morning. This time they had the referral, but it was going to be three weeks before the doctor had an appointment. By this point, I was about ready to go to an urgent care center and fork over the $75 copay to get relief. I showed my injury to our EMT at work. His advise was to get the smallest drill bit I could find (1/16" or smaller) and use my fingers to turn it and drill through the nail He thought that if I did get through with the hot paperclip, it may have cauterized the hole. Unfortunately, he could not legally drill the hole for me. So over my lunch hour, I went to Home Depot and bought a 1/16" bit. When I got back to work, I tried using it. It took a little time, but it did drill through. I had to apply a little pressure after the hole was drilled, but I got lots of blood out and my finger quickly felt better. Now I just have to keep a band-aid on it and wait for the nail to fall off.
Fun times! Are you really grossed out yet? Are you even still reading? :)