Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Nature's Good & Bad

This has been a fairly easy week for us because the group of kids (seen at right waiting to get into the dining hall) are children of military parents who have been deployed to Iraq. We've had 3 weeks of these kids - the first 2 groups were younger, extremely noisy, and really made a mess in the dining hall which made clean-up a tedious task. This particular group are high school age, more mature and responsible, and have been careful to not leave messes for the volunteers to clean up. Sadly, a very large percentage of the younger children are on serious medications and have emotional issues -- kept our camp nurse hopping!
One of the things I love about this place is the wildlife. I usually hang bird feeders within the first day or two we arrive. It doesn't take them long to find the goodies! The squirrels and birds share the seed feeder, and the hummers are such voracious eaters that I've already gone through 5 lbs. of sugar making the nectar for their feeders. Every evening after supper we drive a loop road to the west, north and east of the campground. So far we've seen elk, antelope, deer, coyotes and a beautiful gray/silver wolf. (Wolves have recently been reintroduced into Colorado.) Unfortunately, we didn't have our camera with us the night we saw him. Abby was standing on the couch looking out the window and barking like crazy. When I looked to see what was causing the excitement, this little squirrel was trying to make friends with our "garden racoons".

If you watched national news earlier this week, you might have seen that Colorado is having bad weather conditions. On Monday, this "bad boy" touched down less than 10 miles north of the camp; local news reported $161,000,000 in damage. Most of the folks who live here say that tornadoes typically travel and destroy on flat land and rolling hills (which surrounds the camp), so since we are in the mountains it's not likely that we would be hit. But...it doesn't hurt to be prepared! Nevertheless, it was scary! The last 2 days have been bright, sunshiny days and temperatures in the high 70s. Pikes Peak is still snow laden but the snow will be melting rapidly as temperatures continue to rise. We are so blessed to serve the Lord in this beautiful place.

1 comment:

  1. Looks like the animals know where to come to get food. I like that one of the squirrel hanging upside down to get to the food. Cute!!

    Did you take that picture of the tornado? Scary!!

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