Big Girl

So this is little Moira Josephine Gregory at 8+ months of age. She won't crawl, she still doesn't like to sleep all the way through the night and she's a picky eater, but boy does she love to WALK!

She still needs a little help with walking (we hold one hand with her), but she can take about 5 steps by herself before losing balance.

I think there's some metaphor in this whole "I won't crawl before I walk" thing...

...at the very least, her ambition is inspiring!

The Hermit

So it's officially the Alumni Reunion time here at the United World College and "students" from all the way back in the 80's through the present converge on the campus to pretend that they're younger and to relive some old UWC memories. It seems like a pretty fun time, and our friend Jeremiah does an amazing job at organizing and running the whole reunion.


Today, I led a hike for about 9 of the Alumni up Hermit's Peak...one of the more prominant peaks in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that is about 20 miles west of campus. The peak itself is at an elevation of 10,263 feet above sea level, but really only 3700 feet higher than Las Vegas, NM (which is the nearest town to the UWC). It was about a 4 mile hike to the top and it gains about 2,000 feet in elevation.
The peak itself used to be called Cerro Tecolote (Owl Mountain)until the 1860's when Juan de Agostini occupied a cave near the summit. Agostini apparently was born in 1800 as an Italian nobleman's son and later studied for the priesthood, but refused to accept his eventual vows. This cat walked most of the places he ever went to, and his walk to the summit of Cerro Tecolote evidently was something like a 600 mile trek from Kansas. While he lived in his cave on the Summit, he befriended a local group of Penitentes and they evidently thought him a saint.


Only living there a few years, he left to have more foot journeys in excess of 250 miles each and finally ended up in a cave on another peak near Juarez, NM. A friend he met near there was concerned for his health because of hostile locals and asked him to burn a fire every night so the friend would know he was alright. On an evening in 1869, the fire didn't burn. The friend headed up to the hermit's cave and found him with a knife in his back. Evidently, people would still hike up to Hermit's Peak (Cerro Tecolote) even until the mid 1960's to pay homage to Agostini and visit his cave. The Penitentes would continue to make rosaries out of native plants that they took up to the cave at Hermit's Peak.

The hike up to the peak was really nice today. I've been hiking in Sebastian Canyon every day now for about a week, and I feel like I have my altitude lungs back as well as improved knees since a bad backpacking trip earlier in the summer. I have to admit that I'm feeling much more spry on my feet than I have in a long time.





Along the way, I saw tons of these little moths that I mistook for butterflies. Gnophaela vermiculata is the official name. Pretty little guys were everywhere on the trail today along with some Pine White butterflies. At the top of Hermit's Peak, there was a massive hatching of lady bugs as well...my phone was dead though, so sorry for no picture of that.

my dog has a stiff neck

What's with the dog posts lately? I guess there's just a lot of canine drama around the Gregory house recently.

This is Camden, our sweetheart. When we came home Thursday night from Walmart, poor little Cam was having some major hip issues. She was squealing horribly and couldn't really walk. She's always had bad hips, but we couldn't figure out what would have caused them to flare up so bad in just the 1 hour that we were at the store. We came to the notion that she and Jack must have gotten into it a little while we were gone. We figured that Jack flipped her so that she tweaked her hips.

Camden and I went to the vet today and he heard the whole story and did a physical exam. He came to the conclusion that when she and Jack got into it, he probably caused her to yank her neck too far to one side, causing a mildly inflamed disc. It just so happens that the small nerve the inflamed disc encroached on was giving her a hightened sense of pain in her hips. Poor thing!

She's getting better after some TLC from Kel and Me, and, as funny as it sounds, she seemed to appreciate me taking her to the vet.

my back yard

It's true what the mysterious "they" say about how being away from home makes you miss it so much. This past year, we were SO homesick for South Carolina. The summer vacation that we just came off of was indeed a breath of fresh air. So good to see family...so good to feel the humidity and the mosquito bites...(I know that sounds weird, but it was). At the end of it all, though, it's also nice to be back in New Mexico where we can get our little baby Moira on a schedule again, and where we can see some of our newer good friends.

It's also good to get back to the wilderness out here. This is a shot I took last year on one of my day hikes behind my house. Over the past 3 days, I've been doing either 2 short hikes a day or 1 long hike. Today's hike was a long one for me...probaly about 7-8 miles round trip in some pretty mountainous topography. The baby girl has been strapped into a child-carrying backpack that I tote on each of the hikes and she does SO well. She usually talks her baby talk for the first 20 minutes or so and is then hiked off to sleepy land for a good 30 minutes before she wakes up again.

How much of a blessing it is to have such beautiful land that we're free to explore literally out of our back door.

So to all those natural born explorers out there, the proverbial door is always open and the guest room can be cleaned up anytime you want to come visit. :)

the smell of a skunked dog

So I'll finally have a post that lives up to my blog's namesake...except instead of a "wet dog", picture a "skunked dog".

This is my little buddy Jack just after he had a glorious chase down the hill from our house after a wiley brother skunk. A short battle ensued, but sadly, bearing only shiny white teeth and no projectile vileness, Jack quickly found himself standing in a cloud of "parfume de mephitus" (ode de skunky). I have to admit, it smelled completely different than I expected.

I'm sure I'm not the only good South Carolinian/New Mexican who has driven down a backroad on a mid-summer evening and caught a whiff of that unmistakable odor that seems to give the olfactory receptors a stiff uppercut. You know it when a smelly old "pole cat" is around. But this smell that Jack was wearing was a bit more like death mixed with pepper spray. The poor dog just put his ears back, tucked his tail and slinked back to the front porch...where apparently he had a grave misunderstanding that I was actually going to let him back inside.

I tied him up, snapped this quick photo, and got online looking for "de-skunking" remedies. I had always heard an oatmeal bath would do the trick, but I wasn't sure. I also heard that a tomato bath would work, but I was a bit sceptical. Turns out that a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap works pretty dadgum well at getting most of the horrible perfume off.

Our house does stink a little bit, but with a 7 month old baby girl living here, I'm sure no one will notice the difference!

a "simpler" life

On our way back west from our Summer in SC, Kel, Moira and I stopped off in Mansfield Missouri for a visit to one of the homesites of Laura Ingalls Wilder (the author of all of the Little House on the Prairie books).

We honestly had sort of planned our trip so that we would specifically go through Mansfield and see the house. As we approached, however, there were no signs or anything about the museum/homesite. We kind of expected it to be a tourist trap and were pleasantly surprised to pull up to a very well preserved site with little to no "tourist" trappings.

The house was where Laura actually wrote all of the Little House books by hand after she and her husband Almanzo moved to Mansfield from her prairie home in Des Met South Dakota.

Kelley and I walked through the small house that Almanzo built himself and left in such a relaxed frame of mind after having witnessed the "simple" life that hard work and few luxuries produces.

It was a great end to our wonderful summer back east.

Driving on the Parkway

It's the "end" of our little family summer back home in South Carolina and we decided to pull away for some time to ourselves before having to head back to obligations and excitement in New Mexico. We decided to take a lazy trip back west by heading up the Blue Ridge Parkway first, then deciding how we would get home from there.

The beauty of the trip is the spontaneity of it all. We started out by leaving charleston last Thursday and ended up at Lake Jocassee (Devil's Fork State Park) by nightfall...since then, it's been the Blue Ridge Parkway the whole way until today (Monday). We stayed at Mt. Pisgah, Doughton Park VA., Roanoke Mt. VA, and now a Holiday Inn express for a little break from the camping life.


There have been TONS of cool sights along the way, and we've definitely been taking advantage of the whole "drive awhile, stop awhile" mentality of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Most memorable stops so far have been Brinegar Cabin, Mabry Mill, and Roanoke Mt. park where we saw a surprise bluegrass concert on Sunday night.



We also had an unexpected reunion with our friends Tim Okeefe, his sons Devin and Colin, and his wife Heidi Mills when we stayed in Devil's Fork State Park. We haven't seen them in some time and it was so good to catch up! This is our little Moira posing with Heidi and the Okeefe boys.


So from here the plan is to spend a little time in Shenandoah National Park before heading west for sure. The only major places we want to hit on the way back are Mammoth Cave and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum. If we hit those soon enough, we may head past our New Mexico home and go to the Grand Canyon and Canyon DeChelly before calling it quits on our road trip summer.

Happy Trails!