Categories
Snow Trips & Activities

ATV and Ice

A cool thing about our property is that half of it is pretty steep 20+ degrees, and the other half is almost completely flat. This allows for lots of different activities. Well, that melt off that I mentioned in my last post drained down our steep hill and made a small pond in the middle of our “flat pasture.” And the latest cold snap has frozen the pond into a small ice pond.

If you’re interested in more back story: The previous owners lived in our current house for 1 year. The winter that they were here, the father had this great idea of dragging his children behind his vehichle on a tarp. I bet they had a blast, and it ended up killing a lot of the grass in a long strip. So now we have a fairly flat, slightly lower strip of land going through the middle of our pasture. It was this strip that now is home to our frozen puddle.

I think that’s enough details to enjoy our video. Donald and I (Ashton) took our friend’s ATV out into the pasture and had some fun:

Ashton:
Ashton on the ATV

Donald:
Ashton on the ATV

Here’s the video we made:


(If you don’t watch the entire video, watch Rosco (our dog) at 2:20.)

Wahoo! What a blast!
-Ashton

Categories
Horses Montana Ranch Snow Work

First Montana Thaw and Website Updates

After the horrible winter weather we had in December, January was pretty mild. We had a couple below zero weeks, but there wasn’t any snow or wind or anything else that would be considered “bad weather.”

I finally was getting used to all the snow. I was hoping to get 3-6 feet drifts, like we got last January… and it starts to thaw… Normally it doesn’t thaw until March or April, but our south-facing hill has been without snow for weeks already.

I saw the sun setting and decided to take a ride up our hill to see what kind of pictures I could get.

In this first one you can see the Mission Mountains and a series of sledding paths that we created in December and January. 😉

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s a shot of our house and Bo, the extremely “skiddish” Wild Mustang.

Ashton Anna Home and Montana Mountains

Here’s Jett (Carol’s other wild mustang) in his new head shot with a nice backdrop.

Continue reading “First Montana Thaw and Website Updates”
Categories
Animals Chickens Ducks Horses Mocha Ranch Rosco

A Winter Morning

We woke up this morning as we always do, and we went out to feed the animals. This time I brought a camera to take pictures of all of the ridiculous animals.

Because of the weather, we’ve been keeping the below three horses in the “large paddock.” Today, we let them out to run around in the field. They ran around for a good 10 minutes.
Ashton Anna's Horses

Ashton Anna's Horses
From left to right is Maple, Onora and Aspen.

While I was out in the pasture I took a picture of our house in the snow:
Ashton Anna's House

Continue reading “A Winter Morning”
Categories
Snow

Snowman v1.0

Donald and Amber made our first snowman of the year. Hopefully there will be many more to come:

Ashton Anna's Snowman
Anna got a “Make Your Own Snowman Kit” from Diana Henderson for Christmas, and Anna knitted a scarf to match. Here’s a picture of the builders standing next to their creation so you can see how “ginormous” the snowman really is:
Ashton Anna's Snowman
(This was before they added the arms.)

Enjoy,
Ashton Anna

Categories
Snow Trips & Activities

Sledding in Montana

We have had 3 to 4 feet of snow fall here in Montana so far this Winter. Right now there is about a foot of snow on the ground. And since I’ve never gone sledding for more than a couple of feet, we went out and hit our neighbor’s hill. Anna purchased a sweet snow tube at the beginning of last summer, and we had some 1 person tubes we used on the river. Here’s Anna and Ashton in our river tube:

Ashton Anna Sledding

We’d estimate that this slope is 300 feet long. Here’s a video of some of the crazy slopes we took:

Then we got tired of hiking that ridiculous hill, so we had Cory pull us behind his old Toyota Land Cruiser.

Cory and his Land Cruiser

Happy New Year,
Ashton Anna