Sunday, March 27, 2022

Ken Caryl Ranch's Historic Barn


The suburban community I live in, which is located in the foothills of Colorado west of Denver, was once a cattle ranch with its first owner, John C. Schaffer, purchasing the land in 1914.  In 1921 he hired Littleton builder William F. Sorensen to build a barn to house his purebred, award-winning, Hereford cattle.  The barn survives and was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Information from the History Colorado website:
"The barn is an excellent example of the gambrel-roof variant of the Transverse Frame Barn type as executed in the western United States. Character-defining features include the barn’s rectangular plan; gambrel roof with cupola ridge ventilators; second-story hayloft; hay hood and hayloft doors at the gable end; symmetrical interior organization with two interior aisles flanked by stalls running the length of the barn; and large sliding barn doors on the front and rear walls at the ends of the aisles. The unusual choice to use structural clay tile as a wall material adds to the barn’s significance."



You can read more about the barn by clicking on the photo above to enlarge the photo.

You can also see an interesting YouTube video about John C. Shaffer and his beautiful ranch on this link.




Our community's historic society had an open house this past fall to allow visitors to tour the barn and learn its history.  It now houses horses and is part of the Ken Caryl Ranch Equestrian and Training Center, which also contains two fully groomed outdoor arenas and a large indoor arena.





The enormous hayloft construction in the barn was amazing to view!



It has strong construction that has withstood much weather and time.



Our community has over 4,800 acres of native Colorado open space and many miles of trails that Ken-Caryl Ranch resident hikers, bicycle riders, and horse riders can access.  



It really is a wonderful place to live! 

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Sunday, March 20, 2022

A Snowy Springtime In Colorado


Happy Spring!  Springtime in Colorado means we get our best snowfall. March and April are traditionally our snowiest months. Since moving here in 2013 I've even seen some snowfall in early June.  These photos of myself as a child growing up in Brooklyn, New York, prove that I've always loved winter and snow. I would be out playing in it for hours, sledding, building snowmen, building snow forts. I know I'd miss snow if I lived in a warm climate, so living in Colorado suits me well. This winter we have had some snowfall almost every week since late December, and hopefully, the snowpack has been enough to counteract the severe drought we experienced in the summer and fall of 2021. Many rivers depend on Colorado snowpack melt. The Colorado River supplies 40 million people in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming as well as a $5 billion-a-year agricultural industry. So, as they say: "Let It Snow!"


Photo albums of a vacation we took in Ireland


Recently, my husband and I have had an ongoing project of scanning all our family photographs up into personal cloud storage. It had been on our mind to do this when we moved to Colorado from New York and had to go through many photo albums and boxes of family photos to pack them for our move.  After we settled in, and a few years had passed, the photo albums and boxes sadly remained hidden away in drawers and cabinets and we procrastinated on the project. The devastating Marshall Wildfire that took place in December 2021 reminded us that we must finally make an effort to preserve these memories. We would not be able to pack all these photos into our car if we had to evacuate our home in an emergency and we knew we would be sad to lose all the memories our photos evoked. So now album by album we are scanning them all. It feels good to finally get it done!





A photo of our area last week. 

More snow is predicted this week!




The nice thing about spring snow is that the weather soon warms up and the snow melts quickly. In fact, last week we actually saw the snow evaporating like fog up into clouds above our area after the sun began to shine. It looked like heaven! The streets were steaming with water vapor and everything glistened.  Photos just can't cover the beauty of it all!



A deer smiling for her photo.




The deer curled herself up like this in the snow to take a nap. I was impressed that she was able to twist her neck back so far.  She slept for about a half-hour and then moved on to nibble more of my shrubs.



We celebrated St Joseph's Feast Day On March 19th, which is Father's Day in Italy, and we always purchase sweet zeppole pastries. We were happy to find a small Italian bakery in Wheat Ridge called Dolce Sicilia. So good!
For Saint Patrick's Day, March 17th, I make my favorite Irish soda bread for my family, along with the traditional corn beef dinner. The photo on the lower left is St Patrick's grave in Downpatrick Catherdral Cemetery in Northern Ireland. 



"Surely as cometh the Winter, I know 
There are Spring violets under the snow." 
~ R.H. Newell


So this is early springtime in Colorado! 


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