A return to the scene of the crime…sort of.

It was the late spring of 1996 and Jen and I, married for less than a year, had traveled to Denver, CO for that year’s AOBA National Conference and Show. Things were moving pretty fast at that point for a couple of 24 year olds. Less than 2 years prior, having just moved back home to Vermont my then girlfriend had dragged me — somewhat sulkily on my part — to what was then called the Killington Sheep & Wool Festival. Ostensibly she took me that Sunday to see llamas for the first time since we had been backpacking around Ecuador at the end of her semester abroad. Well as it turned out there were alpacas penned next to the llamas at the wool festival that day and needless to say that set some not insignificant gears into motion.

The following year we went looking, now as newlyweds, for a piece of property suitable for an alpaca farm and in December of 1995 closed on the house and land that would soon come to be known as Cas-Cad-Nac Farm. So it was that the following June, still relatively footloose and fancy free, we found ourselves in Denver happily awash in everything alpaca. It would be another year before we would even have the barn completed (what is today know as the Main Barn), the fencing done, and actually purchased our first females. In Denver (and the following year in Pueblo too) we would spend hours just walking amongst all of the booths looking at animals, reading any literature we could lay our hands on, and shyly interacting here and there with a few of the breeders and exhibitors. We attended every single talk/workshop at Nationals that year that we could and when we weren’t at the conference venue itself we could be found at our hotel hungrily reading through the conference notebooks as though they contained the secrets of the universe. It was an exciting — and it needs to be said more innocent — time in our lives as we began a journey that has now consumed, fully by our choice, almost half of our time here on this earth.

A lot of water has gone over the dam since that first time we attended an AOBA conference, yet here we are visiting Colorado again some 15 years, two kids, and several hundred alpaca births later for another national show. In the interest of full disclosure we are really here more as observers than hardcore participants this time around. We shipped 20+ fleeces out, flew out late Wednesday from Boston, picked them up at our hotel yesterday morning, checked them all in at the the National fleece show and then made ourselves scarce. Though technically signed up as conference attendees (I’ve got the badge to prove it too!), we don’t even have a booth at the show venue. Though we have attended almost all of the AOBA Nationals with animals in recent years (we were at both Salt Lake City, UT and Fort Wayne, IN with trailers to say nothing of Louisville, KY multiple times), this go-round Denver was really just an excuse to travel out and visit an old childhood friend of ours who lives on the other side of the rockies in Durango, CO.  This is also the first chance that Jen has really had to take a breather since the run-up to the North American Show in early March. From the running of that show, to Futurity, to Syracuse, and then pretty much straight to shearing she in particular has really been burning the candle at both ends. Every now and then it’s good to just be. Early this morning we left Denver by car heading southwest and got to drive through the infamous Wolf Creek Pass which at over 10,000 feet of elevation was still very much in a winter mode with what looked like several inches of new snow from just last night alone. As it was the mountainsides up there were still covered with what had to be several feet of the white fluffy stuff. This was awe inspiring stuff for a couple of tourists from New England. Our old friend and hauler Mike Cates has described white-knuckling it through that pass in years past through winter weather with a fully loaded truck and trailer. No thanks. Though truly breathtaking in its beauty, for our part we were glad to be driving a rented SUV with all wheel drive and perhaps, more importantly, with all of our alpacas safely back home on the farm!