Another year, and another installment of our family's annual Newsletter. Hopefully you guys aren't too offended by our switching to spending megabytes instead of pages and pages of paper. It helps our Christmas cards remain lightweight, and we can save a few trees.

This year we have had the privledge of truly exploring Colorado and the southwestern United States. The kids enjoyed their first season of Colorado Little League baseball, Dave celebrated turning 40 with the hike of his life, Patricia went back to work full time, we said goodbye to Howie...and hello to Ranger!

Dave is working hard at the USAF Academy educating and inspiring cadets. He has been crazy busy not just with the classes he's teaching, but he also advises several research projects and helps find new and exciting research opportunities for them. It's a really unique position to be in, getting to help with so much undergraduate research.

This past spring, Dave set up a basic garden model railroad in our backyard. His Facebook page -- which usually dedicated to his N Scale railroad -- spent the spring and summer showing his fans his versatility with different scales. The 2000 lbs. of landscape rocks caused quite the drama when the delivery truck got wedged in our gate: the company had to pay for a new gate! The kids helped by getting those rocks across the yard. I helped by helping Dave choose some Colorado-climate-appropriate plants to landscape the area.

Rio Grande Southern #25 on the Vollmer Backyard Route, June 2014. Note the pretty flowers on the left. It's landscaped quite nicely.

Dave turned 40 this year. He celebrated with a monumental achievement: a group of us hiked the 13-mile, 8000' elevation Barr Trail up Pikes Peak -- elevation 14,110'! It isn't easy, not just because of the physical demand, but also because your last 4 miles (and last 3000' worth of ascent) is above the tree line and out in the open. In the summertime, thunderstorms are a certainty. We had one form very close to us, and that was frightening indeed. That being said, we truly lucked out with the weather, Dave had this hike date planned for months, and the weather cooperated very well. The weekend prior...and the weekend afterward...widespread thunderstorms would have stopped us.

I spent the first part of the year relaxing from the basement work at the end of 2013. We had a pipe burst a couple weeks before Christmas and some of the basement work had to be reaccomplished: some flooring and painting. Restoring the impacted area took right up till the end of the year.

Then, I got some opportunities for reserve work later in the spring. During the spring, I also found out that I could be activated to teach Differential Calculus for the fall semester. It meant most of my summer would be spent training for the position, then I would be teaching from mid-August through mid-December. I'm just about to wrap up that work: as rewarding as it is, it's also the most substantial work I've done since I got off active duty (even more so than my 2009 deployment) and it's been a lifestyle shift, especially for the boys.

While I won't have Reserve work in the spring, I did apply for -- and was hired for -- a temporary civilian position in the physics department to teach physical meteorology. It will be an incredible leap to go from basic calculus to partial differential equations, but it will also be an incredible leap going from teaching freshmen to teaching juniors.

Jacob is now 12 and enjoying middle school! We "choiced" Jacob into the district's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math)-focused K-12 campus, and he really likes it. It's a bit of a drive, but fortunately the school is on the way to our offices at the Academy. This new school has a very strong Talented & Gifted program. Jacob got to participate in the district's High Trails program which involves camping in cabins up in Eleven Mile Canyon. Colorado takes outdoorsmanship seriously.

Jacob has been crazy busy... In addition to piano, he now plays cello. He's been involved in Science Olympiad and chess club. During the Spring he and Timmy played baseball with Academy Little League. Also, this spring Jacob bridged from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts and is already on the verge of earning Second Class. His new boy scout troop is a great fit for him because the boys all have similar interests. Dad is now an Assistant Scoutmaster in Jacob's troop, and in less than a year's time, Jacob's been camping, white water rafting, orienteering, and skiing with his new troop.

Timmy will be 10 in January and is in 4th grade. He's thriving in his school, enjoying his gifted classes and the Rubik's Cube club. He's an active Webelos Cub Scout as well. Timmy took up guitar briefly this year, but decided he had other interests. Like Jacob, he had a full baseball schedule this spring, rotating through second base, catcher, and left field. Timmy has also taken up cooking and gardening, interests he clearly inherited from his mother! Timmy's also become quite the skier, and skied his first mogul field this month at Copper Mountain!

Howie. Unfortunately, 2014 was the year we had to say goodbye to our beloved dog Howie. After almost 14 years, 6 tours of duty, and 2 deployments, Howie was diagnosed in the spring with an aggressive liver tumor. We were never quite able to get ahead of it, and in April, Howie passed away. He remained playful and loving until the end, and even came with us on a ski trip to Crested Butte the month before he passed.

After a few months, the absence of Howie was more than the boys (including Dave) could tolerate, so in July, we adopted Ranger through the Western Australian Shepherd Rescue. Ranger is a tri-color smooth coat Border Collie who was found wandering as a stray near Garden City, Kansas. We think he's roughly 2 years old. It's been a real adjustment going from an older, somewhat sedentary Howie to a young, energetic Border Collie, but Ranger is definitely integrating into the family. He's incredibly smart and sweet. Here's Ranger:

One of the great things about being living in Colorado is how easy it is to visit some of the great national parks. In 2014 alone we visited Mesa Verde NP, Grand Canyon NP, Arches NP, Canyonlands NP, and our "local" NP, Rocky Mountain National Park. The first four were all part of a single weeklong trip. In late June/early July, we set out of Colorado Springs with a full load of camping gear and an ambitious itinerary. We headed down to US 50 through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas, crossed over Monarch Pass, then down through part of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, over to Montrose and then south over Red Mountain Pass on the million-dollar highway, then down into Durango. The next day we rode the famous Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad through Animas Canyon.

The day after the train ride, we headed for Cortez and Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is surreal. The largest of these ruins are some 800 years old. There's a significant difference in temperature, too, between the hot mesa tops and the cool, shaded valleys. It's not hard to imagine why they were built into the cliffs rather than on top of the mesas. After a brief visit to Spruce Tree House, we left Cortez and drove toward the southwest, stopping at the Four Corners Monument, and then pressing all the way to the Grand Canyon.

We set up camp near the South Rim and Grand Canyon Village. The campground was very near the same altitude as our home (~6900' above sea level, our house is at 6800') so it was an easy adjustment for us. Interestingly, heat was less of an issue than the afternoon thunderstorms, which were helping to dent a prolonged drought. The Grand Canyon is a magical place. We spent several days there and made two trail descents below the rim. The first day we hiked part of the Hermit's Trail, and on the second day we took the Bright Angel Trail. Both times we were pretty nervous about the kids making the trip back up -- the boys acted as though they could go straight down to the bottom. You have to be very careful that you allow enough time, energy, and water for the trip up.

Looking southwest on US 163 just north of the UT/AZ border. This is a VERY famous view and we were among numerous vehicles pulled over to take this photo.

We camped in Moab, UT, with trips to Arches NP and Canyonlands NP. Our morning hike to Delicate Arch came after a late night of spectacular Fourth of July fireworks which belied Moab's small size.

After Canyonlands, we broke camp the next morning and headed home to Colorado Springs by way of Grand Junction, CO and Vail Pass on I-70.

Other trips this year included a Spring Break ski trip to Crested Butte, CO and Thanksgiving in a cabin at the YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park, CO, along with our annual family pilgrimage back east to Pennsylvania and West Virginia.