My husband Kelly and I raised llamas in the mountains outside of Ashland, Oregon, during the 1980s. Our herd was always small, and we also offered day hikes with our llamas for tourists who came to Ashland for its Shakespeare Festival. This snapshot is of us during that time.
I wrote two books about llamas:
- Living with Llamas: Tales from Juniper Ridge stayed in print for 25 years. Now it’s available as a free downloadable ebook, in PDF format — that link takes you to the download page. You can also read it on this website, as explained on that page. It’s the story of our experiences with llamas. Neither one of us had any livestock experience to begin with, and it showed! We became quite telepathic with the llamas as time went by, and I wrote about that too.
- Llamas for Love and Money was written during the era when there was a lot of money to be made. That heyday has passed, as indeed I said it would in the book. I later felt I should have titled the book Llamas for Love and Maybe Money. This book has been out of print for some time now.
Kelly produced a series of video programs on llamas, on llama packing, llama reproduction, a general program called Why Llamas? and more. We called our llama publishing company Juniper Ridge Press; now it’s part of our business Hartworks, Inc.
We received an International Llama Association Pushmi-Pullyu Award, for llama education.
Here is our product line from then:
None of these are available now, except the free download of Living with Llamas. It’s been many years (decades!) since we owned llamas. Kelly is now very involved with natural building methods and Rosana is writing. You can see what we are up to at our flagship website. hartworks.
Please note that since we are all unique individuals, we cannot predict how quickly you would learn llama training.
Rosana Hart