It’s been more years than I care to count since we gave up Juniper Ridge Ranch and our llamas. It did turn out to be a good choice for us, painful as it was at the time. As I mentioned in the story, we sold a few of the llamas in our herd to various people, and most of the animals went to live with Linda Rodgers and Nelson Leonard. Originally, we had a boarding arrangement with them but later the llamas became theirs.
Lil Bit, Thundercloud, and some of the others lived out their lives at Linda and Nelson’s lovely ranch, and several of their descendents are there still. Linda and Nelson stopped breeding some time back, but they still have a good sized herd of llamas to care for and love. We stay in touch and get the news. Llama prices are not as high as they were back then.
Kelly and I have been pretty nomadic. We left Ashland for Olympia, Washington, where we found the climate dreary in the winters. So we bought an old Gray Line Hawaii tour bus and turned it into a movable home. The bus took us and our two dogs all over the western United States.
Crestone, Colorado, was one of our favorite places and we eventually built a home there, then sold the bus to friends. Kelly had done a lot of building throughout his career, and he became passionate about environmentally sound building methods.
The house is made of earthbags and papercrete, and if you don’t know what those are, you have plenty of company! Kelly’s got several websites now about these topics: the main one is www.greenhomebuilding.com
My love of animals has continued to come out in a variety of ways. Besides greatly enjoying whatever dogs and cats we have (two of each at the moment), I have a website on positive, pain-free, and effective methods of dog training: www.training-dogs.com – clicker training is one of the methods I write about a lot. Interestingly, after we had parted with our llamas, people began clicker training llamas too, very effectively.
After about ten years in Crestone, Kelly and I bought a little house in Mexico, near Lake Chapala. We sold our earthbag house to friends. Now we are mostly in Mexico, and I blog about that at www.mexico-with-heart.com/blog/
And so things continue. We live as simply and ecologically as we can, and I write about that at www.simplegreenliving.com. Putting this book into ebook format, where it can reach new readers, has reminded me of how much the llamas meant to me. Kelly asked me last night if I wished we had them again. I said no, but I would love to live next door to some without the responsibility!
That’s unlikely, but really all the llamas we’ve known remain alive deep in our hearts. How fortunate we were to live with llamas.
