The grid doesn't exist at Valley View Hot Springs! OLT has its own hydro-electric system to keep the lights on. And it has been running smoothly and has not been offline in months! Some of the items dependent on the system are: lights, refrigeration, heat, cooking, water pump, computers, hot water in the Apple Tree Pools! And anything else that takes electricity!

But there are limits to the flow of electrons. It takes water to turn the turbine that turns the generator, but we are in the throws of a drought with no end in sight. Where we were once producing 60 kilowatts, we are now down to 38! I am enlisting the aid of everyone to help keep the soaking pools hot by not using any more electricity than you absolutely need!

Late last year OLT was given a beautiful opportunity to help the San Luis Valley. Ben Eiseman, a local ranch owner and long-time supporter of OLT, passed away. His family and OLT have created the Ben and Mary Eisemen Educational Fund to help local SLV youth learn job skills within the mission areas of OLT. We have several exciting projects for this year. With the help of our French intern, Margaux Tachet, we will be developing a natural resource baseline inventory and monitoring program to track our progress in optimizing the conditions of our lands. Margaux will work with two volunteer youth and several local paid youth alongside our partners, the Kerber Creek Restoration Project, the Rio Grande Watershed Conservation and Education Initiative, Center Conservation District, and the Natural Resources Conservation Authority. The second project within this program will be having local youth man our Trading Post. They will learn customer service, how to handle money, how to be great sales people, how to make good coffee, and other useful life skills. It is our hope to also create an alternative energy education program around our hydroelectric system as well as the solar technology we intend to install to make the Everson Ranch a sustainable endeavor. The Federal government has deemed the SLV one of the solar centers of the country (335 days of sunshine at 7500 feet altitude) and we want our kids to get those jobs when they come! If you have any desire to help with this wonderful program, please let us know. Mentorship is one of the critical keys to a successful future for our kids!

You know how every year we have a Member's Appreciation Weekend that is so fun, but no kids come? Well, this year, in addition to that marvelous party, we will have a Kid's Weekend! The weekend of July 30, we will have all kinds of kids in attendance and things for those kids to do in addition to swimming, wallowing in mud, chasing damselflies, diving for gnome stones, and worshipping the fireflies. We'll have scavenger hunts, astronomy discussions, bat activities, face painting, hat building, t-shirt designing, cooking, music, circus skills, art projects, talent shows – all kinds of fabulous things just for kids – kids of all ages. There will be no shushing of kids that weekend! Parents, come with your kids and with ideas and materials for cool things to do. If it takes preparation email Cherrye at . Remember, even on Kids' Weekend, kids need to be accompanied by adults. Always make sure your kids are safe, they are ever so precious!

SO much is happening! We are pursuing the evolution of the 150 year old Everson Ranch into an educational and agricultural center for the Orient Land Trust and the San Luis Valley. If you have been to the Ranch, you know the beautiful ancient ranch buildings: Barns, sheep sheds, bunk house, loafing sheds. We are going to build these buildings from within, leaving the beautiful, authentic historical facades wherever we can. We will create indoor and outdoor learning spaces, living spaces, collaborating spaces, cooking spaces, bathing spaces. We will create greenhouses, offices, building shops, barns. We will build permaculture systems around the central building spaces, native grass hay fields beyond that and foster healthy natural grasslands beyond that, up into the foothills. We plan to become a model of best practices for the valley.

There will be places for children of all ages to examine the earth, pet the animals, learn about earthquakes, water, and alternative energy. You might find classes on permaculture, holistic grazing methods, conservation practices, local endangered species of animals, natural herbs, invasive species of plants, primitive living skills, canning, soap making, herbal medicines, slow cooking. You might meet a group of your friends for a dinner in the Ranch house garden, take a bike ride, spend a week weeding the gardens. Who knows, in a year or so you might be able to have a wedding party at the Ranch! With more than ten people!

This summer we have already planned a permaculture workshop, two art workshops, kids science camps like last year, dinners in the garden, and the summer OLT Board meeting. 

We also have a special program we are developing with the help of the Ben and Mary Eiseman Educational Fund. We will be teaching job skills to local youth within the conservation arena. The first program we will develop is an inventory and monitoring system for our plant and animal species. This may include an eradication program for invasive species if that is deemed necessary. We will be working with the Kerber Creek Restoration Project, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Center Conservation District, Rio Grande Watershed Conservation and Education Initiative, our French intern, Margaux Tachet, a local student from Adams State, two interns from France and Breckenridge, and two to four local San Luis Valley youth who will get paid!

We will also be working with the NRCS and a local rancher (arrowpointcattleco.com) to begin rebuilding our grasslands' health with the Allan Savory method of holistic grazing (savoryinstitute.com). We'll be running Scottish Highland cattle, a small, drought and cold resistant bovine beauty. While you have been able to buy all natural grass-fed Arrowpoint beef in the OLT store for the past year, you soon will be able to buy Arrowpoint beef that was raised on OLT lands! We won't name them, we promise! Unless you want to help us... 

Scottish Highlands are known as a hardy breed due to the rugged nature of their native Scottish Highlands. Highland cattle have been successfully established in countries where winters are substantially colder than Scotland's. Their hair gives protection during the cold winters and their skill in looking for food allows them to survive in steep mountain areas. They both graze and browse and eat plants which many other cattle avoid. The meat tends to be leaner than most beef because Highlands get most of their insulation from their thick shaggy hair rather than subcutaneous fat. The coat makes them a good breed for cold northern climates and they are able to thrive in outdoor conditions that would defeat most other breeds of domestic beef cattle. Most importantly, the beef produced from Highland cattle is exceptionally tender and delicious!

We have put a concrete floor (all set for in-floor heating) into the barn we call the Dance Hall. We call it that because we are going to have good, old-timey, barn dances! Anyone willing to play music? We are also going to have board meetings, classes, roundtable sessions, yoga sessions, painting workshops, and roller skating. It will be an all-around useful building for community affairs of all kinds.

At the ranch, in addition to our beautiful new Scottish girls, we now have chickens to lay eggs, horses to till the soil and run fence lines, and a llama to boot. Come see us and give the animals a bite to eat. They all love apples! Me too!

We will be putting in a straw-bale, bath-kitchen building for campers, bunkhouse dwellers, and visitors alike. You will be able hike, bike, garden, herd cattle, clean ditches, mow hay, feed horses, mow the laws, gather eggs, and then take a long hot shower! Or a short environmentally sustainable shower! You will be able to cook your dinner that you picked in the garden or out from under a chicken! 

We need help on all these projects – we need donors and volunteers to make this come to fruition. Help us to make this world a more sustainable place for you and your children!

With Pam, our new Development Director, we are in the process of creating a Corporate Partners Program to engage the local and regional business community with OLT's broader mission of supporting economic, agricultural, and ranching sustainability for the San Luis Valley. Incentives, both advertising and program opportunities, will be offered for varying levels of support which in the future might even include business, education, and conservation leadership retreats and camps at the Everson ranch. One of OLT's first and most recent Corporate Partners is Betz Transformers of Grand Junction who provided a $1,000 in-kind donation toward the cost of our new transformer. Thank you Betz for your generous donation!

OLT has hired Pamela Nelson as our new Director of Development to bring in funding for all our new exciting programs! Pam will help us to secure funds through various strategies to deliver additional revenue streams. Pam comes to the San Luis Valley from Denver where she was engaged in consulting projects and brings almost twenty years of development experience, including three years as Director of Advancement at the Lancaster County Conservancy (PA). Pam loves the challenges of funding the "start-up" stage in organizations because of the variety of responsibilities she gets to juggle from grant research / writing to annual campaigns and membership cultivation. Pam will be working on a Development Plan for OLT as she gets to know the organization, its members, and neighbors in the San Luis Valley. In her "free" time, Pam plans to spend time in the mountains where she loves to hike, ski, bike, raft, run (maybe triathlon training) or do "anything outdoors". Pam was raised in a conservation ethic as her father founded a local Audubon chapter, was an avid outdoorsman, and created a county park in PA from acreage that could have more lucratively been developed as a golf course community. Pam is looking for fundraising volunteers, especially those with experience or a passion for it, to help implement this exciting phase of OLT's organizational development as fundraising strategies are created and tested. The more we expand our circles of influence and engage more people, the better we can accomplish OLT's ambitious mission. Come in and meet Pam and get infected with her lovely enthusiasm!f

The next meeting of the Board will be July 20 beginning at 9am at the Everson Ranch. This is our annual outreach meeting and we hope everyone will join us at the ranch for the meeting, free lunch at 12:30 p.m. followed by Q&A time with the Board and special presentations about holistic range management, water systems, permaculture gardens, and more! This is a great opportunity to learn about OLT, the Board of Directors and the Everson Ranch.

The Board is looking towards OLT's future and is happy to be nearing completion of our Conservation Strategic Plan. We still have lots of work to do evaluating and prioritizing the many goals that seek to achieve our mission. We would like to give a huge THANK YOU to the volunteer task force that spent countless hours brainstorming, researching and crafting a draft plan for the Board to complete. Also, we could not have gotten this far with the help of our facilitator, Edward Gray of Gray Matter Solutions. The following comes from our facilitator's report at the April 20 meeting of the Board.

"The future of the organization is the special concern of the board of directors. The strategic planning process is a concentrated time for the board and executive director to focus on impact and to develop the habits for managing and governing with the future (short-, middle-, and long-term) as the focus.

The Orient Land Trust Strategic Plan is a map showing the impact the Orient Land Trust intends to have and how it intends to accomplish this impact. Like any itinerary, it is a plan, not a prediction. Orient Land Trust is well on its way to developing and implementing a sound, comprehensive, and vivid strategic plan, which will lead to more focused energy, increased stakeholder engagement, and greater intended impact."

In July, we will celebrate the long time contributions and retirement of Dan Jones, Doug Bishop, and Mike Blevins. At that time, we will also be bringing in new directors to fill their seats and help us implement the strategic plan. Join us in July to meet the new leadership. Contact me or Suzanne Ewy, Executive Director (), to find out more about OLT's leadership and other ways you can contribute to our mission.

See you in July!
Jessica DuBoe
OLT Board Chair

Reservations

Call 719-256-4315 between 9am and 10pm to make / change a reservation.

Reservations are highly recommended. Our space is limited to a maximum number of visitors each day (guest quota). This limit and our indoor accommodations are often filled weeks in advance. This is especially true during summer months and busy weekends.

Rates			Summer May - Sept	Winter Oct - Apr
1. Admission Fee (per guest)			(Closed Dec 1st - 28th)
+		( ) Day Use Use of the facilities during a single day. Must arrive no later than 8:30pm.	$15	$12
		( ) Overnight Stay In addition to the accommodation fee below. After checking-out of your accommodation, stay and use the hot springs until 10pm on the day of your departure.	$30 per night	$24 per night
		( ) Member's Quick Dip Members may stop in for two hours to enjoy your waters, sauna, and space.	$11	$8
		( ) Children  Under the 16 years of age for day use or overnight stays.	(free admission)
	[logo]	[ ] Local Discount     Must present a current Saguache County driver's license at check-in.	($3 off per day/night)
	[logo]	[ ] Naturist Society Discount     With a current membership to The Naturist Society.	($3 off per day/night)
2. Overnight Accommodation Fee Reservations may be placed earlier than two weeks in advance by donating. See membership benefits. Choose one. Benefactor-level donors may reserve more than one cabin, sunset room, or camp site.
		[ ] Cancellation Fee paid when any reservation is not kept, increases with two weeks of the reservation, up to as much as $50 when there's no call and no show. (details)	up to $50 per night
+	[photo]	( ) Tent Site First-come, first-serve choice from our variety of nearby or remote tent sites. Each has its own picnic table and most are well leveled.	$10          No Charge
	[photo]	( ) Vehicle Camping Site Use the map and descriptions to select a spacious, level spot for your and your vehicle. Select sites include electrical hookups powered from our on-site hydroelectric power plant.	$15	$10
	[photo]	( ) Oak House Dorm Bed Choose up to two full bunks in our open, communal dormitory upstairs in the Oak House.	$6	$6
	[photo]	( ) Oak House Private Room Choose up to two of the four private rooms in our communal Oak House cabin. Each room has a single full bed, thermostat, nightstand, and reading light.	$18	$12
	[photo]	( ) Sunset Room Select one of four motel-style Sunset Rooms featuring two full beds, complete with kitchen, thermostat, and shared indoor half-bath at end of hallway.	$46	$35
	[photo]	( ) Aspen Cabin A small cabin with two full beds, one in the loft and below its large skylight.	$46	$35
	[photo]	( ) Cedar Cabin A small cabin with two full beds, one upstairs in its loft.	$46	$35
	[photo]	( ) Cottonwood Cabin A large cabin with two full beds in separate rooms, dining area and kitchenette.	$60	$50
	[photo]	( ) Willow Cabin A large cabin with three full beds in a room adjacent its dining area and kitchenette. Connected to Elm, on the left.	$60	$50
	[photo]	( ) Elm Cabin A large cabin with two full beds in a room adjacent its dining area and kitchenette. Connected to Willow, on the right.	$60	$50
3. Pet Fees (if applicable)
+		( ) Pet Fee - Day Use Pets may accompany guests camping in tents or vehicles. Pets should be attended and on a leash at all times so as not to disturb other guests or wildlife.	$2 per pet
		( ) Pet Fee - Camping Pets may accompany guests camping in tents or vehicles. Pets should be attended and on a leash at all times so as not to disturb other guests or wildlife.	$5 per pet
		( ) Pet Fee - Private Cabins Pets may stay indoors with guests staying in the Aspen, Cedar, Cottonwood, Willow, or Elm cabins only. Pets should be well attended to ensure no damage is done.	$10 per pet
		[ ] Pet Deposit     Each pet must be registered and a deposit collected upon arrival. The deposit is promptly returned assuming no incidents or complaints occurred (details).	$50

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