Fourth graders from Sanford, Antonito, and La Jara joined 500 of their classmates from across the San Luis Valley for the Colorado History Rendezvous held Thursday, May 14 at the Fort Garland Museum.

La Zozobra, or Old Man Gloom, awaits his fate, which is then realized on New Years Eve in the San Luis Valley.

Photo by bridgepix

bridgepix has a series of remarkable HDR photographs of valley scenery, including this one of the County Road G bridge that crosses Rio San Antonio between Lobatos and La Florida.

Bristol Head Acres webcam


SLV Dweller webcam


Sheep Creek webcam

Snow fell yesterday and even bigger flakes are falling at SLV Dweller headquarters this morning as of 8:00 am.

The past 24 hours have seen lots of snow -- up to 3 feet in the higher elevations. Too much snow, in fact, to get out of SLV Dweller headquarters. The Cumbres Trestle Snotel Reports 11 feet of snow. The Conejos River Webcam Gallery shows the past two days - notice the tree in the foreground.

Shelters have been set up in Antonito and Del Norte for travelers unable to continue their journeys due to road closures in those areas.

Today SLV Dweller moved its server from headquarters in La Florida to the server room at Amigo.Net in Alamosa. This will provide greater reliability and uptime for SLV Dweller. Outages on San Antonio Mountain will no longer affect the web site, but e-mail is still delivered to a server at headquarters.

A few days ago, the transmitting tower on San Antonio Mountain that delivers wireless broadband to SLV Dweller headquarters fell over, causing the web site outage many of you have experienced. Amigo.Net took a Sno-Cat® to the top of the mountain yesterday and installed equipment on a backup tower, bringing back SLV Dweller to everyone!

SLV Dweller may be moving its server to Alamosa from its current location east of Antonito to mitigate the effects of such outages in the future, so there might be another day-long outage in the next couple of weeks or so as we move equipment.

Thanks for sticking with SLV Dweller!

In a very short video, SLV Dweller tried to capture what it's like on a lazy Labor Day in the San Luis Valley.

Happy birthday to us! Today SLV Dweller turns five years old, and what a time we've had so far.

What started as an online publishing experiment in 2002 has turned into the San Luis Valley's leading collection of SLV-related photos, videos, news links, events and more.

We posted our first historical photos back in June 2002, and what may have been the Valley's first webcam appeared on our site at our five-month anniversary in November 2002. While we've shown you online video from the start, it's only been a little over a year since we started posting SLV-related videos from YouTube and Google.

Today we're debuting a new feature. We feel we're old enough to take you back in time to the days when SLV Dweller first came online, so now there is a "From the Archives" block in our sidebar that shows the news articles of five years ago.

The e-mails and comments that you, our loyal readers, have offered throughout the years have added dramatically to the experience of SLV Dweller, and your readership is what has kept us going.

Our looks may have changed a few times over the years, and our sidebars may have had some different features, but our basic content has pretty much remained unchanged: an agglomeration of San Luis Valley news and information from varied sources.

Where do the next five years take us? That's where we'd like your help. If you have ideas about what we should do differently in the future, write your comment on this post to let us know. We'd love to hear your thoughts on what SLV Dweller can do to reach more readers, become more interesting, and remain a vital part of the San Luis Valley publishing community for many more years in the future. Thank you to all of our readers!

Maps from the U.S. Geological Survey list Sego Peak as having an elevation of 9,476 feet above sea level. With the valley floor in the area around 7,800 feet above sea level, that means that the peak rises about 1,600 feet above ground level.

It's been there for well over a year, but modesty has prevented us from mentioning that a screenshot of SLV Dweller has been inserted into the banner image of Alamosa's Amigo.Net (check the screen of the iMac). The screenshot looks to be from around June 2005.

Watch as the morning fog shrouds the landscape east of Antonito.

Under a gray sky and with idle sprinkler systems in the background, passers-by help a driver whose car succumbed to the high drifts and snowpacked conditions on a nearby county road.

Heavy snows in the San Luis Valley have motivated this coyote to travel on a relatively snow-free road instead of through the snow-covered fields.

It is always nice to hear that our work is appreciated. Thank you Adventure Journalist.

A thunderous noise shook SLV Dweller headquarters yesterday afternoon. Unlike any other noise heard around these parts before, the sound was neither that of an airplane nor that of a helicopter. It turned out to be a V-22 Osprey conducting high-speed, low-level flight operations.

It flew by much too quickly to get a photograph, but the SLV Dweller webcam caught a portion of its flight east of Antonito. The still image above is a detailed portion of a frame of the time-lapse movie. The V-22 makes its first appearance in the movie at 3:10:48 P.M., and its last frame is at 3:11:08 P.M., covering about a mile in around twenty seconds (180 miles per hour).

Just before noon today, an owl stopped by SLV Dweller headquarters to stand watch over a nearby gopher mound. As of 5:10 P.M., the owl was still waiting for a potential meal to surface. That's over five hours of continuous, patient surveillance!

Vibrant flowers throughout portions of the SLV have attracted industrious bees.

The full moon rose at dusk a couple of days ago, giving clouds a temporary pink hue.

A small herd of rabbits sought refuge from the sun today. The photo caught them on their way from one shade source to another.