It was 7 January and late in the day there had been enough snowfall for sledding!

I picked up Aubree (then 7, but not pictured for privacy reasons), at school, and we played there for a minute, but then we hustled up to the nearest park with a good sledding hill.  This is what it looked like at home when I got in my car to go get Aubree:

Of course the dogs, Blue and Mac, had to investigate too, and they came out just as the two neighbor dogs, Mattie and Oreo, were doing the same thing:

This was the scene at school before the kids came out like gangbusters (not pictured here):

And here we are at the local sledding hill we have been able to use twice now in all the time we have lived in Vegas (but once a year the city brings in snow and creates a sled run to go along with a Winter neighborhood party).  

This park is one we came to when Aubree was little, now she likes the ones with big swings and bigger climbing toys.  But we have been here many an evening with the temperature well over a hundred Fahrenheit in the evenings,  so seeing it like this was a treat.

The only way to get her off the sledding hill that evening was to promise we would rise early in the morning the next day and sled some more.  Turns out that after a warmer and rainy late night, this required us to go into the local mountains (the Spring Range just west of Las Vegas):

We drove until we found a good spot with deep snow:

Low clouds kept us from seeing mountain peaks, but it was a nice place for some sledding (not shown for privacy reasons):

Of course the dogs came with us, and had fun smelling rabbit and coyote scents through the snow:

There is little enough to see of Aubree going uphill, expecting me to bring the sled, to allow this one into my public site (I have a password-controlled family website for more personal pictures).  You can see that the dogs have divided loyalties, Blue is coming back for me, Mac is going to keep up with Aubree:

That particular hill wasn't all that exciting, but we found a better one here:

I liked some of the trees around us, as usual

Just above us the clouds were lowering and we hoped for more snow, but alas it didn't happen.  This was our last snow adventure for this winter, we had a lot of rain with snow above about 7,000 feet elevation after, but it was time to switch from snow to flowers, in February (see "Flowers of 2005" pages).

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