Recently we took a short trip to visit our daughter and son-in-law in Colorado. We enjoyed seeing the Rocky Mountain National Park including a herd of elk with a bugling bull! We speculated that he was warning off the bull sitting about 1/4 mile away eying his cows. And it turns out that the weather is a lot colder at 12,000 feet! They put logs on the roof of the visitors' center to keep the roof on in hurricane-force winds. We went to the visitors' center cafe after going to the high point. Here was the view from our table--pretty amazing. After we got in the car again, we saw the elk. The bull is near the bottom middle of this picture with all his cows above him. You can see how well they blend into their background. The competing bull is not shown but the bull in the picture is facing him. We went into Estes Park which was very busy with it being Labor Day weekend and having a big craft fair. Parking was a little hard to find. We did a little window shopping and went into a...

The picture used on my missionary plaque Last Sunday was the last day of my service mission for BYU-Pathway! I served students in Nigeria, hosting a gathering each week, helping students hopefully be more successful in their educational journey. My missionary service was only a few hours a week so I could do it along with all my other responsibilities. Here is my report: Challenges 1. Students in Nigeria have many obstacles in their educational journeys with technology problems being near the top. Many of them do not have access to computers. Doing all the classwork on a phone seems very difficult but that was what they had to do. Another challenge is internet connectivity and infrastructure. Getting online for our gatherings was difficult for many students. Some of the students would do their classwork in the middle of the night because that's when the internet worked the best. Rainstorms would disrupt the internet so the rainy season was especially difficult. Electricity is also ...

 A month ago, we were able to visit the church historical sites in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. This post will cover the last part of our trip. After visiting the Kirtland, Ohio sites and the Pittsburgh temple, we drove to the Aaronic Priesthood Restoration site in Harmony, Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River. There's a visitor's center there and two restored homes:  the Isaac and Sally Hale home and the Joseph and Emma Smith home. Isaac and Sally Hale first built a log cabin on their large property when they bought it. They lived there while having many children before this very nice house was built. Isaac was a hunter and used his large property for hunting. When their daughter Emma was 7, she went to church and the minister asked them to pray. So Emma went into the woods and prayed for her father to have his heart softened that he might start going to church with the rest of the family. Her father heard that prayer as he was going through the woods and started att...