I grabbed this shot at Rainbow Park in Crested Butte one evening in August. I was at a wedding reception and a couple of houses down the street, this bear pops out. The animal was kind enough to walk along the bank of a little pond, producing a nice reflection shot. That's the Crested Butte Country Club in the background.

Hi All,

I’m Robb Pennie, the AIA web guy. While I’m usually pretty happy staying out of the Arrowhead web site lime light, Cheri Ratliff, the AIA Communications Manager, suggested that I introduce myself and offer AIA site visitors a little background about the guy who puts the Arrowhead property owners’ content on the web. It’s taken me a week or two to come up with something that I figured wouldn’t completely put you to sleep, but you may want to brush your teeth, take out your contacts and put on your pajamas just in case. And I've included some photos that I've taken in the last couple of months. Like the plumber with leaky faucets, I'm the photographer with no pics of me and my family and I all in one shot, so these shots are all scenes and critters, kind of irrelevant to my self bio. But Cheri thought you'd enjoy them. Or she was pretty sure that they'd be way more interesting than anything I could honestly write about myself *wink*.

I grew up in Minnesota, in the small town of Marine on St. Croix (population 504), about 45 minutes east and north of the Twin Cities, along the banks of the St. Croix River. My dad taught second grade at the small elementary school I attended (I had him as a teacher for a year), while my mom worked out of our house as a graphic artist and later became a classroom art teacher. While Dad worked on a construction crew in the summers with a few other teacher friends, he also made time for he and I to get away for a few weeks while we were off school. We’d load up the camping gear and our ATVs, and head to the western United States, being gone for two or three weeks at a time. We either camped in a tent or slept in the back of dad’s pickup and rode pretty tame three wheelers and four wheelers, but explored and enjoyed a lot of great country over several years of traveling together. I had no idea at the time how lucky I was just to tour around the American West for weeks at a time with my dad, with only general destinations and vague timelines guiding us.

Horses grazing in the morning mist with Italian Mountain in the background.

As I moved into my college years, (trying to become an English teacher at the University of Wisconsin—River Falls), the summer trips with Dad were replaced with summer jobs and, of all things, bicycle tours. A college buddy of mine had done a couple of unsupported, solo bicycle tours and after joining him for one, I was sure that I wanted to do the same. It sure beat the heck out of working all summer and, in some ways, the seeds for that type of adventure had been planted during all the years of exploring the West with my dad. To make a long story short, I did two major tours over two summers . . . the first from Crescent Junction, Utah to Albert Lea, Minnesota, via Santa Fe, New Mexico. The second (the following summer) was from Portland, Oregon, to somewhere out in eastern Kansas on what turned out to be an incomplete coast-to-coast attempt. Bike touring like that took me through a lot of amazing country and left me with some interesting stories, as well as a sore backside. While I’ve never toured again, I continue to bicycle, now preferring a mountain bike, enjoying Colorado’s single track.

Some nice flowers along Washington Gulch Road with Crested Butte Mountain in the background.

During college I managed to save up enough $$ to make spring break ski trips to the Rockies. Big Mountain, Montana, and Summit County, Colorado, impressed upon me how Midwestern night skiing on Saturday evenings with my church group, while fun, was just the tip of the ice burg in terms of skiing adventures. Somewhere in there I discovered the whole powder skiing thing and because I wasn’t very good at skiing the pow, I decided I had better get my priorities straight in terms of where skiing fit into my life, especially in terms trying to get educated enough to be a high school English teacher. So I put college on the back burner so that I could learn how to ski powder properly.

During my second or third or fourth year of college (there were so many of them, it’s hard to keep track), I packed up my dorm room at the end of fall semester and moved to the Gunnison Valley. That would have been in 1993. Working as a lift operator, skiing daily and getting to live in the majesty of the Colorado Rockies, I was hooked. The next couple of years, I spent my falls at school and the rest of my winters in Crested Butte until I graduated with a B.S. in English in 1995. No longer so sure I wanted to teach, I moved to the Crested Butte area for good.

By that time I had met my future wife, Stacey, in Crested Butte. She was a foxy ski instructor at Crested Butte Mountain Resort and we had tons of fun skiing, riding and adventuring together both summer and winter. We were married in 1999 and had managed to get into a position to build a house in Crested Butte South in 2003, where we live today. Over the years, Stacey and I stay in the area, probably like many of you, because we love the beauty and character of the mountains and have quite an appetite for recreating. Whether it’s skiing or snowmobiling in the winter, mountain biking, water skiing, camping, dirt biking or motorcycling in the summers, we can’t get enough. We have a daughter, now four years old, and she loves to get out and play with us, as well. We purchased a lot at Arrowhead a couple of years back and look forward to being able to build on it someday. But with the various details and caveats that life currently holds, “someday” is a ways over the horizon at this point.

I’ve worked for Crested Butte Mountain Resort in different positions since ‘93, but have been in the I.T. department, handling tech side of the voice communications systems for the resort since ’99. My primary tasks involve maintaining the phone, voicemail and radio systems, but we’re a small shop, so my plate ends up full of interesting projects. I took a couple of years off from CBMR, starting in ’05, to stay at home and raise my daughter, from when she was a few months old until she was just over two. Talk about eye-opening perspectives . . . all dads should have the opportunity to be a full-time parent like that. Since then my wife has taken over the at-home duties and I am back at the full-time day job.

Everybody loves pups. These fox pups and their mother had "denned up" in a culvert in Crested Butte South this summer. A friend who lived near by mentioned that the fox family sure made a dent in the local gopher infestation that was happening at the time.

During my time as a stay-at-home dad, I started a side business with my hobbies, web design and photography. Since returning to work full time, I’ve whittled my photography jobs down to just doing the shot of the day for Crested Butte Mountain Resort. As some of you probably know, I post a daily photo and blurb about what’s going on around the resort or what ever I feel like posting about. It keeps me carrying my camera and looking for nice shots. Click here to view more of my daily posts.

I’ve also maintained my web clients and occasionally take on new web clients, as well. I’ve enjoyed working with the AIA on this web site . . . it’s one of the most active sites that I admin. You all have an amazing asset in Cheri Ratliff—she’s been super to work with and deserves a ton of credit for what the AIA site is. A site withers quickly w/o new content, but Cheri (and those of you who send the photos and interesting blurbs to her) is what makes the site so good. My goal with the site is to take AIA content and web needs and continually translate them into web pages that are attractive and easy to navigate. Judging by the feedback received, we’ve been successful. If you would like to see more or different items on the site, be sure and let Cheri or your favorite AIA board member know.

While I’ve only become acquainted with Arrowhead in the last five or ten years, from my first visit, it was obvious what a special place it is. I’m not sure if it’s the spirit of the community, the winter adventures or the wind wandering through the trees being the only audible sound when I shut off the engine and step out of my car there . . . regardless, I’m hooked. Like many folks, I’d like to be even a part-time resident. But until my little family and I can make more of a stake at Arrowhead, I’ll enjoy visiting my friends there and staying in touch as I work on the site.

Hopefully reading my get-to-know-me blurb will inspire you to put together a blurb and a photo or two about yourself or someone (or something) interesting at Arrowhead and get it to Cheri to be posted on the site. Regardless, have a really good rest of the fall out there and I hope the transition from fall to winter is a quick one.

Here's a shot of a moose cow and her calf that I came across along Cottonwood Pass in July.