Lead Country Club from the 7th Tee

 
Summer finally has arrived! Yahoo! The days have been beautiful warm and sunny with temperatures between 70- and 80F and occasionally even warmer than that!

Unfortunately, all that warm air clashes every now and than with that of the higher and cooler regions of the mountains which causes rather violent thunderstorms during the evening and night hours.
The worst ones carry some big hail and during one of them we suffered some damage in the form of 2 smaller holes in a skylight-dome and 2 big holes in both our AC shrouds.
Oh, well. The plastic of all of them is 15 years old so they were quite brittle to begin with and one of the AC shrouds was already damaged so .... a good time to replace them all!

James at the 6th Tee

 Off course it's perfect weather to play golf! 
We became members for the summer season at the Lead Country Club which was very affordable and is only 5 minutes away from us. How convenient ...

It's a fun little 9 hole course, fairly hilly, but not too bad, so OK to walk. There's one thing you don't want to do though .... hitting the ball in the rough, which is murderous ......

...you can forget about that one, honey ...

It reminds us a lot of Lake Arrowhead, although not as polished, but with lots of pine trees and, just like that one, it is also a 'mile high' course ...

 

The viewing platform at the first Tee ...

Before they mowed everything down I managed to get a view shots of the, for some reason mainly blue, wildflowers on the course, earlier this month ...

              

And while we're in nature, I'll throw in some butterflies:

 

And some birds I shot already quite a while ago. 

This is a Red Crossbill and although it's crossed beak doesn't look very practical it apparently comes in handy if you want to extract seeds from pine-cones!

A cute little Red-Breasted Nuthatch ...

And the incredible sky-blue Mountain Bluebird!

A couple of Tree Swallows have set up residence in a natural hole in one of the Aspen trees right at our site.

        

They don't seem to be very disturbed by us coming and going, and occasionally peeking in the hole, to try to get a look at the babies that must be in there since we can here them!  They must be too far down since we don't see a thing!

... like a bird on the wire ..

James joined the men's golf team and played in the yearly, friendly, match against the members of the 'rival' golf course, the Tomahawk Country Club.

Since he never played their course and the first of the two matches was going to be held there, we played it together on the Sunday before. 

To 'get a feel of it':

The course is a little further away, about 20 minutes, if we take the short cut via a (well maintained) dirt road.

It was another gorgeous day:

For some reason I had my camera set on the 'soft focus' so all the pictures ended up .... soft. Yeah, you got it ...

 

 

Tomahawk is also a 9 hole course and quite pretty in it's own way, especially the first 4 or 5 holes that have a very 'foresty' feel to it, but it has huge drainage problems, which makes the last holes almost unplayable after rain.
Since this spring has been extremely wet it made for lots of water on the, partly cordoned off, fairways, large swampy areas and lots of mud! 
I also didn't care for the fact that the last 3 holes are situated alongside a busy road, which makes for a lot of distracting road noise.

        

They had some fun with the Tee box markers though .... they're tomahawks!

James in 'soft' focus ...

All in all, we prefer our 'home' course!

Last, but not least, look what we came across when driving to the course one morning:

Do you see what I see? Under mommies belly ....

                                Ahhhhhw, it's Bambi! What a cutey!