About Wes
I am a full time llama, llama recreation, and llama equipment business man and have a beautiful wife Ann, and three wonderful children (now grown and on their own). I've designed most of the llama equipment I use and sell. One of my latest inventions is a llama saddle that will hold a car seat or pull a travois for my little handicapped friend Leah, so we can take her along with her family on our mountain treks.
Leah on travois.
Her dad Jim leading llama John Wayne.
I grew up on a farm/ranch near Idaho Falls, Idaho. My dad was an avid outdoorsman that spent winters in the mountains trapping and hunting. He started teaching me about the outdoors and how to survive before I could remember. I spent many days when I was little following my dad around in the mountains. He taught me great respect and love for the mountains and the animals that inhabit them.
I am the kind of person that puts 110% into anything I do, and if I become interested in something it is more like an obsession than a hobby. A few years ago Archery hunting was my primary interest . While hauling my camp in and elk out (on my back) one fall I was sure thinking about an easier way to do it. My friend and I talked about horses and mules and then one day he told me to come up and look in his corral - and he had these llamas. "I've been hooked on 'em ever since".
I love these critters. So easy going and calm they are such a stabilizer for helter skelter mentality that we absorb from such a busy world. I got my first llamas in 1988. I had enough money set aside to buy one female or 10 males. I wanted to pack in the mountains so I had to get the males. It was some years before I could get my hands on any females for breeding. I attended a LANA (Llama Association of North America) Expo in Central Oregon in 1987 and brought back ten potential pack llamas. With all the info I could glean I soon started training and renting llamas for packing and giving packing clinics to train renters and buyers.
I have this problem of believing I can do anything. I come close enough to it that I haven't given up on it yet. My dad used to tell me "you can't do it that way". Instead of defeating my confidence it gave me a dogged determinedness to succeed. I love the truth and how something works - and will be bull headed about sticking with what I think if it has been proven to me. I don't care if you're a doctor or engineer or president of the United States - if I see it works. I've been an inventor since as early as I remember and always dreaming up better ways of doing something. When I was about twenty two I was inventing a pipe moving machine for irrigation pipe one winter. When it come time to plow I was still working on it and my dad was pretty upset that I wasn't out plowing instead of working on that contraption. Below are just a few of my inventions. I have a file of over a hundred potential patents.
My friend Leah on JOhn Wayne
back pack archery hunt-1983
first family pack trip-1986
Got my own-1988
first packing clinic-1989
