And the winners are....!
The winners of our raffles are Amber H for the quilt, Jordan F for the kids' activity basket, Linda W for the china mugs, and Boca R for the movie night basket.  We raised over $500 through the raffle!  Laurie M won the bidding on the print, at $175.  Thank you to the prize donors and thank you to everyone who participated!  The wine basket raffle is on until November 1st, be sure to get your tickets!

We have the tipping table farrier here this coming Monday and Tuesday. We'll be deworming at the same time so it will be a couple of busy days for sure. 

We will be saying goodbye to 2 of our international volunteers on Monday.  Emil and Roman, from Germany, have been a huge help and we, especially Mike, will miss them!   They were only planning on staying with us for a week but it stretched out to four weeks, I'm sure because they're having so much fun!  Joyce, also from Germany, and Ineke, from Belgium, are here for another month, and we're really glad for their help as well.   This is a program we started in February and it has been so incredibly successful.  We've formed some wonderful friendships and sharing the workload on a daily basis has had a huge impact.  Our other international guests were Luisa, Marie, and Katja, from Germany, Sandy and Lisa from Australia, and Michelle from New Zealand.  Thank you! I also have to thank our local volunteers who pushed to get this internship program off the ground.  It has been a life-saver!  We don't have anyone lined up yet for after late November, but we've now signed up for the WWOOFER program as well and have had a lot of interest through that.

As everyone is Alberta with horses or livestock knows, the price of hay this year has really gone up (again). With the number of horses in our care, our hay expense has climbed a lot too! Your support would be sincerely appreciated at this time with cash donations to help us cover our hay costs. Any amount helps! So far this fall we've spent over $40,000 on hay. We have another $10,000 we have to pay for, and this will bring our hay stock up to about 3/4 of what we will need for this winter. We thank everyone who has donated either hay or cash to help us get this far, but we do desperately need to raise another $10,000 at least to cover the remainder of the current bills.  We had hoped to raise this amount at our open house but the weather did not cooperate.

You can also help by purchasing tickets on the raffles from our open house that have been extended to Oct 15th/2018. There is a beautiful western print to the highest bidder (current high bid $100), and the 4 items in the raffle: including a family fun night basket, a kids' activity basket, a beautiful handmade quilt, and a set of bone china mugs.
Raffle tickets are only $2 each, and you can specify which item(s) you'd like your tickets entered for.
We also have a wine basket raffle, tickets are $5 each, draw date is Nov 1st.
Tickets for any of these can be purchased by etransfer to bearvalleyab@aol.com or through paypay or even mail - barring a mail strike, or through one of our volunteers who can connect with you.  Bids on the western print can be emailed to bearvalleyab@aol.com.
Thank you so much for your support and caring!