Hello, Visitor! Thanks for dropping by the Pecos River Encampment website. Joel Owens here, creator and maintainer of this website.

In 1999, I was introduced to websites and how to build a basic site using Geocities FREE hosting service. I was also introduced to the fine art of hand-coding HTML language for the web (it ain't hard).

I started off my personal site with several really varied items that I was interested in, and one of those things was the many years that I had attended the Pecos River Encampment. My first page was a humorous jab at the "not-5-star-hotel" environment, but also a few photos and good memories of the times I'd had there, and the friends I'd made.

Over time, there were a few emails sent to me about the page and even some encouraging comments, so I changed the tone of the page to a little more respectful one and begin to embellish the photos and other items on the page, and started to taylor it toward both the seasoned camper as well the first-time visitor.

As the comments continued to come in and I started locating some former campers thru this site, I decided it needed a realm of its own. And so I moved all the contents over to a separate Geocities site, albeit still a free entry-level site. At that time, my other personal interests begin to take on their own burgeoning space and so I purchased my current main site, www.joelowens.org. You can see there's a lot of variety and odd subjects there, and so it continues to grow and draws a lot of traffic every day, between 60 and 150 visitors per day.

Back at the Pecos River Encampment site, there was a lot of emails from people asking me if I knew how to get in touch with so-and-so that they went to camp with in years past. I researched this some and decided the best thing to do was to add in a Yahoo!Group to see who all was interested in getting back in touch again, or in keeping touch during the year. It filled up right away, and still has a bunch of members! You should join if you haven't already!

The Pecos River Encampment site continues to grow as material surfaces, but the Geocities Free service only offered 15 Megabytes of space and not much in the way of bandwidth, that is to say - the size of pipe they provide for flow of these 15 Megabytes. As a part of this free service, they also took opportunity to place advertisements on the right hand portion of the webpage, overlaying my material. On more that one occasion these ads were not something you'd ordinarily want on a Church of Christ based web site. But it was part of the deal, so on we went.

In May of 2009, I received official notification from Geocities that Yahoo was going to shut down the operation. I already host from Yahoo WEBHosting, so I simply took my exiting page, modified the 'links' and moved it all over to it's new home here at http://pecosriverencampment.joelowens.org.

This web service costs approximately $14.00 per month to operate. Additional funding contributes to ongoing conversion of old audio files and photos to add to this site.

If you would like to donate to the Pecos River Encampment website using PayPal, click the "Donate" button!