After growing up chasing lizards in the deserts through the late '80s and early '90s, I started keeping and breeding jacksons, veiled and "blue" panther chameleons in 2001 on a small scale as "Bluebeast Reptile." Things slowly expanded through 2003, and by 2004, I was producing a surprising amount of chameleons monthly in a few different species. Almost out of luck, I turned out to be pretty good at what I was doing with these exotic and fragile creatures. I was heavily involved in the chameleon market through late 2007 when a few factors forced me to redirect my reptile addiction. More than anything, I was working many hours in my normal job, on top of being a single dad, that I didn’t have the proper time to care for the 200+ chameleons I had on hand at any given time. With all the cage cleaning, cricket care and everything else that comes with it, I was stretched thin for time, and started to feel some chameleon burnout coming on (as anyone with multiple chameleons knows, it's a lot of work).

After getting married in early 2008, I managed to drag my new wife, Sarah, into this business with me, put all of the effort into the tortoises and weaned ourselves off of the chameleons that I had kept for so many years. I always had many of the tortoises running around, just never put the entire focus on them until that point. It's been refreshing to start something new, market something different and make a whole new set of friends in the industry while maintaining the old ones. Because of a good, established reputation in the reptile world, we kept the name "Bluebeast Reptile" after the switch to tortoises, and in 2010, we slowly transitioned over to "Tortoise Supply." Tortoises have been much easier for us to handle being in the desert of Las Vegas, and it offers us more time to spend afternoons together as a family, and to be able to get out of town when we need a vacation. Since nothing in the tortoise world happens very fast, we are young and patient, so we should be just fine.

We are working on many many projects where we were forced to start with babies or young animals (as the adults are simply impossible to get), so as these other groups start getting to mature ages and reproducing, we will have some more "different" types available in the next few years. More than half of our tortoises are part of these "up and coming" groups. We are building a new tortoise-only facility beginning in 2011 which will allow us much more room to expand, build greenhouses for the tropical species, and allow us to raise all our tortoises in even more naturalistic enclosures.

Sarah and I were both born and raised in Northwest Las Vegas, and live here still. We have known eachother since we were kids, but didn't date until a few years after college. We both come from large families, and spend much of our free time with them both here in Vegas and in parts of Utah. Sarah is a hairdresser part time, tortoise caretaker part time (she handles almost all phone calls), and full time mom with my son and our 2 year old "Mack" who helps dad each afternoon with the tortoise work. He likes nothing more than to climb around on the big sulcatas. We also just had our newest addition, "Wyatt," born on September 30, 2010. Hunter, my 8 year old son, is in third grade and is a good helper with the animals here. He likes to draw, play Marines with his friends, ride bikes and wrestle with the dogs. I work day to day as a commercial concrete estimator, do most of the care for the adult tortoises, egg laying and incubation, all our website work and e-mails, and ride dirtbikes as much as I can between everything else. We also have two beautiful bullmastiff dogs (Bella and DiDi) and a bengal cat that complete our family.