The Christmas Diaries, Part 2

Last year's raspberries casting their late afternoon shadows on the snow

Arrival...Sunday, December 18th

We did our typical trying-to-get-somewhere early morning wake-up at the motel, checked in with each other -- “Are you going back to sleep?  Me neither. Let’s go.” -- and were on the road by 5 AM.  We gassed up at Circle K, got coffees, and dug into our friend Geri’s Christmas present of zucchini bread before we’d hit I-25 North.  In the pre-dawn we congratulated ourselves on missing the blizzard that was coming through this area this evening, a blizzard that would, in fact, eventually close Raton Pass, our passage into Colorado.  At first light you could see the snow-chalked ground below the pinon pines and juniper, the white horizontal striping of the mesa ledges.  With some Windham Hill Christmas music collections playing, we watched it get light, enchanted with the snowy scene.  Our excitement mounted with every passing mile.

After a quick stop at our favorite Chinese restaurant in Woodland Park, The May Flower, we went on to Florissant, turned north, and soon hit dirt roads.  They were a bit snow-packed in places, so it was a slow trip in, but beautiful.  It felt like we’d been away for a few days instead of 10 weeks.  When we’d left in early October our neighbor had been fly fishing on the lake below the cabin; now they were ice fishing (and had a beautiful big rainbow trout to show for it) and ice skating through the powder that had fallen over the frozen lake.  

It was all good until we hit our driveway, much of it covered in nearly a foot of snow.  Someone, thank goodness, had driven up fairly recently, so we had their tracks to help navigate the steep, near quarter mile to the cabin.  We made a few runs at it, having to back up a time or two to get further along the unplowed drive.  When the cabin was in sight we decided to leave the car for a bit and hike on up through the snow, anxious to make sure the cabin was alright and that we had power and heat and no frozen pipes.  It proved to be in fine and welcoming shape, relatively warm inside (mid-50’s) thanks in part to the low angle of the sun flooding the cabin with light and the propane heater set to low just to keep the cabin, and its pipes, safe.  

It was great to arrive at a cabin that was fully ready to be occupied.  Both last Christmas and last summer we had either no, or not enough, furniture and there was much moving in and organizing to do.  This time it was turn-key ready, or as turn-key as a cabin like this can be.  We got all the power on, went down in the crawl space and turned on the well pump, checked for leaks, and got a fire going in the wood-burning stove.  My husband went back down the hill and finally managed to get the car up the drive (next time the chains will be put on before trying), and unloaded.  There was a ton of stuff to put away, fire-wood to be hauled up, and totes and duffles to be stowed, but we found time to sit for a short time on the front deck, a bit of a heat trap, where it was, oddly, sweater weather.  It was a mild day with a high in the low 40’s, and we knew the next day would be different, with a predicted high in the 20’s and a few inches of snow.  Perfect!

After an early dinner of some chili I’d made in Tucson and brought up in our cooler, we were in bed by 8 PM -- not so surprising when it gets dark at 5 PM -- and we slept the deep sleep of arriving home after a 900 mile journey.

...and Bears, Oh My!!!

Just below the cabin, contemplating the lake

It was late afternoon.  After a full day outside -- hiking, forestry, hammock-and-a-book time -- we’d retreated indoors.  I was busy losing a game of MahJong on my ancient Gateway laptop and my husband was stretched out on the couch, winning a game of Sudoku (hard).  I heard a thump on the porch behind the house, vaguely assumed it was the dog after a ground squirrel, and kept clicking on matching tiles.  Suddenly my husband exclaimed “BEAR!”.  And indeed, there was, not ten feet from the mullioned glass door and large window looking out on the red rocks behind the cabin.  A shaggy cinnamon colored black bear was wandering by.

My second thought, after OMG, was “where’s the dog??!!”.  I shot out the front door, opposite the bear’s side, and called, firmly, for Bump.  She obviously knew the bear was quite nearby and slunk carefully out from underneath the deck, the whites of her eyes showing, up the stairs and inside more obediently than ever before.

I looked out the front windows, the direction the bear was headed.  He (guessing here) was standing about 20 feet off the deck on the edge of the building pad, looking down the hill towards the lake.  I grabbed the camera and ran out the door to get some photos.  My husband was urging the bear to move along, throwing some rocks his way but not hitting him, despite his intentions.  I can’t remember if we were yelling at the bear -- I was so rattled with nerves and excitement that I kept hitting the on/off button on my camera instead of the shutter and was baffled when it kept shutting down.

The bear headed over the edge towards the lake, hesitating near some rocks.  There were a lot of folks down at the lake fishing and making quite a bit of noise.  The bear turned around and headed back towards us, but adjusted his course down the western slope from the cabin.  He was in no rush at all -- aware of us but not concerned, and not acting at all aggressive.  The bear took his time traversing our hillside, eventually heading for the spring and its dense foliage at the back of the property.  We wandered down the drive a bit and could see him moving about there for a bit, and then we lost sight of him.

Heading towards the spring and PIke National Forest

Bear claw marks

This bear looked young -- not cub young, but maybe a year or two old.  He was losing his winter coat and looked scraggly, but there was no mistaking the power there.  This may well have been the bear that visited me 10 nights in a row in the trailer last year, right after I dropped my husband off at the airport for his return to Tucson.  The bear had marauded our site while we overnighted in Denver, knocking down bird feeders, slashing our seven gallon jerry jug, yanking the drip pan out of the gas grill.  That night, and every night for the rest of my stay, he’d show up shortly after dark, grunting and groaning and rocking the trailer.  My dog Bump would sense him coming before I did, and her slinking off in the most exquisite slow-motion to the farthest corner in the bedroom was a sure sign.  My trailer was a 33 foot Airstream Argosy, tightly constructed of steel, and I kept the windows closed on the side the bear could reach (the ground feel off on the other side).  Despite playing the radio, loud, leaving the outside lights on and shining a flashlight out the window, I never spotted the bear, even when I could hear it outside.  Every morning brought new paw-prints on the trailer, snotty-nosed dribbles down the windows, and more paw prints on all the door handles of both vehicles.  Looking back, I am amazed that I didn’t simply pack up the car -- in broad daylight -- and head south.  About 18 trailers and cabins had attempted bear break-ins; about half of those were successful.  No one was hurt, except in the pocketbook.  Still, there were calls for the bear to be “harvested”.  I would feel terribly guilty if this bear, encouraged by all our bird feeders, unsecured trash, and food left in trailers, cabins, and sheds, were killed.  We’ve moved into the bear’s habitat, not the other way around, and we’re being irresponsible neighbors.

The bear and I are in competition for these!

My Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide to the Souther Rockies says that American Black Bears are very common in aspen and mixed aspen-coniferous communities (and this area is that), as they feed on the aspen buds, catkins, and new leaves in the spring and return in the fall for the berries grown in the understory shrubbery.  Our land has hundreds if not thousands of aspen and wild raspberries are everywhere around the cabin.  Normally crepuscular and nocturnal (someone should let this bear know as he’s been seen from 10 AM right through to the dinner hour and beyond), early summer is mating season, so perhaps this one’s out roaming, looking for love.

I hope he finds it soon and heads back into the deep forest...for his own good.  I’m here to enjoy nature, not contribute to its demise. 

Doors, Chimneys, Shingles, and Night Visitors

We have two exterior doors now that lock and a chimney that is hooked to pretty much nothing.  The shingles have arrived and some sit atop the loft roof, awaiting installation.  It's been a week of subs -- John and his son Alex from Mad Dog Plumbing, Guido for electrical, and the Western Fireplace team to fit the chimney, a necessity prior to shingling.  Richard the painter will come do the exterior staining on Friday, a job that constant rain prevented us from doing while my husband was still here.  

Bob's back at work in Tucson now and leaving almost brought him to tears.  I'm here for another week or so to answer questions and be able to help make decisions about the placement of lighting fixtures, switches, and outlets, and at least one more trip to big box stores in Colorado Springs.  Sadly, the old lights I sought out and purchased cannot be installed, at least not before final inspection, so my list of lighting fixtures to purchase will be a little longer than I'd anticipated.  I'm surprised Home Depot doesn't roll out the red carpet when I pull into the parking lot, but then again..

After spending the night with Bob's sister in Denver before she oh-so-kindly dropped him at the airport shuttle at 5 AM (!!!), she and I spent the morning catching up and harvesting from her fabulous garden we capped the visit off with lunch at a fabulous Indian buffet.  Filled with terrific food, I headed back to the wilderness, running the gauntlet of heavy rains near Colorado Springs, a rock slide near Manitou Springs, and a black as night storm that felt like I was driving through the Gates of Hell in Divide.  The dirt roads were slick with mud, so it was very slow going once leaving the pavement.  Over a dozen squishy slippery miles later I pulled up behind our trailer, relieved to have finally gotten home safe and sound.

My protector.  Right.

Or had I?  How'd our seven gallon blue water jug end up so far from the trailer?  And where were my bird feeders?  The propane tank from the gas grill was tossed aside and the drip pan lay in a nearby low-growing juniper.  Large paw prints covered the trailer and the windows had been smeared by a large and drippy nose.  We'd been beared.  Having had some success with seed from the feeders, a suet block (where the heck was the wire holder for that?!), and the grill I figured the bear might return for a second helping.  Bump and I were inside with the doors locked as darkness fell.  Around 2 AM I awoke to a shuffling sound on the deck, but the flashlight was useless for looking outside, and by the time I'd gotten up and turned on the porch light, whatever had been there had moved on.  The next morning, our contractor, Brian Shelton, came up to check it out.  He warned me to close the sturdy louvered windows at night (I hadn't), as all bears needed was to hook a nail, but that if I made sure to leave nothing outside a bear would be interested in that in a night or two it would stop coming around -- just like we'd quit going to a grocery store whose shelves were bare.  Last night I kept the porch light on, closed the windows and opened the ceiling vents (inconvenient with the sprinkle we had around midnight.  Before bed I heard something on the deck, but quickly switched on the radio and by the time I looked out I saw nothing.  This morning the bucket we keep outside for hauling water was turned over, but nothing more.

I'm considering turning on the radio loud some time after midnight tonight (oh for an M-80) and waiting for a few minutes before putting our pooch on a leash and going outside to see the Perseids meteor shower, which should be spectacular here -- the stars on a clear night with nothing special going on knock your socks off, so maybe a meteor shower would be worth the risk.  Or maybe I'll just have a bowl of freshly picked wild raspberries with whipped cream and call it a night.

Warm from the sun

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Home

Robert Redford, eat your heart out

The cabin is beginning to look, and feel, a lot like home.  The roof with its black paper coat awaiting shingles is weatherproof, so we have been able to experience the shelter the cabin will provide from sun and precip.  The closer it moves towards completion, the more we love it.

The view from the loft

It’s been a week of decisions.  We reverted to our long ago flooring picks when we were advised that the vinyl floors we fell in love with were not only quite pricey, but required mar-free subfloors and days to mop up the oozing glue after putting them down.  Actually, going back to some original thought will give us a cabin with more of the casual “good enough” flavor we wanted in the first place.  The kitchen, bath, and bedroom will have foot square Armstrong commercial vinyl tiles, quite rigid, in a speckled color they call Granny Smith, reminiscent of the apple with some sages tossed in the mix.  We found an engineered laminate “wood” floor with a hand-hewn look named Sand Hickory which is very pretty with the hickory cabinets.  I’ll be looking at tile or slate for under the wood burning stove.  

I simplified the kitchen a bit, making it a straight L shape without the little return on the far end, saving not only on the cabinets, but more importantly on the Formica countertops which are a pretty hazy soft yellow just touched in places with apple green.  The simpler cabinet configuration saved some money on the countertops which are frankly, to me, the most outrageously expensive part of the build so far.  But you’ve gotta have them.  

What the Rocky Mountains DOESN”T need is another brown cabin with a brown or green roof.  We’ve chosen a sandy gray/beige color for the semi-transparent stain and the shingles are a driftwood color of mixed brown, blue-gray, and light beige speckles.  I’m thinking of painting the front door a dull medium red color.  I picked up interior paint chips in a color that looked good with the flooring and cabinets and put them up on several of the cabin walls and a week later they still look right, a yummy color I have only just recognized as the color of dulce de leche ice cream, pale caramel with a hint of yellow.  I’m bound to be hungry all the time here.

The view from the bottom of the stairs

Fireweed, the slimmest of silver linings

We’re getting afternoon into evening rains now -- one day we had 2.6 inches in just a couple of hours! -- and it is hurt-your-eyes green here.  The wildflowers are doing well, making a recovery from the late season hailstorm that drove us out of here almost two months ago.  I have never been here this time of year before and our site is riddled with thousands of raspberry plants, burgeoning with ripe wild berries.  You can eat as many as you can stand to pick, fighting off the chipmunks and golden mantle ground squirrels.  Our contractor, Brian Shelton, cannot believe we have never seen a bear up here, a critter that would be serious competition for the fruit.  Maybe it’s just that since we’re never here this time of year -- that is, up to now -- we’ve just missed this pilferer.  We know black bears inhabit these mountains and hear about their escapades in the interfaces between humans and wilderness -- scattered trash, stolen 40 pound sacks of dog food, and a taste for the sweet syrup from hummingbird feeders and cooling cherry pies on kitchen counters.  This is a place that makes it clear to you that you are only borrowing this land for a brief time and are still obliged to share it with its original inhabitants.  It feels right.  

Wild (and delicious) raspberries on red rocks behind the cabin