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Shoveling out cars, paths, and bodies.

This is edition #19 of the Shangrilogs newsletter.

Shoveling out three bodies in under 12 minutes isn’t bad, but there’s room to improve. After all, shoveling has been the hobby du jour lately. And it’s almost entirely the wind’s fault. We’ll get to the bodies in a minute, but we have to start with the wind.

The wind has shown herself to be a worthy adversary, a trickster if I ever knew one, and she takes everything she can. The only time I remember being in the presence of wind with this kind of command was during Hurricane Ike in 2008. I was living in a shoddy hotel room at the resort I worked at on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. The western wall of my room was entirely glass, and the night that Category 4 hurricane made landfall, I crouched on the eastern side of my bed, away from the glass, knees pulled to my chest and head tucked. The glass patio doors shook violently in their metal cradles and the 450-mile-wide jet engine that was Ike bellowed through the night. That was the only time I feared wind until the other night.

I have to give credit where it’s due, and the wind jolted me out of the bed I was holding myself so tightly in as she smashed into the French doors in our bedroom, shoving them in and out of frame as she howled through. They were locked, holding hands like children spinning as fast as they can ‘til their grip gives out and they tumble into the grass. Snow swirled in like a devil searching for a body, phantom fingers curling in the air, and it was only then we noticed it was also snowing above our heads, soaking our headboard. I respect the wind outside. But I don’t appreciate unannounced guests even when I like them. The bedroom temperature dipped into the 40s.

Her battering ram didn’t work, but it’s not her only war strategy. If you cannot get in the castle, you trap and starve the people inside. We’ve had some four feet in the last week or so, with 15 more inches coming tomorrow. It is the medium with which the wind paints, her brush strokes severe and energetic; she has patterns that help you recognize her work, like the six foot snow drift in front of our latest main entry. I say “latest” because the wind is having a real laugh taking them one by one. You want to use the front door? Permanent 5-foot snow drift. Your French doors? Taped shut with Peel and Seal tape, just giant pieces of shiny silver tape gift wrapping every seam in the bedroom doors and window. Your garage door? A massive wall of wind-whipped layered snow, compressing and compacting by the hour so if you wait til the storm is over, it will be back-breaking. Get out there where I can see you so I can slither through every zipper you have and chill you to the bone.

But she does have a sense of humor. After filling the screened-in patio with two foot snow drifts, she left the path from the patio door down to the cars so perfectly clear you can see the ground. She has quite literally swept the path for us, like some kind of game. After all, she wants to see you desperately shovel out the other doors over and over, like a whole town of Sisyphean fools.

But the shoveling didn’t stop there. We’ve been shoveling out our driveways, shoveling out the truck bed, shoveling out the internet satellite, shoveling out the compost bin, shoveling out the cars — the cars! My and Ben’s egos remain strangled by a warm taunt offered before the snow came: “if you can’t make it up the hill, you can park at my house.” All generosity was wiped clean by the very idea that there would be something Ben and I couldn’t do. If we can’t make it up the hill? It was like insulting our competency, our capabilities, and our cars all at the same time. But lately, I’ve come to understand what he meant.

There are cars abandoned everywhere. I shouldn’t even say cars: 4-wheel drive trucks, Land Cruisers, Subarus, vehicles capable of wintering and presumably driven by people who should understand at least marginally better than us how snow driving works. Maybe everyone is lazier than us. Maybe snow tires are sitting in the garage waiting to prove their value and earn their space. But everywhere you go there’s just another car left in a snowbank, fallen into the creek, jammed between trees, or just abandoned and left to be plowed in. We’ve seen a minimum of ten cars sitting in piles of snowy shame and frustration. There’s only 180 people in this town! It seems like a town ritual to dig out cars. It would be practical to buy shovels to keep in both our vehicles, but thus far we’re too smugly driving up the icy, snow-whipped road in 2-wheel drive knowing we could switch to 4-wheel, and slipping into the driveway without it. Never mind that each vehicle looks like it had one too many when we pull in, swaying from side to side, because the driveway we shoveled out in the morning is, yet again, covered in snow.


But all this shoveling pales in comparison to the shoveling that matters.

On Monday, Ben and I went to our first avalanche rescue course. It was an all day course, 15°F with (you guessed it) wind gusts upwards of 40mph, but mostly just strong enough to be persistently annoying. It seems important to reality-set a little here: it’s very unlikely that just living here will ever put you in likely avalanche danger. There are often avalanches along the 2.5 mile road into town, but no one in modern history has ever died in one. You’re usually just driving over avalanche debris (assuming you haven’t lost control of the vehicle, which, we’ve seen how people drive here.) The massive avalanche field that splits the town into two sections threatens to annihilate only two houses, and typically conditions are easy enough to understand that those people can evacuate in advance if risk is high. In the last ten years or so, they’ve only stayed with friends once.

The most persistent avalanche risk is actually the one you seek out, and because backcountry skiing is now part of our “move your body” roster, we are seeking out that risk, even with all precautions in place. So we need to know how to protect ourselves and anyone else who might be out there. Death by trauma in an avalanche is possible, but plenty of people live through the slide — it’s how fast you get them out of that slide that determines whether they live past it. A person who is completely buried in an avalanche can live for about 15 minutes before incurring serious brain damage. Snow is porous, but victims are typically breathing their own exhaled air (if their airways aren’t clogged by snow), resulting in carbon dioxide poisoning, as well as their breath melting the snow around their mouth which can refreeze as ice (non-porous). Point being, you gotta dig them out, and you need to do it quick.

In the backcountry, you should be wearing a radio to communicate with your party (e.g., “clear, follow my line” or “dropping down in 3”), but everyone also needs to be wearing a beacon. The beacon is how you find someone trapped in the snow, or multiple someones. In the event of a burial in an avalanche, all parties not buried turn their beacons to Search. Once you get your beacon as close to the person trapped as you can, you use a ~10-foot probe (longer in regions with deeper snow) to try to locate the body beneath you. And once you jab into something that feels like a person or a backpack or a ski, you start digging for your life, or more accurately, theirs.

At the top of the class, our instructor started with a warning: “this class will simulate high stress scenarios. I know some of you know people who’ve died in avalanches. I can’t know how you will react, so please do what you need to to take care of yourself through the class.”

I don’t personally know any avalanche victims (probably “yet”), but it didn’t make the simulations any less serious. In the screaming winds, at the end of a day of skinning and digging and learning, we were set up with a scenario. They separated us into three groups far enough apart to not hear the instructions the other group were receiving, “you don’t know each other, you’re all out in the backcountry on separate trips, and there’s been an avalanche, you have no idea how many people might be buried — rescue all of them, now, or they’ll die.”

They taught us an acronym for avalanche safety: ALONE.

A: Any additional threat of avalanche? No? Assign a leader. 
L: Look for clues. Do you see a pole or ski sticking up? Where was the last place you saw the people before the snow broke?
O: Outside help. Use your Spot or Garmin and phone and call for help. Call it in over the radio, too. 
N: Number of people you’re looking for, if you know.
E: Everyone turns their beacons to search mode and begins the hunt.

We were disorganized. Each group assigned their own leader. We didn’t work together. The beacons don’t lead you in a straight line and we didn’t designate paths for each group to search. The wind reveled in the chaos as my beacon led us within 1.5m of a signal. We unearthed probes and shovels from our packs, ditching our skis and bags, probing into the snow until we made contact with something. And then, the shoveling began. You don’t think of shoveling your driveway or your stoop. You don’t think of shoveling out paths and cars. You only think of who you would be shoveling out. Of how many seconds it’s been since you began searching, of how many seconds that might mean their airways have been packed with snow, of how many seconds they have left.

We recovered the first body in three minutes, but we made a dumb mistake of not turning off the dummy’s beacon once we recovered them. We dug a hole only a meter away looking for the second body, our beacons all still alerting us someone was near. It was the beacon we hadn’t turned off, wasting time, wasting seconds of someone’s chance of survival if that had happened in a real slide. A few meters away, more of the search party located another body, and we stomped through the snow to dig them out, your top speed embarrassingly slow as you collapse through the snowpack. At the final shovel strike, we heard another member of our party, completely alone, call out across the slope some 25 meters away, “I’m 1 meter away from a signal!” A third body. My and my friend’s skis were, at this point, maybe 8 meters uphill, so we army-crawled with our shovels out across the snow as fast as we could, trying not to sink in, digging with fury at the site once we arrived. We found the legs, and like idiots, we started digging out the legs, then the belly, then the chest, instead of just trying to dig out the head first so the dummy could breathe.

But we recovered all three bodies in 12 minutes. A little too close for comfort. A little too comfortable for actual close calls. I kneeled in the snow panting, shovel in hand, finally released enough from the simulated disaster to notice how exhausted I was.

We made a lot of mistakes in the simulation. We should have designated a leader, assigned dedicated search paths, assigned probe and first shovel duties, turned off beacons on the dummies as soon as we found them, we should have kept our equipment closer in order to reach bodies faster and have better access to the tools at our disposal, and many, many more. But that’s why you take classes and courses, and you keep taking them because the reality is, these skills aren’t tested that often. And between the classes and the books and the videos and the practice drills, you shovel. You shovel all the drifts, over and over, even when she fills them before your eyes, even when she whips and taunts you, yelling through the night, because only then can you see the wind for what she is: a general, fraying and testing your nerve, preparing you for the day when shoveling isn’t in or out, but life or death.

If you enjoyed this, subscribe to the newsletter at shangrilogs.substack.com for my high-altitude adventures. For information on staying safe in avalanche country, check out: Avalanche.org,Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CIAC),Sierra Avalanche Center, and Know Before You Go (KBYG).

When’s your off-season?

This post was originally published on Shangrilogs Substack. Subscribe here.

Do you have a personal off-season? Can you?

My life here is supported by a resort town. There’s not a single amenity in our “town”, so we head into the actual town 25 minutes away for restaurants, stores, salons, etc. Those businesses all operate on a resort schedule, which is the closest American Industry gets to European. Beginning in late October through early December, hours are reduced and many places close up for a well-earned off-season. And I love every moment of minor inconvenience. Good for you, Siam Thai. Get out of here! No problem, ski shop. You go climb those mountains.

Unfortunately my own sanctioned off-season this time of year probably looks like yours: here are two days off — we know you’re likely spending them negotiating familial relationships, walking on Covid eggshells, trying to recover from years of getting hammered by 40-hr-work-weeks that are actually boundary-less tethers to tiny dinny nightmare sounds coming from your tracking device, all while cooking an actual feast you haven’t practiced in a year — but we hope you come back refreshed on Monday because Carl scheduled that 8am. (Carl thinks we should be back in the office because he’s a sycophant who believes the American Dream is real. Carl doesn’t give a shit what timezone you’re in.)

Corporate jobs don’t have off-seasons. And no, vacation days don’t count, because the point of shutting down the whole business is that there’s not 738 emails waiting to destroy your newly replenished zen when you get back. Which is why I believe in manufacturing your own off-seasons: breaks from fitness, upping the frequency of takeout meals, a pre-determined month of caring less when the house is a mess, a couple weeks’ work of “phoning it in” which I love and have loved since college when I realized it was possible to give a C performance and still get A- life results. And to be clear, despite years of professional work promoting it, I’m not talking about self-care. I am instead talking about self-reallocation-of-care. For me, the perfect off-season isn’t punctuated by massages and elaborate tea routines, it’s just doing a whole lot less of the bullshit and a whole lot more of the best shit.

But what is the best shit?

I have to give my brain a long enough break from the day-to-day to even figure out what a fulfilling day even is. A natural place to start here is to just think about what you’re grateful for. But when I’ve attempted gratitude journals in the past, it gets a little old writing “my legs, Finn, Ben, parents, the outdoors” over and over again. So instead, I like to think about what I regret. After all, when we sit around talking about what we’re grateful for, we’re just dancing around what we regret, or more often, what we’re attempting to not regret, e.g., ignoring your children, spending your life at a desk, never seeing Paris or whatever. Gratitude is a nostalgia-laced reverence, a practice of really nesting in the good things brought into our lives, where regret is that same nostalgia-driven awe, just this time with a big ole complicated layer of “whoops.”

I only have one serious regret — the rest all fall under the categories of “learning experiences” and “well what are ya gonna do.” (I guess the third category is “yes, I absolutely wouldn’t have gone to that restaurant that night” but that’s rewriting history — not choosing a better decision.) My biggest regret is when I had something really good and I let another person convince me it wasn’t. Or, in more explicit terms, I had a popular Tumblr from 2010-2013 that was optioned into a book and instead of converting that audience to a newsletter or different platform and continuing to write for myself, I just let it die because my Worst Boyfriend™ convinced me it (and I) were trash.

I used to resent him for that, but it was my choice. There will always be people who want to influence your decisions — usually not with any malice. But an off-season, a time when I let my brain get a full dose of introspection, allows me to pay closer attention to what’s bringing me real joy and flow immersion. When I can pay attention like this, and burrow into that feeling, I’m not so easily led astray in the woods.

Sort of like moving to this town in the first place.

“Isn’t that kind of far from a hospital?”
“Aren’t you worried about avalanches?”
“Do you even have snow tires?”

I had conviction around this decision. (To be fair, I also didn’t have any manipulative sacs of bitterness in my circle anymore.) Which brings me to the present, an off-season if I ever had one. Living somewhere without endless city entertainments, my job in transition with our budget slashed, friends to see in person at a near all-time low, and only six hours of actual sunshine — there’s not a lot to do but dedicate myself to figuring out what I want to do with myself.

At the tail-end of my last off-season, I and three other women set out to read Designing Your Life together. I was swimming with big ideas and bigger dreams, and I needed to shape the clay of them into something I could use, which is exactly what that book advertised it could help with. For the most part, I really enjoyed that book, but one exercise struck me as particularly futile. It asked for you to write down a thing you love, e.g., “the outdoors” or “making to-do lists”, and then make a word web in all directions under a time limit, and at the end, circle the words you wanted to be a bigger part of your life. I remember thinking this was so dumb. Then earlier this week, I came across all these old papers while unpacking. Here are the words I circled:

  • Home decor
  • Sharing
  • Community
  • Inspiration
  • Tropical
  • Rustic
  • Connection
  • Stories
  • Newsletter

*Gestures around at exactly what I’m doing right now, in a house I themed #tropicabin, sharing my stories and building a little community of people who care via a newsletter.*

Which brings me back to my big regret: abandoning the blog I worked tremendously hard to build. I knew when I was working on that blog that I was fulfilled. Is it ironic to do years of on-and-off soul-searching to come to the same conclusion that you did years ago? This is the plot of countless successful movies, after all. It took me a few years, and a couple very good off-seasons, but here I am, spinning my regret back in the gratitude direction.

So I want to say thank you for supporting this writing endeavor. I don’t wake up each day excited to log in to work, but I do wake up excited to work on this. And I still get questions that make me doubt myself.

“Are you doing it to just practice your writing?”
“Do people actually read it?”
“It seems a little aimless?”

But thanks to the right kind of rest, my conviction is happy to answer: no, yes, so?

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We have to give ourselves off-seasons. It wasn’t that long ago that humans knew a couple hundred people and read the paper and a few books. We have got to give ourselves a break because no one else is going to give it to us. Shut your kitchen down. Shut your social down. Put an out-of-office on your personal email. We need our own permission slips to care less about some things so we can care more about finding and funding and defending the things that light us up.

Here’s my recommendation for a little Sunday journaling in the afternoon sun: Use the past week of stirring up the pot of gratitude to see which regrets are adding that depth of flavor to the stew. Write down all the joy-giving things in your life, from things you do frequently to things you rarely get to do. Then, write down your regrets and what you would do differently. The reality is, we can always start “differently” right now. Be more honest, commit more deeply, love bigger, draw stronger boundaries, and so on. Finally, give yourself a time-constrained off-season. Put it on the calendar. “Do not spend time picking up the house.” Because it doesn’t matter how good your list of loves’n’loathes is if you don’t give your brain the space to figure out how to apply that to your life.

So when I’m re-shaping that ball of clay called life, I try to remember this:

  1. Gratitude tells us what we’re getting right
  2. Regret tells us what we could get right
  3. And rest tells us how

It’s been almost a decade since I was this excited about my own ball of clay. It took one off-season to realize what I had, one to realize what I wanted, and this one to finally pursue it. Thank you being the ones to help me shape it.

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I’m not sure if that’s a good thing

“Well you’re definitely the first.”

This past week, we screened-in the eastern facing porch on the side of the cabin. The porch slopes to the South, with the brick-on-dirt floor crumbling in that direction as well until it reaches uneven slabs of stone acting as steps down to the “yard” below. A mixed material retaining wall wraps beneath the steps to the south facing garage, holding up one corner of the narrow deck on the front of the house. The deck, in the heat of a high altitude summer, droops off the house like it’s daydreaming about the winter snow’s embrace. It’s safe to sit on, though I would not recommend leaning on the railing.

The side porch takes the brunt of the wind. Our wooden rocking chairs have been rocked some 20 feet into the yard more than once in the two months we lived here. In the myriad of threats we heard about the weather, most people included the wind. We all know how I feel about this ongoing weather intimidation tactic. I asked, “what speed are the gusts?”

“Oh, they get up to 70 miles per hour on some days.”

This was the first quantifiable piece of weather information someone had offered — an actual number we could react to with data and our historical personal experiences of various weather events. And our reaction was: uhhhh…. OK????

Look, I get it. No one’s preaching the skin benefits of -20 degree wind gusts at 70 mph, building snow drifts against your house in the span of minutes that Cooper could die in. I am not going to pretend that’s pleasant. But 70 mph? Any wind I’ve driven faster than does not intimidate me. I used to rally the horses at 12 years old in winds over 70mph to get them in the barn before the latest tornado whipped through. I helped shutter the resort in the BVI as the Category 5 hurricane rolled in. Even in Topanga, 70 mile per hour gusts were not uncommon in Santa Ana events. We had our single pane windows shatter more than once from debris in the wind. We taped cardboard up and went to sleep.

That “70 mph” was all I needed to hear to confirm our next project: we were going to build a catio for these cats, and we were going to do it on the pre-existing porch structure to save time and money.

We spent a week framing out the structure. We had to carve into the logs of the house to embed the wood supports for the framing.

And from there, every piece of wood was custom carved and cut to fit around the existing timber supports. The existing porch was so wildly uneven that there are gaps between each piece of old wood and the new framing. Our plan is to mix all the wood chips from the project with mortar/chinking and stuff the gaps — a good solution for the log cabin look. We built a plywood pony wall up to 28 inches from the interior of the porch, which gives a height of ~4-5ft from the exterior ground below. It’s capped with a 2x6” railing for even the fluffiest of cats to find a perch. The exterior will be wrapped with corrugated metal that we’ll quick-age to match the metal that wraps the bottom of the cabin. On the interior of the porch, we’ll use shiplap to hide the framing.

The screens themselves can withstand winds up to 120 mph, but to-be-determined if they can hold the weight of a growing maniac cat who has already tried to climb them. In the event the screens succumb to cat (or wind or snow or neighbor judgment) we’ll reinforce with metal mesh. We’re going to maintain this screen porch regardless of what the screen is.

We had the pleasure of running into one of our more industrious neighbors the other day, and Ben asked him, “hey we’re building a screen porch. Is this a terrible idea?”

He laughed. “Well you’re definitely the first.” But he liked it. Great way to diminish wind into the house. Simple way to regulate the temperature with massive south-facing windows. And indeed a practical outdoor safe haven for cats in predator territory. Just because you’re the first doesn’t mean you’re foolish — just foolhardy. There’s plenty of that here.

This town has the typical mountain town’s truncated version of a colonizers’ history: “established 1881.” But it was plenty established prior to that by the Uncompahgre Band of the Ute Nation, removed by the U.S. Army on September 7, 1881, nearly 140 years ago. The government relocated the Uncompahgre Ute People to Utah, and one year after the Ute were forcibly removed from their ancestral land, San Miguel County split off from Ouray County and was made its own political subdivision in the newly-formed State of Colorado.

In 1879, the ore-laden valley already had 50 people living in it, with a new narrow gauge railway only 2 miles away. By 1885, it was a town of 200 people. There was a hotel, a couple saloons, a pool hall. Winters were treacherous; the valley was and is prone to avalanches. But where there’s gold, there’s gumption. The power needed to run the stamp mill to process ore drove innovation. Timber was scarce at such high elevations, so a wood powered steam mill wouldn’t cut it. But the San Miguel River just a few miles down from the mine looked promising. Thus began the development and construction of the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant. It was a hit. In fact, it was so successful that the Ames Plant led to the adoption of alternating currents at Niagara Falls and eventually to being adopted worldwide as a viable power solution.

The plant remains, but the gold rush obviously didn’t. By 1940, the U.S. Census declared this little town I call home as tied for the lowest population in the country: 2 people. By 1960, it was one of four incorporated towns in the U.S. with no residents. But the joke was on the Census — the town’s single resident was just out of town the day the census came through. 1960 population: 1.

By 1980 the population grew to 38, 69 in 1990, and about 180 now. (Plus 51 dogs according to the town’s website.) With modern amenities, it’s easier to be here. Studded snow tires, satellite internet, solar panels, instant coffee. No matter the hardships, there’s the reality of the present. In the 1880s, as the town boomed, the Ouray Times declared, “it will be at no distant day a far more pretentious town than it is now.” That day hasn’t exactly arrived, but I guess it depends on what you consider pretentious. I don’t think the town claims any airs of excellence beyond what’s true. In fact, the town hardly claims anything at all. There’s no sign indicating it’s even here. There’s just the old side and the new side.

The new side, the Eastern half, was drawn out in the early 1990s, some 100 years later, and is separated from the Old Town by an avalanche zone—preserved open space for hiking in the summer, preserved open space for surviving in the winter. The town forbids short-term rentals, no one has a fence, dogs roam free, and all the houses have that cabin look to them. A boulder nests in a grove near a trailhead in the center of town with a plaque paying respect to the Utes who called this valley home. There’s no industry here. No businesses allowed. If you want a $7 latte, you can drive the 14 miles required to get it, assuming there’s not an avalanche blocking your path. You can, however, buy a pink lemonade in a

solo cup at the permanent lemonade stand run by the local feral child mafia. Crystals (rocks) can be purchased for an additional cost. We bought one, hoping to buy favor at the same time.

The town plan has a few guiding principles, and it’s all in the name of preservation. We must preserve:

1 - the quiet atmosphere
2 - the rustic character
3 - the natural setting

And finally:

4 - protect the health and wellbeing of the people here

No snowmobiles, no ATVs, no drones. In fact, the only sign of the outside world here are the passers-through. When you take the dirt road through town to the end, you enter National Forest, and you can hike over the pass saddle at nearly 12,000 feet before descending down the other side into Silverton. The pass road climbs rutted through an aspen forest before scaling across a scree field and then lurching over to the other side. Every day, it seems like 30 or so Texans and Arizonans in lifted and loud Jeeps with unused mods climb over this mountain in the comfort of their air conditioning, simply to drive down the other side. You could hike it, ride it, run it, and ski it, but they don’t. They rev their engines, kicking up dust in a town of feral children and roaming dogs, staring at us instead of waving.

I’ve lived here for two months and look how salty I am. I’ll fit in yet.

But today, there is a temperature that whispers of perfect trails and the dwindling of ogglers driving 35 in a 15. It’s already snowed in the mountains we see from our kitchen. Today, like a dedication to the Septembers of our youth, you can feel a chill in the air. A temperature akin to pencils and sweaters and reinventing yourself. A temperature that doesn’t exactly sing “screen porch” but could if you had the right slippers on. That’s what I did this morning: put my slippers on and sat there in the cool mountain morning air, thinking about the cemetery behind our house, about the Ute tribe, about the miners, about the mailman who died on Christmas in 1875 on the pass, about the 5 people who died in avalanches here just last year, about the people in their cars on their phones driving through, and all the people who’s very first question to us was, “so are you gonna live here part-time or full-time?”

Maybe it will be a hard place to live. But at least we’ll have a screen porch.

Every week I’m writing about moving to log cabin in a small town at 10,000 feet. Subscribe here for free:tinyletter.com/keltonwrites

I bought a house in the middle of nowhere

“Yeah, I loved it, but she’d never move there.”

It was something akin to that, at least. He didn’t mean any mischief, no deceit or planning. It was an honest take on what, at the time, was true. I saw the road into town on Google Maps, noted that it was closed during the winter, acknowledged the reality that a person can own a snowmobile, and I said, “we are not moving there.”

But, all good truths are just dares in the making.

And here I am, living in the “there” I said I would not.

Two years ago, I left my job at Headspace for a life reset. It was pre-pandemic, and Ben and I were planning a big road trip. Our perfect paradise in Topanga, CA, had crystallized itself as many people’s perfect paradise, and those “many people” all had more money than us. Our options to buy a home were nil, and home-buying was essentially all we wanted. Ben’s a builder and I’m a world builder, and we wanted somewhere to invest that didn’t belong to someone else.

We packed the car with the tent and the bikes and the dog and all the things that come with tents and bikes and dogs, and off we went on our own Tour de l’Ouest, looking for a place to call home. We knew what we wanted, knew our odds of finding it, and hit the road anyway. Here was the dream list — concocted by two pie-in-the-sky dummies who married each other:

  • Not rainy or consistently windy
  • Notable access to the arts
  • Remote and challenging to get to/close neighbors
  • Wild West influenced architecture
  • Progressive community
  • Exceptional trail access out the front door
  • High-speed internet
  • In our budget

And my personal favorite: had to “feel right”

Good luck to us with a list like that, but thus began our hunt. We camped in the snow, tried every dirty chai in the Rockies, and explored every town we could. Whatever a good time it was, it felt useless. Every town Ben was OK with, I hated. Every town I was OK with, Ben despised. And the few places we both loved required money we just didn’t have. We came home with our sails down, limping into the harbor of our rental.

But as is the way with romantics, our dreams began to slowly eclipse our reality. Books fell victim to Zillow and Trulia. TV was replaced by the MLS. All writing time was dedicated to Realtor.com. Hours were spent pouring over maps, county records, and updating spreadsheets that tracked price per square foot compared to beds and baths.

Over time, all that internetting led to one singular town of 180 people at 10,000 feet in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado with a road that said “Closed Winters” on Google Maps.

Look, I don’t know what happened. Ben found this town on a map, I said don’t be ridiculous, and after a year or so of him telling people I’d never move here, here I am, being ridiculous. Was it reverse psychology? Maybe. Was it the charming “town plan” that mandated all houses be rustic cabins and forbade AirBnB? Could be. Was it the fact that when I looked at Strava’s Heatmap, it showed what seemed like thousands of miles of trails just out the front door? I mean, yes. All these things played a part, but all I know for certain is that one day I woke up and said, “we’re going to move there.” Ben doubted this conviction (and the realities behind it) thus cementing it into place in my head.

In a town of 180 people there’s only ~60 houses, which means maybe 2 or 3 get listed per year — but my spreadsheet had the proof: we hadn’t missed our chance yet in this tiny town. The data showed a strong likelihood there would be at least two houses listed within the calendar year. This, however, was also our last chance. The spreadsheet also showed that if we didn’t find a house this year, we wouldn’t be able to afford one the next.

We called a realtor, made our case, and harangued her until she believed us that we were truly the kind of yahoos who would move to an avalanche field and stay there.

And then it happened. A pocket listing. It was a darling home built in 1890. It had the beds, the baths, and the views. We were the first and only to know. We put in an offer, they agreed, and we would come to see the house in a few weeks. But in those few weeks, the circumstances changed. The sellers lost their own sweet deal, and they couldn’t sell yet. Their agent promised we had right of first refusal, it was only a matter of time. Ben lamented, I preached patience, and we went to see the house that was no longer for sale anyway.

It was a quiet winter morning in Covid when we drove across the packed snow to meet our realtor outside the house. The sun was out and the 13 degrees Fahrenheit felt warm. I unzipped my jacket, mask on my face. I took long videos and talked about where I would set up my office and where we’d put the bikes. As we closed up and I settled into a future where this house would eventually be mine, our realtor told us there were comps in the area — other residents quietly interested in potentially closing out. Would we like to see them? Sure, let’s.

  • One home came with an incredible commercial kitchen. The whole house was a whopping 3500 sq ft if my memory serves me correct, which falls under the category of “houses too big to find your cat in.“
  • Another home had an open-air-to-the-kitchen bathroom.
  • The third was dark and overpriced with cracked windows and open beer cans scattered about.

And then, plans changed. 

“Hey guys, there’s actually one more house we can see.”

The last house we saw was a log cabin, nestled in the hillside by itself, with massive A-frame windows looking out onto the peaks beyond. Inside was a labyrinth of a life lived long and large. The cabin was built and loved by a man we’ll call Jack. Jack was 82, and as we walked toward the front door on that sunny winter morning, he exited with two beers in his pockets, headed to the mountain to ski. Jack was an attorney — in his life he’d been both criminal and defender — and from the stories, somewhat interchangeably. There were artifacts from running in the same scenes as Hunter S. Thompson and Willie Nelson; there were stuffed birds, bad books, sheet-covered couches, smoked spliffs, and piles and piles of mouse shit. Every inch of the house was lived in, and not just by people. You think millennials like plants? No. This man likes plants. The biggest monstera deliciosa I’ve ever seen, spanning some 10 feet wide and 15 feet tall. Draping cactuses, spider plants, massive aloes, and an ambitious hoya carnosa clawing its way to the top of the massive fireplace.

But there were problems. I’m trying to be diplomatic saying the house was lived in. The wood by the door handles was dyed black from years of hand grease rubbing against it. The carpet in the upstairs was soiled almost everywhere with bat scat. Newspaper was stuffed between the massive logs to keep the wind out. There was cardboard taped over almost every window, blankets nailed over the others. Half the doors wouldn’t open. It was unnerving to touch the crusted light switches. It was early enough in the season of Covid-fear that touching anything felt like gambling. On our way back to our rental in the bigger neighboring town, we shared our awe and our no-ways, lamenting how long we’d have to wait for the little 1890s fixer upper.

That night, I sent the video I took of the cabin to my parents. “Can you believe this?” I asked.

And do you know what my dad said?

“Great log construction.”

After that, the cabin was all we could talk about. “Could you believe those plants?” “Did you see how big those logs were?” “I just googled Jack, look at this.” “Do you know what the insulating factor of logs is?” “How much did he say he was asking?”

It came down to the plants. Amidst all the chaos in that house, the tender care of those decades-old plants sung the clearest. This wasn’t just a place Jack lived in, it was a place that wanted to be lived in. We made an offer the next day.

Jack had six months to clear out his 30 odd years of collecting, and the town had six months to speculate about the worrisome Californians moving to their high-altitude, high-risk town.

The town itself is an old mining town. It rests in a high valley, surrounded by peaks over 13,000ft, and is over six hours from the nearest major airport. Five people died around this town in avalanches this past year. The dirt road into town is littered with avalanche fields, warning visitors to not stop when driving in. The other way out is a pass road, only drivable in the warm months, but you could skin out if it was dire. Most August days, the high is in the mid-60s. The valley is blanketed in wildflowers, and the aspens littering the mountainsides suggest a promising fall display. The town had a heyday, a low day, and now it’s a community of preppers, adventurers, appreciators, and “get all these idiots away from me”ers. We don’t know these people yet, but the ones we’ve met have the same like to live hard attitude we do. Heli-ski guides, ex-CIA agents, woodworkers, bakers, teachers, just a general can-do group of people. The kind of people that see a California license plate and peer with skepticism between the thin gap over their sunglasses and under their caps.

You might say I’m romanticizing the place, but the residents are worse. Like all good old-timers, they’re full of threats: “wait’ll you see the snow drifts,” “let’s see how you do outrunning an avalanche,” “good luck with the winds,” “the last Californians didn’t last a year.”

God, what does that remind me of?

“Yeah, I loved it, but she’d never move there.”

With every taunt, my teeth ground more enamel, fingers rolling into a clench. And maybe Jack recognized this intensity, because on the day of closing, he hosted a gathering for us in the town’s open space. He had us introduce ourselves to the skeptical locals, and I made my case in court, eyes narrowed and lips curled.

“I’m the daughter of a smokejumper and wildlife biologist. I grew up watching the wind and the door. I’ve lived in big cities, small boats, and more than one cabin. I always take the stairs, I never use air-conditioning, and I’m a very good shot.”

I’m just a girl, standing in front of a town, asking them to give her a fucking chance.

Jack stepped forward to speak. “You know, I had my doubts about a couple Californians coming to look at my house. But these people? These are the nicest people you’re ever gonna meet.”

And then I helped Jack set up his cot so he could spend his last night under the stars in the town that kept him young. Cooper ran circles with the other dogs. People brought homemade cocktails and bowls of dip and we felt welcomed. Even the mayor, a fellow writer, came and she struck up a conversation.

“I hear you’ve got a little bit of a following on social media!” She teased.
“I guess, nothing wild.”
“Well I just wanted to let you know if you ever geotag this town, I’ll drag you out of it.”
She grinned.

This was a special place. And every visitor who couldn’t handle the realities of being here threatened the very wellbeing of the people who lived here. This town survives on a delicate balance. They source their own water, manage their own roads, and fervently protect the land and the people around them. Their stories about racing avalanches, snowmobiling in the dark of night to the doctor’s house, hunkering down in each other’s homes as the storms pass — these stories were bylaws. You can join when you’ve proven you’re ready to join. By their own projection, they are hardy and steadfast people, and when they see a Californian, they see something fleeting.

Many years ago, I worked in the British Virgin Islands. The people born and raised there were called Belongers. At the customs office, the placards above the lines literally read, “If you belong, stand here” and “If you do not belong, stand here.”

Whether or not we belong isn’t up to the town council, and it’s not up to these residents. It’s up to years spent drifting my old Mustang in the snow on the way to school, up to Ben’s months and months spent in the backcountry, up to my years of reading fire reports and assisting with evacuations, up to Ben’s ability to read the landscape and the weather, up to my doggedness, his diligence, and our pathological love to do difficult things well. It’s up to us, to these old logs, and to this valley. Doesn’t mean we’ll belong, but it does mean we’ll try.

And for the record, the road is open in the winter. But do these sound like the kind of people who’d tell Google that?

Next week, a tour of the house that we get to call ours — stuffed with newspaper, run by plants, and filled with mice.

P.S. Here’s where we get our mail.

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ahedderick:

   After the fun of putting together a sweatshirt design for the high school trip and the drudgery of going to the market (but we were out of a LOT of things), I started in on the farm cleanup project. My Aunt traveled from Annapolis to help out. There are two rooms upstairs in my late father’s house, with a mini-room/stair landing in between. One room was relatively well kept, the other was CHAOS. He disassembled some of the furniture and set up grow lights and nursery stuff for starting flowers.* Everything that had previously been in the room; shelves, books, clothes, just got shoved back and gradually covered with a layer of potting soil, dead bugs, and dust.

   Lovely, eh? Well, *cracks knuckles menacingly* Today’s the day. My son brought up a socket wrench to disassemble the remaining bits of the old bunk bed. Aunt L. and I dragged garbage out of the room and down the stairs in a steady stream. Once the room was largely empty, I started tearing up the elderly linoleum (check out those lovely seventies colors! Orange, mustard, and avocado green!). Under the linoleum was ‘underlayment’, which I was able to pull up with the help of a crowbar. By this point I had sweat running down my face in a stream and dripping off my jawline. The underlayment was held down with very small nails, all of which had to be pulled up. Dust, dead bugs, and debris were billowing through the air. The irony is that I had cleaned up very significantly in here a few years back, but of course had to leave his flower-growing stuff, because he was still trying to use it. Since that time, it had accumulated a metric ton of crud. At one point, while I was hauling a broken chair down the stairs, I dropped it on my foot. It hit my big toe with cartoonish precision, and I’m definitely going to lose that nail. It’s a horrid color right now.

   We filled the dumpster just from one room, and we’ll very likely gather just as much trash tomorrow when we tackle a storage ‘trailer’ that he parked behind the house. There were so many boards just randomly nailed/screwed to the walls or the window frames. I removed enough rough lumber to build a kid’s tree fort.

   I’ll try to get picture of the empty room tomorrow. The old floorboards under the linoleum are a nice, medium-width pine. I have no IDEA why anyone ever covered them over. It was my room as a kid, and it looked a lot nicer then.


May 13, 2022

* With reason, in that he used to grow and wholesale flowers to florists 

End Result:

I’d guess the last time this room was empty(ish) was 1970. Yes, there is a hole in the wall. Yes, it does lead to an alternate dimension. But I have enough problems right here. As rooms go, it’s just ok. Much better than it was yesterday, tho, and I’m glad. Today’s adventure was the

(dun-dun-DUUUUUUUHHHHHN)

Trailer trash. Which I will put in a separate post.

For the past few months, I’ve been renovating a secondhand dollhouse & modernizing it. The whole process has been documented in video, and you can catch the 14 episodes (very short ones :)) on the IGTV channel of Hunker on Instagram. [click here for the 1st episode]

The first pic is a snap of the dollhouse from the front view, and the whole ‘demolition’ process was way tougher than I expected -_-’

The biggest structural changes I made was to enlarge two of the windows (for the kitchen & bathroom) and to install battery operated pot lights for the first two floors. Wish I could include more pictures of the whole thing beyond the limit of 10, but I guess… you could just check out the episodes to see how the whole thing turned out :)

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