May 15, 2009 - Moab, Utah

One place that we used to visit a lot in the 1990's was Moab, Utah. We used to go there to mountain bike, and always found ourselves captivated by the beauty there, especially once you got out and away from town a little ways. Linc wanted to bike there on his birthday, so we drove over and car camped on a weeknite, to avoid some of the crowds. Moab has gotten a lot more popular in the last 10 years, but the area around town is still really inspiring and nourishing, even if it has a slightly overused feel to it on some days. The first day, we rode the Slickrock Bike Trail. These four pictures are from that. The trail is an adrenaline pumping adventure course, with technical climbs and descents that challenge even the most hard core bikers. We were really feeling the effects of the winter, but pushed through and managed to ride all of the parts that we'd learned how to ride in the past, although at a little slower pace than we might have otherwise. Somehow biking it this time felt a little juvenile (OK, we are almost 50 years old), and almost a little sacreligeous too. There is so much rare beauty out there on those petrified dunes, with islands of life where the waters drain into potholes in the rocks. Sego Lilies, Evening Primrose and both Prickly Pear and Barrel Cactii were all flowering, along with wild mustards and plants and shrubs that we still want to get to know. The birds were singing up a storm, each sparrow and warbler identifying his own little island of life in the rock dunes as his own, and singing call and response duets with his neighbors around him. Biking felt like an intrusion, and even though we weren't leaving as much black rubber on the rocks as the jeeps, ATV's and dirt bikes, the ride didn't have as much meaning to us as it used to years ago. It's still probably a great way to introduce people to the outdoors, by challenging them in a physical way, especially the younger folks. It's the way we got drawn in, throughout the 1980's and 1990's.

I can't believe we've gone beyond mountain biking. I'm sure we haven't completely. But we might be more apt to use the bikes to meet basic transportation needs now than before, and less just to get an adrenaline rush.

OK, maybe just once in awhile!

We drove as far out away from the crowds to car camp as we could, up by Porcupine Rim, but still managed to have someone camp close enough to wake us up shooting fireworks over our heads in the middle of the night.

We woke with the feeling that our bodies really wanted another day off after pushing through the winter to make some money to support our addiction to sustainability, but we tried one more ride just to see....gave up two miles into it, and drove home, eager to start packing for the move back to the yurt.

I know what I said in the above paragraph makes no sense. How are you living a sustainable life if you have to go off somewhere else to make money to support your "sustainable" lifestyle? Good question! We're figuring this one out as we go. One thing that might have to go will be health insurance. Our present coverage has a $10000 deductible per person, and the coverage costs have been increasing at the rate of between 7 and 25% per year.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, health insurance premiums have increased an average of 78% in the last six years (and that's despite the last four years having unusually low increases!) From what we've read and heard, when you do need the coverage, the insurance companies fight tooth and nail to avoid paying and find ways to avoid covering a substantial portion of the bill. So why encourage them by supporting them? In 2006, when we lived on the minimum we could for the year, our health insurance costs were nearly one third of our gross income. At the rate that the coverage is increasing, in 10 years we would have to work so much just to pay for the insurance that the work alone would make us sick, necessitating more coverage, which would require more work, then more sickness... Not really all that sustainable.

We are thinking about starting our own personal health insurance company - just put what we'd normally spend on premiums in a dedicated account each year, increase the contribution each year at the rate that Blue Cross does, invest the money in a green fund of some sort, and hopefully in 10 years we'll have saved enough to pay for our own health care should we need it. Plus, we'll have a health maintenance program, involving regular areobic exercise, healthy homegrown organic foods, low stress lifestyle involving less working to make money to buy health insurance...

Sorry about all of the philosophical rants and complaining about things that are wrong with our civilization. I'll probably be too busy in a few days to rant anymore. The best way to change the world is to change your own life. Wasn't it Ghandi that said something about "be the change you want to see in the world"? Time to start being and doing!

May 14, 2009 - More GJ Hiking Pics

We spent a weekend backpacking in Dominguez Canyon on the Gunnison River near Grand Junction. Dominguez Canyon was recently established as a wilderness area. It's beautiful, but the petroglyphs on the boulders there reminded us that people used to live here too, not just come here to visit. I can imagine that it looked even better to see it then, with people living there in harmony with their surroundings.

We also took a Sunday to hike the 15 mile round trip up to Rattlesnake Arches in the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness near Grand Junction. The arches were really beautiful. This one is called First Arch (the first of several in a row along the rim of Rattlesnake Canyon). We climbed up through this to complete a loop. It's a steep climb, especially for us since we don't really like heights. You might be able to see three of the Moki steps that are chipped into the rock in a vertical row at the lower left of the photo, just above the trees.

So many arches - we lost count! Really beautiful.

May 13, 2009 - Ready to Move Home!

Grand Junction has some incredible hiking and mountain biking trails. When we lived here 10 years ago, we often drove 3 hours or more out of town on weekends to hike and backcountry ski in new places each time, but that doesn't feel right anymore to burn all of that fuel. Staying in town forced us to explore a little right around the edges of the city, and we found some wonderful places to visit. But that's all it really was - visiting, not really living. It makes sense to have wilderness areas, places of exceptional beauty preserved so that future generations can view them in their natural, undisturbed (or at least somewhat restored to natural) state. But, lately when we see places where people are living in harmony with the land they are on, we find even more beauty. There seems to be more life, both domesticated and wild, and more diversity, more of a feeling of wholeness than we see in wilderness areas. I'm sure some people would argue with me, because often human beings living in a place means environmental degradation, but I believe that humans have the ability to contribute in a positive way to any habitable environment, and when they are just visitors, there is less life than there might be otherwise. I'm starting to think that humans are not meant to live so isolated from nature that they have to drive to a wilderness area to "visit" nature, take pictures, and scurry back to their antiseptic artificial homes. We learned in Maine that there really is a feeling of connection and fulfillment the more you derive your daily needs for food, fuel and shelter from the land that you're living on. The more you participate in nature, the more you give and the more the land and everything living on it gives back. It's a feeling of connection, thankfulness, commitment and aliveness. It's a great feeling, (a knowing?) and it's one that now that we've touched it once, we can't wait to get back to it. So, in retrospect, we're not entirely sure we made the right decision to move to GJ for the winter. If we attempt it again, it will be for a shorter duration than the six months that we did this time. We did come out ahead money wise. Linc was happy to learn a new skill, residential energy auditing. He even had hopes of establishing a branch of the energy auditing business in Pagosa Springs for awhile, but after looking at the economics of it all, decided against it. He also was really thankful for the chance to renew some very rusty HVAC and plumbing system design skills, working for a couple of different engineering companies in the valley, and Jeanne was able to do the same for several different companies as a physical therapist. But it felt like we were in a state of suspended animation all winter long. Often it didn't feel like we were fully alive, just numb.

What really raised our spirts were our two visits down to Pagosa Springs to live in the yurt for a couple of days at a time. We immediately felt more relaxed and happy, and the elation usually lasted for a few days after we returned. Both times we also drove up onto Wolf Creek Pass for some backcountry skiing, enjoying the high altitude climbs and the long downhills in untracked powder back to the highway.

We even found out you can cook pancakes right on a wood cookstove!

During our visit to the yurt in early April, it was warm, and there was enough bare soil to allow us to clear a small area for our first garden. Jeanne was so excited that she went ahead and planted peas, in the middle of a sudden snow storm the next day.

December 2008 - Move to Grand Junction

So, after all of that preparation for winter, building the yurt, cutting firewood, filling the root cellar with preserves, a strange thing happened. We moved 5 hours away to Grand Junction for the winter in order to find higher paying jobs. We'd used up a good chunk of our savings between moving ourselves and Linc's mother west, buying the land, solar electric system, yurt, an old moving truck (which we still own and use as a lockable dry place to keep tools), rainwater catchment system, and so on, and the stock market crash took our retirement savings (much of it invested in a green energy fund called Winslow Green) and wiped out the majority of it. Our two vehicles, both 1980's vintage, with a combined mileage of over 500,000, were showing signs of their age, so we figured we'd better be realistic and look for work.

When we were packing to leave, we both went through a day or two of the blues. We realized how much we were going to miss being on our land through the winter, and found ourselves missing the community of people in the development and in town in general, and the lost opportunity to share the experience of living throught the winter there with them.

So, with a few misgivings, off we went to a cheap apartment in Grand Junction, Colorado. That's a view of the Grand Valley from up on the Colorado Monument, with the Grand Mesa in the background. It's really a pretty nice place as cities go, lots of hiking and biking trails right in and around the valley, and you can drive up the onto the 10,000 foot summit of the mesa to backcountry ski.

We drove down to Flagstaff, AZ a couple of times over the winter to visit Linc's mother and sister. We'd stop in Moab, Utah in each direction for a hike up the Moab Rim Trail overlooking the Portal, where the Colorado River enters a cut it's made through the sandstone cliffs that tower over town.

November 15, 2008 - Ready for Winter

Well, here's the yurt, ready for winter. The carpet scrap nailed to the pallet ramp makes it a lot easier to get up the ramp when it's covered with ice. That wire dangling from near the front door is our phone line. The phone company ran the line underground some 300 feet from the main road to a post terminal within 15 feet of the yurt for free. Wow. Let's see, at about $25/month, they should recoup their investment in about 20 years... This other view, from the back of the yurt has another dangling wire. That's the one that runs from our solar panel stand to the solar controller and battery box inside the yurt.

The old camper storage trailer roof had begun to leak in several places, and we had doubts about it holding four feet of snow in the winter, so we built a roof over it. Alright, another 200 square feet of roof to collect rainwater on, that's another 132 gallons every time we get an inch of rain!

The solar panel rack is mounted on a steel pipe that is attached with u-clamps to the side of the camper. We tightened the clamps enough to hold the panels from turning in a strong wind, but loose enough to be able to rotate the panels with a pipe wrench to follow the sun if we really are low on power on low angle sun days in the winter.

I finally had time to build wooden sides for a little utility trailer that we'd bought in Maine to help move our things in. The sides attach to the metal frame with quick release clevis pins, and the front and rear boards slide into wooden tracks. The back drops down for a ramp, which works great when you're using a wheelbarrow to load it.

October 15, 2008 - Root Cellar

Here's a view of the yurt from down the hill again, with our rainwater catchment roof on the ground below.

We cut a hinged trap door into the floor and added a ladder to get down to the enclosed, insulated basement.

So far, it looks like we can maintain good root cellar temperatures in the winter by playing with the two screened vents that we cut into the metal skirting. The mass of the earth and the water in the tank help buffer the temperatures down there, and the freezer gives off a little heat. It's a great place to store preserves and root crops in the winter.

We built a sleeping loft over half of the yurt. Jeanne can walk right under without hitting her head, but I've got to duck a little when I walk into the office area. I keep forgetting to do that!

We're amazed that it's possible to fit a bedroom (loft), office, library, wood cookstove and kitchen into a 200 square foot yurt. It's cozy and functional. It definitely feels like home to us.

We like living in the yurt a lot. The fabric walls let sound through really well. You can hear the wind, rain, birds, coyotes yipping, turkeys calling, and, uh, the neighbor's generator running... The big skylight and windows let in plenty of light, and allow for lots of ventilation when needed. The woodstove keeps it warm and cozy in winter. What more could you ask for (besides a tiny bit more room)?

Sept 30, 2008 - Hiking and Firewood

When we went to pick up the yurt in Montrose in early September, we went for a hike from the town of Ouray. They call it the Switzerland of America. The scenery there is amazing. The building in the picture is an old miner's bunkhouse, perched on the side of cliff, thousands of feet above the valley floor.

The forest service sells firewood permits for $10. per cord. When they are thinning beetle killed pine, or cutting firewood killed wood, they limb the trees, and usually cut them to a length short enough to allow the public to drag them out to the roads. We collected four cords, and used one to help some neighbors out that couldn't get their own. Here's Jeanne, who does all the work in this family, sawing away on one piece to get it down to stove length for splitting. She said that a log this size takes between 200 and 300 strokes to cut. I don't think I count strokes when I cut, but she's probably right.

We have two big, antique cross cut saws that we bought at antique stores in Maine for around $20 each. This one is used for sawing logs to length and can be handled by either one or two people (there's a small post handle at the opposite end from Jeanne). Our other saw is a long, flexible one that we use for felling trees and requires two people to operate. I've found that these old saws can be sharpened pretty easily with a fine triangular file and a flat file. It takes me two or three hours to sharpen each saw, but it doesn't seem to need to be done very often. It's great exercise sawing wood to length, especially for the upper body. We both enjoy doing it. I don't think we'd enjoy cutting wood so much if we were using a chainsaw.

Sept 25, 2008

We built an 8' tall, 5' wide structure in the middle of the yurt with shelving on both sides and ladders on the end. The ladders are used to climb up into the sleeping loft (pictures of that later). The bookshelves face the loft and the office under the loft on one side, and the kitchen on the other. The bottom shelf on the kitchen side is a wood box with divided sections for kindling and newspaper for fire starting. You can sit on the top of the shelving unit with your head up in the dome - great for looking out for black bears prowling around the yard.

Here's a picture of the solar charge controller, battery disconnect, and meter and fuse panel. It's a small system, but it seems to be all we will need for a long time.

The third photo is looking up the hillside at our yurt, with the 900 gallon water tank in the foreground.

Here's the bottom of the canyon with dirt road winding it's way up through. If we ever get goats, they're going to love this hilly land!

Sept 15, 2008 - Home Sweet Yurt

We picked up some used cabinets and used them in the yurt. For now, we've got plywood countertops. One thing that is hard about living in a yurt, is trying to figure out how to use furniture, that was made for a rectangular building, in a round one.

The seccond picture shows our hand crank grain and nut butter mill that we bought a few years ago from Lehmans. It's a workout to use, but is well built and has lasted us for about six years now. We grind all of our grains for breads with it, and even can make nut butters with it (with a lot of effort). In the background is the icebox salvaged out of our storage camper. We make the ice in the solar powered freezer.

Third photo is a view of the sink area with a hand pump that pumps water up from the 500 gallon tank in the basement. The sink, also salvaged from camper, just drains through a mesh pasta strainer into a bucket in the cabinet. We dump the food scraps from the pasta strainer into a compost bucket (also under the sink). The food scraps compost bucket gets emptied into a 55 gallon steel drum with bolt-on lid (to keep it safe from black bears). We hand carry the dishwater for now and use it to water the trees around the yurt, but eventually hope to pipe it directly to fruit tree mulch basins.

Next picture is our second wood cookstove. This one is a Baker's Choice, made by a group that separted from the Amish. We bought ours at the factory in Kentucky when we moved back out to Colorado from Maine. The stove has a large, airtight firebox that can hold 18" long standard split wood, instead of kindling. The oven is large enough to bake a turkey. They offer a hot water tank and a single pass heat exchanger that installs in the firebox to allow thermosyphon heating of a water tank installed above the stove. We didn't bother with the tank or heat exchanger, but did use the heat exchanger on our first Baker's Choice stove to heat all of our domestic hot water at our house in Maine. Cooking breakfast usually produced enough hot water for the day.

The Bakers Choice is overkill, heating-wise, for a 200 SF yurt though. We definitely don't have any trouble staying warm inside in the winter with this thing idling along. We did find that it doesn't draw as well with the chimney running up outside the yurt as it did with an interior two story chimney in our house in Maine. Without adequate draft, we can't damper it down all the way to hold a fire, but maybe that's just as well - fires without enough oxygen pollute a lot more.

Also, this stove seems to use a lot more wood than our little summer kitchen stove. I figure it's going to use about five cords of wood each winter for heat, hot water and cooking.

I think that eventually, we'll have a passive solar house that won't really need much heat. I think we'll need to come up with something more efficient for cooking by then. Maybe a solar cooker for sunny days, a rocket stove cooktop, and a rocket stove bake oven? My goal would be to get down to 1 cord of wood per year for cooking, hot water and heat. The last picture shows the finished yurt from the front, with a ramp entrance made of salvaged pallets. We bought our yurt with the rainwater catchment gutter accessory, but are wondering whether the rainwater collected off of the plastic coated roof canvas might be too toxic for use in the gardens. Maybe for a small garden pond?

Sept 6, 2008 - Putting Up the Yurt!

As usual, I uploaded the photos in reverse order, and I can't seem to move them around in this editor. The picture below shows the inside of the yurt. Jeanne sanded the floor and put on two coats of OSMO Hardwax Oil (a great, durable non-toxic clear finish).

The 5' diameter acrylic skylight is hinged at one edge. You crank it open with a long rod that you can reach easily from the floor.

We asked friends and neighbors in the area for help putting up the yurt. We're really thankful all these people showed up. It was a fun day for everyone, even if Jeanne got a little hoarse from trying to read the directions aloud while everyone went ahead and put it up whatever way seemed logical (then took parts back down and turned them around and put them back up the right way). It took about six hours for the group (up to 11 at times) to put the yurt up. We relaxed for awhile afterward around the summer kitchen and had homemade pizzas cooked in the wood cookstove.

Jeanne and I built our second solar food dehydrator (the first one is still in Maine, at Earthways).

Here's the summer kitchen, with the bracing done, some scavenged cabinets up, wood saw overhead, metal on the sides for blocking the wind, drain gutter routed to a 55 gallon drum for dishwater, and a bench that Jeanne made.

August 26, 2008 - Yurt Deck

A yurt skirt! We used more of the salvaged roofing metal, flattened by beating on it with a hand sledge, and cut to the correct length to skirt our yurt. The bottom edge of the metal is buried in the drain trench gravel, so any water running down the sides will get carried away by the drainage pipe. Also, burying it in gravel seems to have worked to keep mice and chipmunks from getting into the yurt through the basement, and they can't climb the metal, so they haven't been able to get through the sides either. The ladder is sticking out of the access hatch that we cut in the deck to be able to access the basement from inside the yurt. We insulated under the floor of the yurt with straw, kept in place with chicken wire and wood strapping. The sides of the basement were insulated with 1" of blueboard insulation against the metal, then about 6" of straw behind more chicken wire. We think that the resulting root cellar stayed at or above freezing for the entire winter, even though we were gone for much of the winter.

August 25 - Summer Kitchen

I uploaded pictures in the wrong order. This picture shows a home made drying rack we made the day that our neighbor Tom came over with this enormous Puffball mushroom he'd found that morning while fishing along the San Juan River. He gave us half. We cooked some with dinner, and made a drying rack to dry the rest on for winter soups. Thanks Tom!

There's the mushroom. Huge!

Here's the inside of our summer kitchen. The wood cookstove is a small model that we bought new in Maine for around $400. It was our source of heat and for cooking when we lived in an earth lodge for a year at Earthways (Earthways School of Wilderness Living in Canaan, Maine). It isn't airtight, and runs best on small branches and wood split to 1" or so diameter. The oven is a little small, but it heats up fast. It's a perfect stove for a summer kitchen or camp.

There's the frame of the kitchen, not totally done installing the timber frame braces yet. Poles are Ponderosa that we cut with a two-person cross cut saw and peeled with a draw knife. The roof framing is store bought lumber. Roofing metal is more of that salvaged from the local roofer.

August 23rd, 2008 Homestead Progress

Remember that rainwater catchment tank we put in? Well, we needed a roof to catch rain on, so we built one on the ground, using pallets scavenged from the local hardware store and used roofing metal scavenged for free from a local roofing company (they have to pay to dispose of it, and except for having screw holes in it, it was in great shape). We attached non-perforated 4" flexible polyethylene drain pipe along the bottom edge (slit the pipe open to put it over the edge of the roofing metal and strapped it on with plumber's strapping) and routed it through a filter screen with cleanout access and then down the hill in a smaller (1") polyethylene pipe to the 900 gallon rainwater collection tank. We won't be drinking this water, but will use it on gardens. Is it clean enough for that? Well, sure, except for any concerns about the polyethylene. But, as I understand it, polyethylene is one of the least toxics of the plastics. I think that anything biodegradeable (dead bugs, mouse poop, etc) will be cleaned up by the soil bacteria when we use the water on the gardens.

The picture to left shows our yurt cellar hole. We put a 500 gallon water tank in it for drinking water storage. We'll pump from that up to the kitchen sink with a hand pump. We've poured concrete footers for the 10 yurt pad posts, and installed the posts with temporary bracing. We used a flexible clear hose filled with water as a level to determine how long to cut each post so that they'd all be at the same height for the yurt floor joists.

Here are the yurt floor joists installed.

We used 2" x 6" tongue and groove pine boards for the yurt deck. We screwed each board down to the joists (nearly all of the screws are hidden in the tongue of each board). We then scribed a 16' diameter circle using a string and pencil from the center point, and used the circular saw and generator to cut to line. It came out really nice.

Since we had to wait for our yurt to be made by the Colorado Yurt Company in Montrose, we started building a summer kitchen so that we'd be able to put our little wood cookstove in it to use for cooking. We'd much rather cook with wood than with propane.