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.