My dear fellow bloggers, I give you —Dick, the tree.

Dick is a grand old aspen. He stands proudly deep in the forest at the cabin. Like an old cowboy who’s been riding the range on his horse too long, his legs are bent in a permanent bow. His stance is a jaunty one with one leg slightly more forward and more bent than the other. You can almost hear him greeting you with a howdy pardner!

Dick is so named because of a strategically placed twig, which over the almost 20 years that we have known him, is not quite as obvious as it was back when we first met him. It happens to the best of us. Age has a way of wearing us down over time.

Dick is a strange one. We can’t quite figure out how he came to be. There are two separate trunks coming up from the ground which turn into one. It doesn’t happen at the ground like there was one tree that got split somehow. So, another tree falling on Dick and him growing around the fallen tree doesn’t make sense either, because how could two parts of a tree join back up together so perfectly? But the only other scenario would be two independent trees joining up together, and could that really happen?

Yet in this close-up shot, it look like there is a definite seam, doesn’t it? Go ahead, don’t be shy; take a closer look, Dick won’t mind you staring at his private parts.

Here is Dick, from ...ahem, ehr… behind.

No matter which direction you view Dick from, he’s a strange fellow. We have great affection for Dick and visit him every time we go to the cabin just to be sure he’s still standing. Dick’s stomping grounds are in an area of the forest we call “the blow-down” because there are so many downed trees from the wind. So far, so good. We figure his two-trunked hold on the ground is pretty darn stable. At least we hope so. If Dick ever gets back on his horse and rides off into the sunset, the forest will never be the same.

Date: Sunday, May 27, 2007
Time: 2:30 p.m. Eastern Standard time
Outdoor Temperature: 83.7 degrees F
Pool Temperature: 72 degrees F

And just in case you think I can’t swim, you’d better read what happened last year. Click here. It’s worth a laugh ...

I still can’t get the cabin out of my mind, so I’m going to share some photos that I took while on our short visit.

Our cabin sits in a meadow surrounded by pine and aspen so we don’t really have a “view” from the cabin. But, all that is needed is to walk around. Down our short driveway, the view of Bull Mountain is waiting for us. [this photo also appears as my header this week.]

A road bisects our two parcels of land. Every year it drifts over and is usually impassable until mid-May or early June. This year we are predicting no one will be able to get through until July 4th. Here is this year’s drift seen from both sides. You can see the poor tree on the left has had a hard winter. The snow just stripped it of its branches. It was quite a winter up there this year, as our friends and year-round pioneer residents Donna and Larry will attest to!

Pasque flowers are the first to bloom as soon as the snow recedes. You can be sure that wherever there are pasque flowers, the snow has not been gone long.

Old aspens tower above our heads in the forest.

At the old beaver pond, majestic dead trees stand as sentinels. On this calm morning reflections abounded.

We stood on top of the meadow on our land adjacent to the cabin and used my little Canon with its stitch assist program to take a 360 degree view. Below is the result. A circular cursor will appear when you run your mouse over the photo. Click and hold down the mouse button and drag it from left to right to view it.

Ed Note: Movie temporarily removed. Sorry!

The cabin is nestled in a group of trees seen early on. Here is what the entrance to our cabin looks like. See if you can find it!

I can’t help myself. It’s that time of year when I take up my trysts with Johnny once again. We meet once a week, intimately, for about 2+ hours or so. I ride him; control him. Sometimes he bucks and kicks and gives me fits, yet we manage to smooth things over. He can be obstinate but I usually have the upper hand. Both of us end up satisfied at the end of it all. If you don’t know who Johnny is, you’d better follow the link provided above. And shame on you for not reading my archives!

He seems to be having a few issues this year. One particularly annoying, and life threatening part of his repertoire seems to be a steering issue. Make a turn too tight or fast and you find that the steering wheel is stuck. This usually happens when headed straight for a tree or one of the boulders that sprout from our yard.
Look out ahead!
Only fast thinking and a good strong wrench of the wheel can save you. Several times I’ve come close to crashing into something, so I’m really careful now. Really now, wouldn’t you find that annoying as you-know-what?

The other issue is that he seems hungry all the time. If not completely—and I mean completely—full of gas, he coughs and sputters going uphill. With our yard, uphill comes as part of the package. Up the slope, down the slope. No getting around it. Can’t go across the slope because you might tip over. [There is only one true flat spot in our yard and we’re thinking of turning it into a boules court.]

Maybe he didn’t like his winter vacation in the shed instead of the garage. Or maybe he’s decided he doesn’t like New Jersey because it’s too much work. But more than likely Johnny just needs a little spa time. We need to make and appointment with the travelling Deere Spa to come and give him a going-over. Maybe then he’ll mend his ways.

That’s me: Fire Woman. I don’t know exactly why, but I have a thing for fire. It’s not the destructive let’s torch the place kind of thing, more like a part of who I am. It must be a throwback from a more primal time of my life. I can see myself as a good Cave-Woman-Wife keeping the cave fires burning, or something like that anyway. Come to think of it, things haven’t changed too much over the eons, but I still can top Rick regarding making fires. I have to be careful what I say though since lately he’s been catching up to me in his fire-making abilities.

Above is our wood cookstove at the cabin. She’s not old if that’s what you’re thinking. She was brand-spanking new in 2001 when we bought her. A Heartland range. Not a cheap investment, about $5,000 back then, but worth every penny. I opened the door to the wood box so you could see the nice fire burning merrily within. This baby can heat the whole cabin; all 1,000 square feet of it. We usually start a fire first thing in the morning to take the chill off, even in summer. The cabin is at nearly 9,000 feet above sea level, so the nights can get downright chilly.

It also can roast a mean turkey. It takes a while to get a good bed of coals to get the oven up to 375 or 400 degrees, and once there you have to keep stoking it up in order to keep the temperature even. We’ve done a couple of turkeys and baked muffins mostly. As you can imagine, the whole time you are using the oven you are also heating up the cabin—a lot. So, not a good summertime activity unless you open all the doors and windows! And we typically only use the cook top for heating water. There’s a reason for the old saying of “slaving over a hot stove.” I don’t know how they did it year-round.

There is nothing quite like the heat from a wood stove. It’s cozy, and warms you right down to your bones. When the stove is going the propane heat never comes on. It’s just a shame that we don’t have hardwoods to burn. We have to make due with pine and aspen which burn quickly and are not nearly as dense. We go through a lot of wood! But, the more I have to add wood, the more I get to play the role of Fire Woman. Not a bad thing at all.