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.

Ah, the cabin. It’s a special place. It’s a place where you can go and get away from everything. It weaves a spell of relaxation on you. People ask us, what do you do up there without a phone, TV or internet? But we do have TV, I tell them: Cabin TV, and it has various channels.
Such as the Bird Channel:

the Front Porch Channel:


and the Fireplace Channel.

All the channels keep us entertained. There is no pre-programming, nor is there a viewing guide. They all come in HD with full surround sound.

Take the Bird Channel for instance. It’s colorful and the programs change constantly. Bright blue stellar jays let everyone in the forest know that the food has been put out with their raucous cawing. Chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, ruby crowned kinglets, and my personal favorite, the hermit thrush**[see side story below], all add to the symphony. And let’s not forget the whirring of hummingbird wings and the chittering arguments over who’s flower it is. The Bird Channel also features squirrels, ground squirrels, and chipmunks.

The Front Porch Channel is a bit more varied. Although it includes the Bird Channel, it can also feature moose, deer, elk or a coyote. We didn’t see any of those this time around, and since the salt lick is no longer there they have less of a reason to visit us. This channel comes with the additional sound of Bart Creek, splashing and tumbling over mini waterfalls as it flows through the bottom of the forest, engorged with spring run-off. Side Note: [Bart Creek was named for our dog Bart, that we recently lost. He was our water dog. He loved to wade in the creek. He would get right out in the middle of it, water up to his stomach, and just meander along.]

The Fireplace Channel is a mesmerizing one. Flames leap and dance in an ever-changing pattern. Logs shift and fall as they burn. Snap. Crackle. Pop. Time to add more wood ... Sometimes the Fireplace Channel comes with the added bonus of a poetry reading, usually Robert Service or cowboy poetry, by Rick.

I think you get the idea. It’s a hard place to leave.

**Side Story: It took me years to figure out what kind of bird we were hearing early in the morning and at dusk. It’s crystal clear flute-like notes would pierce the air. Ethereal, haunting. My “Birding by Ear” CD did not help with the identification. For years we called it “Flea-by-the-sea-bird” because Rick had made up a little ditty to remember how its song went. Four ascending notes: flea-by-the-sea; then four descending notes: don’t-bite-at-me. I know, it’s silly ditty but it helped us remember how it sounded. Finally I realized it was in the thrush family because of when it sang, and went through all thrushes on my larger bird CD until I found one that matched. Hence, the hermit thrush. They come back every year.**

Our house in Colorado is being taken over by birds. First, there is this ghostly impression on the sliding glass door where a bird obviously flew into it. Can you see it, the wings spread wide? It’s like it imprinted the house with its spirit. It looks like a hawk to me, or maybe it was a grackle. There was a twin print to this one on another door right next to this one, but it was more faint. Same bird, or one just like it. Very strange ...

This sweet dove has built a wispy nest under the eave of the sunroom in back. She picked a smart place for her nest, out of the wind and rain. We didn’t disturb her; let her have her babies.

We also discovered that a woodpecker—a flicker probably—had made several nice holes in our stucco board on the outside of our house. One was the size of a grapefruit and a starling had started to nest inside it. The hole went all the way through the stucco board, the foam, and finally the wood. They tell us it happens all the time and the repairs are simple. Still, it’s just one more thing.

Now if only the birds could pool all their money together and buy the house, it would be a perfect fit.