Cabin Journal

Loving Winter

I remember my first winter at the cabin, arriving after the first cold snap and finding that all the aluminum cans—of water and pop—had exploded in the refrigerator, leaving a huge mess. The ancient refrigerator’s skin was too porous to protect the food inside, including salsa, salad dressing and pickles, which all froze. Inside the kitchen cabinets, the olive oil had congealed, and the gallons of drinking water had frozen.

I got a refresher course in science: water expands when it freezes. I learned my lesson, now taking home any cans before temperatures dip below freezing. I empty the rain barrel outside; the ceramic jug inside, which holds my drinking water in summer; and the plastic pails that I use to haul water from the pump. In late fall after I re-stain the deck, I bring any leftover paint home because otherwise I just wasted $40 worth of paint that will freeze.  

In winter, the chores seem endless, and yet it’s satisfying to take care of the cabin, under sometimes adverse conditions, like shoveling my way to the water pump when there’s two feet of snow and from the driveway to the front door. After I deplete the firewood from a night of keeping the woodstove going, I need to haul in more from the shed.

Yet, despite all the work to keep the cabin maintained, I love the winter. Before Christmas, the roads were (relatively) full of cars carrying Christmas trees, coming back from designated Forest Service spots. Now that the season has passed, the roads are almost empty. Many of the cabins (above) are boarded up. When I go for a walk, it’s just me and the Highland cattle out there.

This winter has been mild, and some days are warm enough (in the 40s) to bask outside in the sun. Yet the snow on the south side of the cabin, left over from a big storm a few weeks ago, hasn’t melted, and the creeks and ponds are frozen and covered with snow, although I can hear the slight sound of water gurgling under Cabin Creek. All good signs that it’s winter.

When I go for a walk, I have to pull my collar up and tighten the scarf around my neck. I love the strong winds of winter, which buffet me, the trees and grasses. After the heat of summer and fall, I’m eager for the force of fresh air—minus pollution and smoke from wildfires. The cold makes me feel alive, and my survival instincts are aroused.

I’m just as happy to be back inside the cabin, getting a fire started in the woodstove. It seems like a small miracle—trees that once stood upright, that pulled nutrients from the earth and carbon dioxide from the sky, that once stood so tall while rooted in the earth—can now, in their demise, provide heat. Not just heat but comfort. It feels like a gift from nature that is now giving up its last breath.  

And yet I know that the flames that are providing warmth for me are destroying thousands of homes and lives in Los Angeles. I feel both humbled and fortunate to be able to sit in front of this small fire, soothed by the crackling sounds and by the flames that mean no harm to me, but leap and clutch at the air.

Outside in the Colorado mountains the darkness is almost complete, lit only by moonlight, while winds shake the cabin. Beyond is a world that feels increasingly shaky and full of dangers. But inside  I feel safe in this circle of warmth.

Suburbia Comes to My Wilderness

In the past few months I’ve watched the progress of a new house (below) going up near my favorite pond, where in summer I watch dragonflies swarming and moose eating in the tall grasses. In the distance Mount Meeker looms over this perfect landscape (above), and I’m guessing the view from this modern house takes it all in. Its construction—metal and floor-to-ceiling windows—is shockingly different from the small nearby cabin made of logs (below). But this is the trend now in Meeker Park, as once empty “lots”—parcels of pine and aspen—are filled in with large homes that dominate the landscape.

Meeker Park started out as a farming and ranching community, but its beauty at the foot of Mount Meeker and its closeness to the tourist town of Estes Park started drawing people from flat landscapes to build small cabins where they could spend summers—or at least a few weeks—in a mountain valley with cooler temperatures than Nebraska, Kansas or Iowa.

 

The cabins were rustic—one neighbor refers to his as a “shack.” My cabin, built in 1939, is 600 square feet. Most, like mine, started out with no plumbing or heat. When a few summer residents retired and wanted to live here all year long, they added heat (mostly in the form of a propane or wood-burning stove) and plumbing.

 

But now Meeker Park, which maybe had a permanent population of 100 when I first arrived 15 years ago, is seeing an increase in people who want to live here all year round. When I first bought my cabin, only two neighbors out of 13 cabins were brave enough to withstand the cold and windy winters. But then gradually our neighborhood started filling in with people who couldn’t afford to live in Estes Park—a school principal, a minister, a retired nurse, a schoolteacher--and those who can do their work from anywhere and want to live in a beautiful place.

 

With that came changes: more cars and pedestrians, even in winter; the sound of chainsaws and hammers; festive lights hung from trees; plastic flowers decorating cabins; and the ultimate wilderness insult—bicyclists, who wear colorful lycra!

 

I came here for the wildness—to enjoy the emptiness, especially in winter when I could go down “lanes”—dirt roads—and find cabins that were empty and that I didn’t know existed. Now I’m likely to enter someone’s space, see the car parked in the driveway, get growled at by their dog or find someone splitting wood.

 

I came for the dark forests, but they’re being thinned (rightly) to interrupt future wildfires, as are the tall grasses, which are turning into lawns as city people bring their aesthetics to the mountains. I came for the wildlife (like the elk, above), but they’re being scared away by all the human activity (except for the moose, which aren’t afraid of anything).

As the world gets more crowded, more people are seeking nature, wild animals and quiet places, just like me. I can’t begrudge them, even as the wildness disappears.

At the end of our lane, a new family with two little girls has moved in. When I walk that way, I see a hand-written sign that says “Secret forest” in front of an aspen grove large enough to hide in. When I was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago my family’s house bordered an undeveloped lot full of tall oaks and smaller trees and bushes; we called this the “woods.”  My girlfriends and I would build forts and jumps where we would take our imaginary horses through the woods. I dreamed of living in the mountains and in forests that I could get lost in.

As much as I don’t want my neighborhood to fill up, I’m happy for these girls. They’re living my childhood dream. I can’t help but welcome them to the neighborhood.

Aspen Whisperer

This time of year city residents flock to the mountains for the annual viewing of the aspen leaves. News and social media recommend the best places to go, so thousands jam mountain roads, cars piled two or three deep, leaf peepers eager to get photos of hillsides of golden aspen, which are then posted on Facebook or Instagram. It’s hard to resist.

Because I was gone for 11 days, I missed the aspen peak. When I came to the cabin, I was disappointed that most of the trees had already dropped their leaves. But I knew there had to be a few stands left, so I went searching. They weren’t on Coyote Hill Road nor on Big Owl Road, but I finally found a few stands near Fritz’s Pond.

 

Under the golden aspen, the grasses and flowers were dry and crumpled. I found a somewhat even place to sit down, turned off my thoughts and all other sensations (the pain in my feet) and just listened. Outside of bird songs, the soft clapping of the aspen leaves is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world, like a musical hush that can enter your soul and root your mind. When the leaves stop their whispering, I wait for the wind to start up again in the tall pines and then descend into the aspen grove, so the whole musical revue starts again. If the wind is strong enough, the dried grasses will bend and add their own soft rattle to the wind-induced symphony.

 

You don’t need to drive dozens of miles, jumping out of the car to get the perfect picture before driving to the next hillside of golden colors. You don’t need to join the throngs of people photographing the hillside of yellow, orange and red colors. Just find one aspen grove, settle yourself into a comfortable spot, open your senses, and listen closely to the leaves. They’ll quiet your soul in ways you never knew possible.

As the World Turns

I was on the path where I always find flowers—especially columbines that cover the hillside in June—but today I was looking for one I hoped I wouldn’t find. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked so closely because when I put my head down there it was: the blue gentian—the last flower of the season (below).

This is the time when I can feel the earth tilt. The light is less intense; the days are shorter and nights cooler. The sun is setting behind Mount Meeker at 7; gone are the long slow summer nights that I took for granted. At night the temperatures are in the 40s. Suddenly everything feels different: we‘re going in the opposite direction, downhill toward fall.

In two weeks, the hummingbirds will leave, right on schedule, around the beginning of September. Shortly after that, the ground squirrels and chipmunks will nestle into their burrows for the winter. I’ve been enjoying their antics all summer, especially the young ones who boldly approach me when I come outside, staring at me, trying to figure out who is this huge foreign species who occasionally throws out vegetable and fruit remains.

There’s a sense of emptiness on my walks. The flowers that are still blooming look frayed and tired. We had a month of almost no precipitation, and the plants in front of my cabin–green-gray sagebrush, yellow gumweed, sulfur flowers—only grew this summer to half the size they usually do. About two weeks ago, I noticed the leaves on many starting to curl up. The heat hasn’t helped—80 degree days aren’t normal here, but then 100 degree days in the valley aren’t either.

The tiny raspberries are partly dried, although there’s enough for me to take a small bite. On the gallardia, one of the flashiest flowers here, the yellow petals are drooping over the orange seedheads, almost the last piece of color, jutting out  somewhat defiantly among the fading flowers. The purple asters are still blooming, although they’re on their last stages. And I admire the persistence of the purple harebells (right), which, despite their seeming fragility, have been flowering since July, through the heat, the rains and the cold nights.

But the pond (top and left) is still full, and, most gloriously, it’s covered with dragonflies—stick-like blue bodies with glistening bronze wings. I watch them swoop across the pond and then hover, long enough for me to try to get a photo, before they jet off again.

 What’s the reason for their flights? I know mating is going on, but it took me a while to see that they were laying eggs in the grasses around the pond. These larvae can live up to two years in the water before emerging as adults, which will then only live another few weeks to months. Then the life cycle begins again.

As with most of nature, and humanity, too I wonder why. Why bother? What urge is in these fragile insects that keeps them doing this strange life cycle? It’s the same urge that will send hummingbird 1,000 miles to their winter homes in Mexico. The same cycle that ushers in fall and then winter and back to spring. The one that keeps life rolling along. Do any of us know why?

Don’t Stop Singing

My neighbor told me the first thing he does when he wakes in the morning is throw open the door so he can hear the birds. At my home, the robins wake me at 4:30 with their insistent singing (“wake up, you sleepy head”) and then signal that I can go to bed around 8:30 at night.

Birds have always been a source of inspiration, but in this world of anxiety and distrust, more people are turning to birds as a source of pleasure, distraction and even sometimes exaltation.  I think of the New Yorkers who were captivated by a short-lived owl named Flaco who hunted for mice in Central Park. Here in Boulder County, several years ago officials built a platform near the fairgrounds for an osprey nest, and their progress has been avidly followed, making the front page news when one of their eggs hatch.

For most of our lives, birds were in the background. We may have noticed a flashy goldfinch or sparrows building a nest in the corner of the garage. But now people crave something that’s outside of our world. You only need to listen to a meadowlark (above), with its full-throated warbling, to start believing in beauty and purity again.

To us poor humans who can’t fly, the birds exist in a space where gravity doesn’t pull us down. I watch the violet-green swallows (above) make their dizzying swoops in the sky or the ravens slowly flap their wings above me, as if surveying their kingdom. The hummingbirds make me laugh with their frenzied chasing of each other (get out of my space!) and then in awe at their launch straight up and steep dives down, pulling up again before they hit the ground. Suddenly, my spirits lift.  

The house wren (right) fools you with its drab colors and boring name, but its song is one of the most beautiful around. And my Merlin app identified the ruby-crowned sparrow, a bird that hides in the upper reaches of the pine trees, letting its beautiful song float down to us humble humans. Once I heard it around the cabin, I heard it everywhere on my walks around Meeker Park.

It's not just robins that remind me to be more alert. Before the pasqueflowers disappeared, I went for a walk to savor their delicate beauty. But, as usual, my thoughts drifted off somewhere. Luckily, a jay arrived in the pine tree above me and loudly cawed: Wake up!

Birds seem to appear just when we need them. When my mother was dying, a hawk appeared in a tree across the alley from her apartment. After my father died, three sandhill cranes flew in circles above my two siblings and I after the funeral. Everyone I know has similar stories. What are these birds telling us? Especially, now in spring, when I’m at the cabin and surrounded by birds flying and singing, I feel like I’m being woven into a world I had forgotten that I belong to.

The downside of observing birds is that you notice when they’re gone. For two years in a row, I haven’t seen the mountain bluebirds (left), which previously hung out on fence posts around the open field. Nor have I seen the rare western bluebird, which once nested in the front yard, for many years. In the Wisconsin woods where I spent summers as a child, the whip-poor-wills’ lonesome cries can no longer be heard. We’ve lost so many birds over the past few decades that it makes you want to cry. Since 1970, three billion birds have disappeared across Canada and the U.S.—to habitat loss, climate change, cats and loss of insects, among other threats.

And yet, at night, before I go to bed, I listen one more time for the screech owl, its haunting call bouncing across the valley and through the pine trees. And then listen for the returning call. It’s still there. It hasn’t disappeared yet.  

 

Give Us Light

It’s been a dark, wet spring. The earth is a soggy mess, water running everywhere, and last year’s leaves are matted on the hillsides. Among the brown grasses flattened by winter’s snow, only a smattering of new green grasses can be seen. So the pasqueflowers are almost the only color in this drab landscape.

But they are not showy, like the columbine and purple penstemon that will appear in June. You have to search for them, let your eyes rake the ground because they like to keep low, out of the strong winds and cold nights. Already they’ve taken their first slam after a foot of snow fell since they first bloomed about two weeks ago. But these first flowers of the year  rose up again, somewhat bruised. One in my yard had its stem broken by the heavy snow, yet it’s still blooming.

Last week, wind gusts of 60-70 mph raked the land with snow blowing horizontally. Anything that could hide from the winds, like chipmunks and birds, did so. Strong pine trees tossed and turned, and many couldn’t withstand the force. A reported microburst a mile away laid down dozens of trees, shut down the power and phone service for more than 16 hours. One nearby neighbor lost at least 24 trees on their property.

I stayed inside the cabin, waiting for the roof to blow off, and the next morning I nervously checked on the pasqueflowers in my yard. I found them bowed but not beaten. Some were encased in frost, but they hadn’t given up, and when the sun came out, they lifted their heads back up. Even on a partly sunny day, their cups held the light I longed for.  

Their yearly visit is coming to an end, and soon they will go back to their lives underground. But their small survival and radiance always fortifies me

Six Signs of Spring

1. At Wild Basin, the snow is melting and exposing the boulders and dark water in St. Vrain Creek. The thawing leaves behind strange, beautiful forms. This one reminds me of something from the sea, maybe several dolphins momentarily halted by this still partly frozen world .

2. Kinnikinick (right) stays green all winter, but when the sun starts to get higher in the sky and the air temperature goes up a few degrees, this ground plant turns a deeper green, spreading itself across the pale rocks and providing a little color to the still mostly brown landscape. In a few weeks, its flowers will appear--small, pink and bell-shaped.

 

 

 

3. The chipmunks and ground squirrels have emerged from their dens. Last week, I was greeted by a ground squirrel that had taken up its customary position on my deck, sprawling across the wood, as if the first thing it wanted to do after emerging from underground, where it had been sleeping for six months, was relax in the sun. I felt the same way. 

Every summer I sit with my feet up on the bench, entertained and fascinated by these thoughtful and playful animals, even when they are trying to drink my wine or water, as one did a few years ago (left).

 

4. As the ice melts in St. Vrain Creek, these round holes appear, giving a glimpse of what lies below: an assortment of varied-color rocks. I've never understood why the melting creates round holes. This must be a rule of nature that I would understand if I were a scientist. Since I'm not, I can only peek into its depths.

5. Objects start emerging from the snow, standing out in this white landscape, like this old water pump (left) and a very young ponderosa tree  (below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Hammocks (below) start to appear. Sure, there's still two feet of snow on the ground and the creek is partly frozen. But hammockers have been waiting all winter and can't wait a minute longer. Just string the ends between two trees, listen to the creek murmuring and the wind—and relax. Ahh. Summer must be just around the corner.

 

The Big One

It was all our fault, when I think about it, the neighbors and I standing around for the past few months talking about how little snow we had gotten all winter—2 or 3 inches at a time that quickly melted. We need a good snowstorm was our refrain. So nature finally obliged, generously dumping 4 feet of snow over two days. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much snow at the cabin. I don’t know how our neighbor, who plows the road, managed to pile the snow up 10 feet at the end of the driveway (below). I’m wondering if it will melt by June.

 

And the poor turkeys! As I was unloading the car, I heard a loud flapping of wings behind me and assumed it was a hawk. But when I turned around, it was a turkey flying out of the tree. I know they take shelter in trees at night, but this was late morning. And then it occurred to me that these birds might be too heavy to walk on this snow. And where would they find food? Could they peck their way through 4 feet of snow?

When I first arrived, I made my way to the cabin stumbling through snow that came up to my knees. I could hardly open the front door through the mass of snow. And there was no way I could shovel my way through the back porch (bottom), with snow that hit the bottom of the window and the top of the porch railing, to the well pump to get water to wash hands and dishes.

Even in my snowshoes, I sank a few feet down. When I went to deliver some food to my neighbor and get jugs of water from his buried car (right), I struggled to get to the back of his car, push snow off it with my ski pole, and then open the heavy back door. Because I couldn’t carry the jugs and use my poles to get back to the driveway, I threw one jug halfway down, which disappeared in the snow. Maybe by May, we’ll find it.

We have so few physical challenges in life, it’s almost a relief to be tossed one, to have life deliver some interruptions in our normal, schedule. When I couldn’t get water from the well pump, I boiled snow on the stove. When my back hurt too much to shovel a path, I tromped the snow down with my snowshoes.

There’s another interruption—a change in the landscape that’s welcoming. In the backyard, the picnic table and porch were hidden under the deep snow (left). On my walk around Meeker Park, huge piles of snow masked the landscape, burying familiar markers: cars and cabin roofs, Cabin Creek, the hillside of boulders, the field that last week was bare. I couldn’t even find the two Highland cattle.

It’s a different world, one that appears so rarely that it’s a treat, a break from the familiar. There’s a hush and momentary stop to all the rushing; not much is moving except the creek, muffled under the snow. Just for a day or two, the world feels softer, quieter and safer, as if the snow had paused the world, tamping down any aggressiveness. I breathe it all in.

The Amazing Pack Rat

A few weeks ago, I went into the garage/shed at the cabin and was startled to see a huge mass of pink insulation on top of an old chair that a previous owner had hung from the wall. It could have been a modern sculpture hanging from a museum wall. But I knew exactly what it was. My pack rat, which has delighted me for years with its creative collections of items spread around the garage, had built a nest from the insulation in the empty space under the cabin.

Since I hired a handyman several years ago to stop the cold air from creeping up from the ground in winter, I’ve been finding the pink insulation all over the yard and in the mouths of enterprising ground squirrels, carrying it to their underground nests (bottom).  I imagine this winter all the squirrels and chipmunks staying cozy and warm wrapped in the pink insulation.

I use this old garage, built for smaller cars of the 1940s, as a place to store paints, picnic benches and chairs, and logs for the wood-burning stove. The pack rat (or rats over the years) has found it an ideal place to take shelter from the cold and from predators, as well as raise its young.

This is the same pack rat, I assume, that a few years ago hung aspen branches, still with green leaves, on the hooks above the work bench (left). I also found the branches in the upstairs attic spread out on the floor in a perfect line. Because pack rats eat leaves, it probably brought these into the shed before winter winds destroyed them. But why did the animal spread them out so nicely instead of just throwing them in a heap?

Almost every time I open the garage door, I find some new handiwork from the pack rat, also known as a wood rat, which are about 5 inches long, bigger than most mice, including the deer mouse that inhabits the inside of the cabin.  Most often, I find that empty metal cans, paint brushes and stirrers have been moved from the shelf and assembled into a pile elsewhere in the garage.  

Before the rat built the pink nest on the wall, I found a smaller one on the floor in the garage corner, so perfectly rounded that it looked machine made. Leading up to it were small pieces of wood that I use for kindling. I took this to be a barricade, a preventive measure to keep me away from its nest.  This must haves been the same reason it laid down a row of sticks and pine cones on a board that’s on the floor (above). They were almost perfectly spaced and lined up vertically. I’m forced to imagine this animal going around the garage and selecting pieces just the right size and then carefully lining them up on the board, perhaps sitting back to see if the sculpture works, then arranging and rearranging. But for what purpose?

When I went online to find why these animals want to create such structures, the first pages that came up were from pest-control businesses, which gave tips on how to get rid of them. Inside your house they can be destructive. A neighbor told me about coming back from vacation and finding her cabin rearranged by a pack rat, at which point she called the animal-control business.  If the pack rat got into my cabin, I would feel the same way, but so far the wood rat has stayed inside the garage.

At the cabin I’ve had a lot of amazing wildlife encounters: moose strolling down the road, hummingbirds chasing each other, a river otter sledding down a snowy embankment, goshawks flying through the trees. But I think nothing amazes me more than this very plain, almost ugly animal that creates something imaginative out of simple items in the garage. No moose, no otter, no bird could do anything like that. Not many humans are that creative. And it lives in my shed, so I can be delighted by its achievements every time I open the garage door.

How Nature Endures

The persistence of nature—to keep going no matter what—has always amazed and inspired me. Many times I’ve spotted a young ponderosa pine emerge from a group of boulders, finding the only dirt among them to sink its roots and grow toward the sun as well as gather what little water it can find in inhospitable of conditions. I’ve seen aspen trees hanging precariously over streams where it looks like one push could send them into the water. Yet they hang on.

On rocky hillsides, the yellow and white daisy spreads out among the gravelly soil, adding brilliant color to what seems a barren site. In spring, pasqueflowers (below) are knocked out by snowstorms but emerge bedraggled, coated with their own anti-freeze that allows them to recover and flower once the sun melts the ice off their petals. On the tundra above 10,000 feet, alpine wildflowers survive cold, snow and harsh winds, improbably spreading dazzling color across the windswept and rocky terrain, as if showing the world that beauty can surface anywhere.

In the canyons bighorn sheep find ways to surmount cliffs, finding small cracks in the rock to heave themselves up and down vertical cliffs. Near the cabin I once saw a moose limping and most likely in pain, but instead of laying down and giving up, it kept walking, intent on finding willow bushes for sustenance.

On a mountain stream, I’ve seen trout leap up a waterfall, throwing themselves over and over with all their strength in this uphill struggle to migrate. On their own migration journeys, hoofed animals like deer and elk will find a way around barbed wire fences. Pronghorn will scoot under them, lowering themselves as much as possible to avoid getting snagged on the barbs or caught in the wire. Nothing seems to deter them.

At the cabin, every spring the hummingbirds arrive during snowstorms and hunker down as best they can, waiting for the sun to come back out and warm them. This is what life hands them and so they endure the cold and wind, even while they dive bomb each other and keep up their incessant squabbling. Other birds, like songbirds, work to build nests in spring, lay their eggs and wait for them to hatch. But if a strong wind or hungry bear knocks down the nest, the parents, without hesitation or lamentation, will build a second nest if the conditions are right.

Even our pets persevere when in pain or near death. A friend didn’t realize how sick her dog was until she took him for a walk and he collapsed on the trail. We were able to coax him back to the car, but a visit to the vet showed that he had serious health issues and had been in pain. Yet he didn’t complain, kept pushing and following his human companion until he couldn’t anymore.

I once had a cat whose body was falling apart and could barely walk, but when she wanted to be on the bed with me, she would claw up the blanket. If only we humans were so persevering and uncomplaining.   

On Lily Lake, on a late winter day, when only a patch of water is open, Canada geese huddle around its edges. Where does this push to survive and thrive come from? Do humans have it, or has it been knocked out of us because life has become too easy: food from the supermarket, medical interventions for most any physical problem and buildings that provide shelter from cold, wind and rain. I don’t know the answers. But when I see a small pine tree emerging from between  boulders, my heart breaks a little: I know it likely won’t survive but the fact that it keeps trying gives me hope and makes me want to try harder.