Seasonal Effects

In the high country, Fall sneaks in with a coat similar to a tawny tiger, striping the leaves yellow and orange and red. Following its’ slightly subversive arrival, Fall achieves perfection by contrasting the comforting earth tones of sage green and tawny grasses here in the San Luis Valley (SLV) with dramatic color. The oak brush streams along in blazing crimson glory and the golden ribbons of aspens and fiery cottonwoods light up the landscape.

Add to this a brilliant blue Colorado sky and sunshine with pleasing warmth, yet a slight reminder chill that lingers and spreads into a crisp cold evening. Welcome to the change of seasons. It’s all downhill from here.

I’m still recovering from the effects of the chilly carnage of 2008, the first “real Colorado winter” – one that the SLV old timers hadn’t experienced for twenty years or more. Three feet of snow on the level for four months surrounding our home, the bare blinding blanca landscape a constant presence - an adversary - in our lives. Sub-zero temperatures were no longer a novelty, but a fact of life. Denial did not work. It just left me stranded without a shovel and the undercarriage of my Subaru firmly wedged in a snow bank at the beginning of my driveway.

Apathy did have some benefits. What did it matter that the plow was sideways in the ditch blocking the drive? It’s not like we had access in anyway. So what if the raging storm had winds up to 45 mph which blocked us in and made it impossible for the propane truck to drive to our tank so that we were in imminent danger of freezing pipes (and ourselves to death). Whatever.

When I made the move from Boulder to the “Banana Belt” of Salida in the Arkansas River Valley in 1998, I wasn’t overly concerned with seasonal hardship. Colorado was experiencing a lengthy drought period and snowfall was light and manageable for years. But then came the winter of 2007-08 and the brutally cold sub-zero temperatures and record snowfall accompanied my first winter out of scenic Salida and living in a higher, drier and colder valley. What a wake-up call.

Try moving to the wilds of America’s West and attempting to live and thrive in the sparsely populated San Luis Valley for a humility test. Colorado’s SLV is “not a place for the timid,” as Salida naturalist and author Susan Tweit writes in her book, “The San Luis Valley – Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes. “Sizzling hot in the summer, frigid cold in winter; the San Luis Valley is a remote expanse about the size of the state of Connecticut that lies forgotten between two major mountain ranges in south-central Colorado.”

Having been born and raised on Long Island, some of my New York edge still remains, even while road rage remains in the not so distant past. I have a general impatience with life’s burdens and general maintenance, and as the dreariness of winter wears on my nerves, my annoyance level and sense of “frustration and unfairness” usually culminates in me buying a car, getting a tattoo or piercing in February or March of each year. I am not a true winter person and it shows...

Try making it through one winter here in the freaking frigid high alpine plains and attempt to keep your sanity in negative 26 degrees while attempting to start at least one of your vehicles after hiking a third of a mile out your snow-drifted driveway in the crackling cold – day after day. Try post-holing through 3 foot drifts wearing a headlamp in the frigid darkness and pulling groceries and 50 pound sacks of alfalfa pellets and chicken scratch on an expedition sled that was last used on a climb up Denali. The initial excitement of donning snowshoes to make the trek to the mailbox got old pretty quickly. Welcome to the San Luis Valley in winter - where zero degrees actually sounds like a reasonable temperature -- and any temps over 15 degrees Fahrenheit feel like a heat wave.

Wake up each morning and stress over what charming challenges Mother Nature has in store for you that day. Daily life becomes a production. Commuting is a nightmare. Wind is to be feared and despised for the havoc it can wreak. Basically, when the wind blows, we pay – cold hard unbudgeted cash to cover the costs of plowing the driveway. (Which "blows".)

Even as this new life here on the farm/ranch continues to be challenging in the way of everyday survival and comfort, I still feel reassured that my partner and I are in it together. (Sometimes he more than I, depending on my physical discomfort level.) Creating the “Blue Moon Homestead” (named for our wedding date in July 2004 on the night of a rare second full moon in the month) from the dirt up was in no way possible without the energy, drive and commitment of my husband Jack.

We are living in a modest 1580 square foot papercrete palace on the prairie. Also known as “fibrous adobe” – a mixture of concrete and recycled newspaper – papercrete has excellent insulation properties with an insulation value relative to R30. Our rustic adobe-like home is complete with large windows showcasing the Sangres, two wood-burning stoves and an enclosed green house, and is warm and comfortable, if not quite finished. It was built with energy efficiency in mind, one level with in-floor radiant heat under stained and sealed concrete floors and solar powered hot water and electricity. We are tied into the grid, but are selling back kilowatts to Xcell Electric.

Our “papercrete palace” is far from “Done” but it’s fairly comfortable. With walls a foot thick, we hardly hear the high winds that sweep across the prairie and its passive solar design keeps the house warm even without turning on the in-floor radiant heat as the evening temperatures dip below freezing. The southern-facing greenhouse soaks in the solar rays and radiates heat through an open door and window into the house. It’s barely cooling down when we arrive home after the sun sets. By lighting fires in the woodstoves, we cut the costs of heating with propane and can almost make it through the coldest months with our 125 gallon tank.

One frigid morning the temperature hovered at -26 degrees below zero and none of our three vehicles would start. An engine heating block might have helped, but that didn’t materialize until after this latest frozen fiasco. (Even then we would have to have been able to drive the car up the driveway to an electrical outlet – hah!) We went for months without any access to our driveway and carport.

After having attempted to start the car and truck down at the end of the driveway, Jack trudged back through the frigid pre-dawn light in a weary way – knowing that even if the Subaru did start (which it didn’t - as I found out later,) it would take awhile to dig it out from the four foot drifts that had blown in the night before.

I was of the mindset to call it a “freeze day” and huddle in next to the wood stove for the day, but winter-loving Jack was insistent that he needed to be at work – dedicated Monarch Mountain employee that he is. It was time to call the Villa Groovy help network – and miraculously one of our neighbors had his truck garaged and his driveway plowed enough to be able to reach us. It is a beautiful thing to have friends and neighbors willing and able to help out – and for us to be able to return the favor at a future time.

Winter in the high country is always challenging, but more so when you have farm animals to take care of. There are drifts of snow to be shoveled, so the goats can reach their feeder and ice has to be broken in the water trough. Biting winds blow hard and scatter hay and keep the chickens huddled inside the doorway, away from their grain and water. Buckets with ice need to be chipped out and filled with fresh water to bring inside the barn, so the animals can drink before it freezes solid. There’s the added expense of heating the water trough and leaving the light and heat lamps on overnight in the barn. The precious few eggs need to be gathered before they freeze.

Lots of effort, very little pay off. Braving the minus zero temperatures to feed, water and muck out the barn, buying and transporting the feed, trekking up to where the alfalfa hay is stored and carrying few armloads back, using the pump to haul buckets of water – all of it takes time – and some days all we have to show for that extra work is an egg or two.

I’m committed to taking care of my animals, but with little daylight and below freezing temperatures, my enthusiasm for “living the farm dream” wanes. I empathize with the chickens which are tropical birds – “What are we doing out here in the frozen Yukon?” Laura Ingalls Wilder – I am not. I may have the little papercrete “palace” on the prairie, but some days I am less than enchanted.

Unless I’m out on the ski slopes and being buried in powder. Our Villa Groovy Neighbor Ski Day was epic – over 3 feet of freshies in five hours at Wolf Creek. Every visit to Monarch was pure powder pleasure - swooshing through a few feet of fluffy flakes on my snowboard with a smile. Memorable times snowshoeing with neighbors and the majestic snow-capped Sangres in our backyards. Dragging sleds filled with holiday feasts up the impassable driveways of next door neighbors and Winter Solstice parties that never end because a blizzard has set in and we can’t make it a quarter of a mile back home.

So it’s a trade-off. Creating all kinds of winter hardship memories with friends and neighbors have served to create a close community and give us lots to chat about during our social gatherings.

“It took over 2 hours to go one mile home in the beater Toyota pickup truck – no heat. The chains kept slipping off and we slid off into the ditch. Had to catch a plane to Honduras the next day. Took six hours to get to DIA. People die in that kind of weather…”

“Negative 13? Well, at least it’s a dry negative 13. No, seriously…” and voices will trail off.

The premonition of winter comes early here in the Valley. Nighttime temps have been known to plummet to 11 degrees in mid-October. It is what it is.

I’ll try to focus on the positive. It’s the season for fires in the wood stove, hearty soups, baking bread and playing in the snow. My dogs are thrilled with the accumulation of white stuff to roll around and burrow in. I’ll be looking forward to the impromptu socialization with shovels and jumping cables on the road and in driveways with neighbors and friends - our comrades in the cold.


>Pending Publication - Jan 2010