The summer was one of the driest in New Mexico history, and it was pretty scary.  We spent many days enveloped in smoke from fires in Los Alamos and Arizona, and the national forest that borders our property was closed for a good part of the season.  The monsoon rains finally came and gave some relief.

   

We spent lots of time working on the house.  I concentrated on mudding the straw walls, and we figure I put about 3 1/2 tons of material on the walls – a mixture of sand, dirt, straw, and water.  We celebrated when Jeff put the last bit of straw in the walls, as it felt like a big milestone to have that done.  Jeff constructed a temporary kitchen area that is much more user-friendly than the old arrangement – I’ve even started using the indoor oven!  He also built our garden space by digging out a 20×30 area and burying straw bales in layers of manure, rich composted soil, and straw mulch.  He then planted a cover crop that flourished during the rains, and we just put up a frame that we got from a neighbor that will serve as a greenhouse.

   

   

   

We have been doing other stuff besides working on the house.  Jeff became the president of the domestic water association, which oversees the community well where many folks on the mountain get their water.  Shortly thereafter, the pump operator retired so Jeff has been acting as operator as well.  I started a new band with some friends on the mountain called The Muddy Mountain Orchestra.  We’ve had a couple of gigs and its been lots of fun.  We fired up the horno a few times for pizza parties, and the highlight was the Pizza Potluck Pickin Party in September, when we invited the whole mountain and some friends from town and had a great night of music and food.

  

   

   

For the past two weeks I have been up at the Lama Foundation for the Permaculture Design Certification Course with Scott Pittman of the Permaculture Institute, based in Santa Fe, NM.  There were 20 of us taking this particular course, and Scott’s depth and breadth of knowledge and experience was quite impressive.  I think I can say we all had an enjoyable week and shared a tremendous amount of information, though for me it was also a lot of time sitting on my arse in a classroom setting ..

   

On Saturday at the mid-point of the retreat, we had the unexpected opportunity to have the whole group over to our place for a tour of the property and some of the permaculture related elements we are doing here.  There is quite a crossover between off-grid necessity and permaculture design elements – composting, natural buildings, water management, gardening, community.  Later that day we visited Brad&Janet’s (of KTAO Solar Radio fame) place in Taos, then finished with some top-bar bee hives.

   

The group consisted of folks from NY, LA, Florida, Seattle, and of course Taos and Lama.  At the end of the week we finished with the talent show, a mandatory part of earning the certificate of completion.  This “final exam” was a nice relief of playfulness after a long two-weeks of intensive study – we covered a lot of material that may be more appropriate as a couple of semesters at University.

   

    Naka-Ima

While I was away playing camp-school, Kate was at home tending all the dogs and cats and working on mudding the inside of our house.  She got a long way and it won’t be long now before the inside is “done” for this season.  Then we’ll move onto getting the garden area built, add the deck off the loft, and maybe start plastering the exterior and other project possibilities.

   

In spite of a couple of May snowstorms, its feeling very much like spring here on the mountain.  The goats we milk 1x/week have had three sets of twins so far, and there is a baby yak that was rejected by the herd who lives next to the goats and loves to suck on human fingers in his pursuit of a meal.

   

Wildflowers are starting to bloom, hummingbirds are whizzing through the air,  and the spring winds have been reliably relentless.  I’ve been volunteering a few hours per week on the mountain farm, planting in the greenhouse and in the ground.  Jeff constructed a small hoop house here on our land and he’s been planting pots of full of veggies and flowers.

I had a successful and fun tour of NM and Colorado with my friend Matt Meighan last month.  I met lots of kind folks and saw some beautiful landscapes.  We’ve had a couple of pickin’ party potlucks at our place, and music has been a central theme lately.  Jeff built a washtub bass, and he also acquired an upright bass and a mountain dulcimer, and finally got the old banjo all put back together.  We’ve been working out a few songs and he’s pretty much a natural on bass.  Which is a good thing because bass players are a little hard to come by around here.

   
   

The biggest news is that we’ve started living in the house.  Its still under construction, and probably will be for a couple more seasons, but we have a nice temporary kitchen set-up and its so nice to have all this room.  Even though the house is only about 560 sq. ft. living space (400 sf footprint), it seems like a mansion compared to the trailer.  Jeff is working on finishing the framing and straw downstairs, and then I’ll have plenty to do for the next weeks and months ahead getting it all mudded.

In a couple of weeks, Jeff will be participating in a permaculture workshop at the Lama Foundation, which is a really great opportunity.  We’ve been enjoying getting to know the people who live there and have been volunteer cooks about 1x/month for them. We were recently featured in a blog on off-grid living for Mother Earth News magazine, and they also used a photo of Jeff taking a bath in the outdoor tub for a column about DIY creative reuse of cast iron tubs.

Cassien’s Finch and a Black headed Grosbeak ..

]]> http://riverbird.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/springtime-in-the-rockies/feed/ 0 riverbird http://riverbird.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/new-kid-rusty-choir-and-forestry-oh-my/ http://riverbird.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/new-kid-rusty-choir-and-forestry-oh-my/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:45:30 +0000 riverbird http://riverbird.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/new-kid-rusty-choir-and-forestry-oh-my/ ]]>

Introducing our newest family member, Rusty the orange tabby, yeah!  He has fit in here remarkably well and smoothly.  He spent the first few days carefully slinking around through the dogpile and got to meet Palo, they became quick friends.  One of the reasons we were wanting another cat was to give Palo a buddy, but also to have an extra mouser around the property  ..  However, I think the new kid may be dyslexic, rather than catching the mouse in the house, he caught a mouse outside then brought in in alive and let it go!  Good thing Kate wasn’t here at the moment.  When he’s not out mousing at night, he stay very close, insisting on sharing our pillows.

   

   

       

Kate has joined the Taos community choir.  They are singing “Elijah” and she has been recruited in as the soprano understudy for solo parts, and will be doing a series of performances in May.  Kate’s friend Matt Meighan from Portland will be visiting the area soon and the two of them are heading off on a two-week tour between Albuquerque and Boulder, CO.  Check Kate’s website for tour dates.

I ended up not having to ‘take on’ the Forest Service after all, but more so maybe joined them.  The short story is that there is a proposed thinning project immediately adjacent to our northern property line for the purpose of creating a fuel break for potential forest fire.  The actual work would be carried out by Rocky Mountain Youth Corps.  So in the end, I have become the community liaison between Lama and RMYC in an effort to make this a collaborative project.  As a result, I have also begun a pretty serious study of silviculture, forest ecology, and fire risk management.  I also enjoy a nice hot tub on cool early spring days ..

It feels very much now like spring has sprung.  Though even this morning we has an inch of snow ;-|  The past week has been a little breezy, but quite warm occasionally pushing 70!  With spring in the air, we are getting started again working on the building.  Kate has been mud plastering the walls in the loft, while I have been working on building a new dog yard area and various landscape projects.  We are looking forward to a busy and productive work season and will be moving into the loft “soonish”.

We’ve been taking a break from the building and other projects since our last writing – you might say we’re on an extended winter break.  Being on the mountain makes it easy to be in sync with the natural rhythm of the seasons, and winter has been quiet except for a few species of birds and the occasional coyote howl.  Everyone here is doing fine staying nice and toasty in our “cozy” ol’ Argosy.

We’ve gotten a couple more snow storms, including one that brought some of the coldest temperatures in New Mexico history.  This storm really drove home the advantages to off-grid living.  Due to rolling blackouts in Texas, the natural gas pipeline from there to New Mexico lost pressure and the gas company turned off service to many areas of the state, including Taos. People who rely on this for-profit, privately owned  “public utility” to heat their homes and cook their food and heat their water were left literally out in the cold for an entire week, while temperatures dropped to -25 degrees.  We were not directly affected, other than our favorite restaurants being closed, but were saddened as we listened to the radio for several days and heard person after person calling in feeling desperate as the (Minnesota owned) New Mexico Gas Company displayed a high level of incompetence and arrogance in dealing with the situation – a bad combination.  Homes were frozen to the point of broken pipes, businesses and schools were closed, and stores ran out of electric heaters.

On a happier note, the storms have also brought lots of fun with them.  I went snowshoeing with the dogs on New Years Day, which was a great way to kick off 2011.  This past weekend, we had a sledding party on our road.  Its about 1/2 mile from top to bottom, and we got a disc saucer and a tobaggon.  Funny enough, the best ride was Jeff’s river kayak – worked great on the frozen river that is our road.  He spent the day taking kids from the mountain up and down the road and they had a great time.

Click here to watch Jeff’s ‘luge style’ sled-cam ..

Now the temperatures are starting to get warmer and the snow has largely melted from our sled run, slowly morphing to the seasonal mud.  But of course, winter isn’t over yet…

Stay tuned for upcoming stories:

• a new cat
• Kate joins the Taos Community Choir
• Jeff takes on the Forest Service

‘you tawkin’ to me?’

We’ve been making steady progress on the house, and ironically the more we get done the smaller the trailer seems and the more eager we are to get moved over.  Our  friend  Todd came over and helped Jeff set the wood stove so we’ve been having fires in there regularly, both for warmth as we work and to help the mud dry out.  I finished staining the floor boards for the loft and Jeff got them all put in. Right about then, our neighbor Adrian, who is a rug dealer, brought us a Persian rug as a housewarming gift.  We’re saving it until the mud is all on the walls, as it is pretty dirty work.

Ravi,  another friend on the mountain who has worked on a lot of straw bale buildings, came over and showed us how to get started mudding the bales, and the upstairs has a first coat done.  We’re planning to get a second coat on the walls up there and then we’ll move in upstairs.

We’ve also had our eyes open for things we need, trying to  to find used things that are still in good condition.  In the last couple of weeks we’ve found an oven on Craigslist, a 100 pound propane tank on Trash and Treasures (a call-in radio show on a local station where people can advertise things they are trying to unload), and a unique galvanized metal ceiling fan from Habitat for Humanity
.

We’re continuing to plug into the community  as much as we can.  Possibly against my better judgement, I’ve become vice-president of the school board for the Roots and Wings, the charter middle school on the mountain.   I also volunteered to feed the goats at the ranch once a week. Jeff is getting involved with a sustainability council that is getting started on the mountain, incorporating the school, the ranch, and all the various non-profits, animal scenes, and vegetable growings, and other community based activities.  He’s been feeding the yaks for a few days while Daniel, the main ranch hand, is out of town.  He also helped our friend Surya change the alternator in her car.

The weather is still pretty mild for this time of year, but we have gotten a couple of snow storms.  The dogs love it – they bounce around like a bunch of puppies.  We’ve been having our share of fun too.  I played a show in Taos on Solstice and a bunch of folks from the mountain came [watch on youtube].  The next day we went to a gingerbread-house building party, Lama style.  This gingerbread house was an adobe and it included an outhouse, a goat pen, even goats and chickens and an horno. .  We shared Solstice/ Christmas dinner with about 10 other folks, and the food and company was excellent.

All this and it isn’t even the New Year yet!

Before we moved to the mountain, I kept saying I wanted to be more physically active and engaged in my life.  Not the going to the gym for $500/year kind of physical activity, but the shoveling dirt/carrying stuff/getting dirty kind of physical activity.  And I got my wish.  I’ve worked physically harder since moving here than I have in the previous 30-some-odd years put together.

Gathering firewood is one such activity.  I knew we’d be doing this, but I didn’t know how much work it would be.  As Jeff told me, firewood warms you up three times…when you get it, when you cut it up, and when you burn it.  On a recent wood-gathering expedition, we hauled two dead ponderosas out in pieces to the truck, and I can tell you that is harder than it sounds.

In spite of the occasional sore muscles, I love it.  Sleep is so much sweeter, food tastes so much better, and we aren’t paying some faceless utility company to keep us warm in the winter.

Speaking of keeping warm, we’re managing to do pretty well even though the temperatures at night drop well below freezing.  I’m learning how to dress in layers, and the woodstove in the trailer does a pretty good job.  We’re also getting closer by the day to moving into the house.  Jeff got the last of the windows in, and we’re working on the floorboards upstairs.  Just a little more straw and a little mud…

On another note, I’ve been playing monthly at a sweet little place in Taos called the Adobe Bar.  Its inside an historic hotel by the plaza, the money is good, and the gig isn’t too much past our bedtimes.

We had our first Thanksgiving on the mountain and ended up going to not one but two feasts, including one at the Lama Foundation, which is the last remaining 60’s commune in the area.   We are reminded how much we have to be grateful for this year, moving to this beautiful mountain full of kind, generous, like-minded people.