My mantra when we were building was, “It’s just a mountain cabin.” So, pretty much, it’s just a mountain cabin, but a beautiful welcoming home and I truly love it. The housing appraiser called it a “friendly little place” and my sister Phyllis says it reminds her of a dollhouse. It’s a tiny charmer, built …
A third of the recently burned forests in the American West will never regenerate, according to research led by Colorado State University foresters and published in the journal Ecology Letters. “In many places, forests are not coming back after fires,” says Camille Stevens-Rumann, assistant professor in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship at CSU. When forestry …
The view of southern Colorado’s East Spanish Peak from our cabin is mesmerizing, especially when the mountain dances with the clouds. Sometimes this is a prelude to rain, but often it is just the magic of nature. Watch it dance below.
Our meadow is the light green vein dissecting the fire in the center. Photo from the NASA Earth Observatory June 22, 2013.
Map from the The National Centers for Environmental Information
Colorado is a semi-arid climate, and droughts come and go with regularity. It is not unusual for the state to be in a severe drought in the summer and to return to normal in the fall and winter. Most of Colorado was in extreme drought in June 2013, the year of the East Peak Fire.
We hear a shuffling, then see a movement in front of us, a shape on the boulder less than five feet from us. A furry foot is reaching from the rock to the deck. A big furry foot. Attached to a bear. Seems he’s planning on coming onto the deck. “Shoo!” I shout. Seriously, this …
The forest in 2012 and after the East Peak Fire in 2013. The East Spanish Peak is in the background.
Our cabin is roughly the size of a two-car garage—20X24-feet—with a deck across most of the front. The giant hollyhock took us about a decade to grow, using seeds from my sister Phyllis’s yard in Pueblo. It seems happy in it nest next to the rock our neighbor Harold hauled out of the meadow for …
Our neighbor Dave called to warn us about the fire at about 6 p.m. June 19, 2013. It began at the Spanish Peaks Scout Ranch, about a mile from our little handmade cabin south of Walsenburg, in the foothills of the East Spanish Peak. We had evacuated by 6:20. The fire was ultimately named …
The Japanese have a concept called shinrin-yoku, roughly translated as forest bathing. It originated in 1982 when the country’s forest agency began to encourage wellbeing to combat the threat of suicide in Japan, which at that time was the highest in the world. The idea is to walk deliberately and slowly in the woods, observing, …