How many winters? - #83

A different kind of body count.

Quick reminder that after next week’s edition, Shangrilogs is going on vacation April 16-30, returning May 7. I hope you can take an off-season for yourself to get a little messy.

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It’s Closing Day on our local mountain today. I was on the lift on Friday with another local, and as locals do, we shared where we lived in the region. He laughed when I mentioned my town. “They got electricity up in them parts?” he joked in faux cowboy. “Barely,” I played along. It was locals on every chair that day, every one of them playing the do-you-know-so-and-so game. This time, I mostly did. I knew the names, I knew the houses, I knew the people. 

More snow looms on the forecast, but Closing Day marks the end of winter, at least as a season of commerce. Tomorrow, the businesses start closing down for spring, many remaining closed until Memorial Day weekend when we welcome in the summer season of trail sports and Jeeps.  

Two winters in, and I can say moving to a log cabin at 10,000 feet sold to us by a man who got busted doing cocaine with an undercover DEA agent in a town full of Denali guides where there’s enough snow that there are multiple ways to die of suffocation from it was a genuinely great idea. 

Pleased as punch.

Given that it’s April 1, we are three months shy of our two-year anniversary of moving here, but in these parts, time is counted in winters. Which was your first, how many have you been here, and were you here for the big one. If your first winter is an audition, your second is on the line. You’re still the one taking orders, trying to figure out how to make it through your shift without any major failures. But you’ve proven you won’t burn the place down, at least not by accident.

Going into our first winter, we knew the order of the day was to just listen to the house, the terrain, and the patterns around us. We weren’t there to boss anyone around, but to let them show us how things work. The previous owner had cardboard over half the windows along with space heaters in each room. The interior of the front door was covered with a blanket, blocked by five feet of snow on the exterior. With all of those elements and others removed, the house told us how she runs while the winds told us who was really in charge. 

One of the covered windows when we first saw the cabin.

Inside, there wasn’t a room it didn’t snow in. Snow came in through the windows, the doors, the logs. Sometimes you would just look up and it would be snowing from some unknown crevice high above. Second, several doors became inoperable or needed near constant shoveling in the winter. 

Here’s a hastily crafted floor plan of the main floor. The cabin is built into the hillside with most of the lower level buried, excluding the south facing wall where the entrance to the woodshop is. 

To take a closer look, click here.

In the winter, we are constantly shoveling out the patio doors from our bedroom as well as the garage door to the woodshop where we typically enter. We don’t bother with the front door. But the one door that stays clear is the exit from the porch. The way the wind works with the drifts, it sweeps this door and its stairs completely clean. When we moved in, we enclosed this covered patio to turn it into a screened porch (much to the surprise of our neighbors), but that turned out to be a blessing. Not only is it a safe haven for the cats, but the half-walls protect the interior from most snow, making it like an outdoor mudroom. The only real problem is that the stairs are SW facing, stone, and under a dripway from the roof – which means they are constantly covered in ice. There’s no railing. But for us, this is decidedly a “third winter” problem when we won’t be able to just crawl or clamber through obstacles because there will presumably be a baby. Then again, it will be our baby, so who knows. 

After a long first winter of listening to the house, we were able to take some initiative in our second. Log cabins are typically insulated in two ways: the inherent r-value of the logs, which is determined mainly by their thickness, and by the log mortar that is caulked along the seams of those logs, a process called chinking. In the 30 years the previous owner had lived here, he’d never pursued that second option of sealant. Logs twist and warp over the years, and these ones sure did, letting in a lot of the elements. So before the second winter arrived, we chinked most of the house.

Just in time.

We also changed our wood type. Instead of all aspen, we went with harder woods like oak and pinyon this year, which burn longer. For our third winter, we know to order a mix of both. But the harder wood did make for warmer fires, and that paid off. The coldest it got in the house this year was an uncomfortable 45°F when the power was taken out by an avalanche and the winds ripped up the valley for days, straight through the house despite the log mortar. The doors and windows were installed in the 90s, and the logs have since warped around them. We went into winter thinking doors and windows were our top priority for the next winter, but now that we’re nearing the other side intact and unfrozen, we’re wondering if they’re as big of a priority as we think. That’s what a little bit of sunshine will do to you.

Even with snowbanks higher than our cars, the angle of this April sun has us forgetting the length of winter. When the wind lets off, you can go outside in a t-shirt. If you close your eyes, you might even think it was green. That’s how powerful the sun is at this elevation. It makes you think that the snow blowing through your front door is kind of charming instead of point blank alarming. We still have our plans for next winter though: we really should replace all west-facing doors. We need to insulate and heat the unfinished room in the basement. We do need to figure out a grating system to go over the ice stairs. But our biggest mistake last winter wasn’t living with the doors or letting it snow inside. No, our biggest mistake was being here in April. 

March 30, when the snowbank is taller than your car.

Every March when you’re riding the lift, waiting in the grocery line, and running into each other getting coffee, the big question isn’t how was your winter, but are you leaving because in April, everyone leaves. The businesses close to give the majority of workers a break from the service industries. Other businesses close simply because business would be bad. The school district spring break is two full weeks smack dab in the middle of April. If you’re here, you’re one of the few. Leaving in April is how you leave thinking winter is a gift and not an endless burden punctuated by an entire month of cold mud. That’s a difficult way to end five months of chopping, stacking, shoveling, digging, bundling, burning, and freezing. Your gift for getting through is getting out. 

Moving to a cabin in the mountains is a dream. But only if you dream of labor. When I think back on this winter, how far the house has come and how far it has to go, the best parts are all about work. Sure, there are cozy nights by the fire where the snow falls straight down, but most days here are like living in a snowglobe being held by a rampaging toddler. You’re really just holding on hoping you’ll eventually get swooped up by a parent and placed on a nice windowsill where the glitter can settle and you can get some sun. And in the stillness, do you know what you do?

You dream of more labor. You dream of the summer labor of planting and weeding, building a greenhouse, finishing the patio. You’re already taking measurements of the doors, picking out stains for the logs, imagining how to re-engineer the deck falling off the front of the house.You dream of the fall labor of knocking through walls, insulating ceilings, and ordering wood. You’re already onto designing rooms including entire DIY projects. You’re ordering paint. You’re mapping out the order of hikes you can do based on projected melt dates of corresponding elevations. You’re out of your mind.

Doing a little March shoveling.

 But that’s what this dream is like. That’s why you move to a place where you manage your own trash, where you have to dig out your driveway every time it snows, where the question isn’t how many years but how many winters. How many times have you proved yourself worthy of the job? We got the audition, we worked the line, and next winter, dare I say I think we’ll be part of the team because if it sounds like work, it also sounds like fun.