Winter Catch-Up

Spring is my favorite season, but it is also the busiest and most stressful time of the school year, so I am going to catch up with a blogpost! Dan and I are both terrible at remembering memories and details of our adventures, so an attempt at retelling our stories will certainly fill me with gratitude and inspiration.

Our 2018-2019 Winter was a cold one. We spent most of vacation at the cabin in Green Canyon, where the highs of the day were in the single digits. Cabin life can be rough! Constant freezing temps can easily drain our energy, even when doing normal tasks. We usually visit when the in-laws are there, but this time around we had the cabin to ourselves for a few days and couldn’t figure out how to get the stove fire warm enough to heat up the house. We had to keep the solar panels brushed free of snow, the panel batteries warm with a propane-fueled ceramic heater, and monitor the wattage and our use of electricity. If the wattage was low, we used the generator and monitored our gas supply. A trip to town to get gas would have been an ordeal in itself. Fortunately, Dan’s parents joined us a few days later and warmed up the house in a few minutes!

Living in the cabin makes me think fondly of all of the conveniences we have in our day-to-day lives. A lot of it is meant to save us time, but I wonder if our smart phones/technology are beginning to do too much for us. Is it genuinely freeing up time for us to live, or to work more? Are people going to miss doing things the ‘long’ way?

We were able to make it to Relay Ridge again after a few failed attempts from prior trips. [see earlier posts] We had visited the ridge when we first started dating, and it was my first time riding a snow machine. As frigid as it was this time, the views were rewarding – I love being up and above the clouds. The snow was powdery-soft, waist-deep, and the machines in that snow made it feel like I was floating.

This was also the trip when we left Bella and gave her to my in-laws. We thought Bella would benefit from all that space to run, and Dan’s mother is available to walk her everyday. Our house is so quiet now because it is just us and Gogo, who doesn’t really bark, run out the door when it’s open, or eat food off of the counter. We miss Bella, but will still get to see her every so often. In fact, she is coming to visit this weekend!