The Grass/Land - How We Found Our Place

 

Above is an aerial photo of the farm that was taken before we bought it.  The realtor gave it to us.

 

 



How We Found Our Place

Someone recently asked how we came to be living in this remote place.  It is a good story and I have decided to tell it here.

About ten years ago, we were longing for a place to get out of the city and away from civilization for weekends and holidays.  We did a lot of hiking and camping and canoeing on public lands, but it had long been a dream to have a place of our own.  We began taking weekends to look for our refuge.  We looked in the mountains and we looked on the prairie.  The prairie captivated us, because it reminded us of the  mid-west in some ways, and because it was realtively unpeopled, and the traffic coming and going on weekends was not so terrible.   We saw an ad in the Denver newspaper for open plots of land, some large, some small, and some with primitive cabins on a large ranch that was being subdivided in Huerfano County in southeastern Colorado.  We went to look.  It was the weekend of our wedding anniversary and the solstice.  We fell in love with a parcel and asked if we could camp out on it before making a final decision.  The next morning we closed the deal.  The story of this place is being told at http://www.apishipawash.blogspot.com .  I mention it here because it was a catalist for our move to the farm as well.

Because it became our aim to build a home and eventually retire on our new land, and because all that open range just begged to be explored on horseback, we bought a couple of horses, boarded them, and began to ride.  For me it was a re-learning process.  For my husband it was a new endeavor.  This was better started in our fifties than in our sixties, we reckoned.  As the years passed, boarding the horses became more and more expensive and as I relearned/remembered what I had known about horse care, the standard of care offered at the places we could afford seemed less and less adequate.  So one day my husband said, "These boarding fees are like a second mortgage.  What would you say to looking for a horse property, bringing them home, and paying ourselves the mortgage payment?"   I was thrilled with the idea and ready to retire from my full-time teaching job anyway.  So we determined to look for a place, thinking it would take months, perhaps years, to find the right one. 

We contacted a realtor in Elbert County, because that was far enough from Denver that we might be able to afford property there.  He gave us a stack of listings to drive around and look at, with the idea that we would ask for a showing of anything we liked.   It was a rainy October Saturday morning when we started out on our search.  We drove for miles, and hours on muddy paved roads and even muddier dirt ones.  We saw many, many pieces of bare land with double wides or other temporary housing, loafing sheds and round pens.  There were a couple that had real barns, and outdoor arenas, but all seemed minimal and a little sad.  It was around three oclock in the afternoon.  We had not had any lunch.  My husband was getting that grey-around-the-gills look that he gets when his blood sugar is low.  It was raining hard now. We had been on this one dirt road for quite a while, Elbert County 17/21, and we came to a crossroads.  It was foggy.  We could not see any mountains and we were not sure which direction we were going.   He said, "I can't do this anymore.  It's too depressing."  I started to turn the car around in the intersection.  He looked up the hill to the west and said, "Now if we could find a place that looked like that, I be all over it in a heart beat!"  I looked in the direction of his gaze.  There, on top of the hill, was a little white house and a big red barn. 

It looked like a Minnesota farmstead, like the ones his grandparents and great aunts and uncles had lived on and worked, around Walnut Grove.  There was a grove, and a couple of other buildings, and that signature red barn.  "It looks empty." I said, "Let's drive up there and see."  It was empty, and down in the tall grass there was a little hand painted For Sale sign.  We hopped over the fence and looked around.  We peeked in the windows of the house and looked in the barn and sheds.  It was old and run down and had definitely seen better days, but it had real possibilities.  This was before we had cell phones, so we hopped back in the car, took down the phone number on the sign, and headed back to Denver, stopping only for gas and  hot dogs at the Franktown service station.  

When we got home, my husband called the number from the sign.  It was a realtor in the town of Elbert.  She said the place was sold, it was under contract and the closing was the following Thursday.  He asked that she keep our number in case anything went wrong at the closing. 

And something did go wrong at the closing.  They had to relist it for 48 hours.  During that time, we got a proper showing and made an offer that was a few dollars over the asking price.  The place was bank owned and priced as if it were bare land.  The bank that owned it was in Kansas and they figured from the photographs that whoever bought it would scrape the buildings and start over.  They hadn't met us!

 

 

When we went back for the showing it was a sunny day and we realized that it had this amazing three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Pike's Peak, and the Bijou.   The whole thing seemed like it was meant to be.

The Riding/Training - Elvis and Sleeping in the Barn

Elvis and Sleeping in the Barn

 

Elvis gets loose stools every time he stays in a stall for any length of time, or tailers anywhere, or stresses about anything.  It has been suggested that he might have ulcers.  I have treated him for sand and he gets pro-biotics every day, so I guess the next step is to treat for ulcers and see  if it helps.  I have a call in to the vet to get him a prescription. 

The Grass/Land - A Cool and Frosty Drink This Weekend

A Cool and Frosty Drink This Weekend

I was going to go out and do a sort of  photo essay of the storm this afternoon, but the wind is roiling around the buildings making eddies that spin the snow up like giant dust devils and I didn't dare  step off the back porch.  So the above photo is all you get today of the storm.  As you can see, the world drops away just past the lawn chairs by the fire pit and garden fence.   It is a little hard to tell how much moisture we have gotten, but it is more than we had, so it is welcome.  It is not enough.  Not yet.  But it is a start towards summer grass and hay.

I did steel myself to make the trudge down to the barn to brush the horses while my husband picked stalls.  They are in good spirits and doing well.  No one is stocked up and while they enjoyed being brushed vigorously in "quarters", to get their circulation up, no one seemed to need it desperately. 

Below is the scene we woke to on Monday morning.  It looks like we got a pretty good snow!  I will have to check the media to see what the official amount is.  Our road is plowed already, so now only the drift in the driveway is keeping us in.



The Buildings - The Sauna Gets a Deck

The Sauna Gets a Deck

Last weekend, while Elvis was busy throwing a shoe, my husband was busy building the deck on the outside of the sauna. This deck will eventually be a porch with a roof and a privacy screen and a shower.  But for now, it is a level place to cut the wood to make the benches.

Getting closer ...

The Riding/Training - Elvis Throws a Shoe and Gets a Lesson

Elvis Throws a Shoe and Gets a Lesson

Before I get into the story about Elvis, I just want to say what a JOY a good warm pair of socks is this time of year!  My daughter-in-law knitted these for me a couple of years ago and they changed my life.  Literally.  Along with a good pair of "Ice Riders".  They are made of some ridiculously expensive yarn that has silk and angora and I don't know what else in it.  They are dreamily soft and extremely warm.  Over a thin pair of socks and inside my Ice Riders - I become oblivious to the kind of cold that I used to dread and which drove me inside between chores.  I simply had to sing their praises before moving on.

Elvis threw a shoe sometime last weekend, and I agreed to meet the farrier at a friend's barn in Evergreen so he didn't have to come all the way out here for just one shoe.  My back has been pretty bad and I was not planning to ride until after I had some acupuncture done on Tuesday.  But with the opportunity to ride and have  lesson in an indoor arena, I decided to throw caution to the wind and try riding on Monday.  Elvis was pretty wound up about being in an indoor, and about snow falling off the roof, and about the P.A. system, and about the trailer ride, and my back was still pretty bad, so we had a walking lesson.  And it turned out really well.

As I said, Elvis had a lot on his mind and a lot of new things to think about, so I expected him to be pretty distracted and the lesson to be sort of a throw-away. But it wasn't.  For the first time ever, he actually started to accept some steady contact.  And for the first time ever, he seemed to begin to understand about how a frame is supposed to work.  It was wonderful and so unexpected.   It seemed like a little light bulb went on in his brain.  I hope we can turn it on again the next time we school.  We worked on being straight and some leg yields and haunches in.  He was super!

I am going to try him in Flicka's eggbutt snaffle next time.

The Animals - Bachelors Will Be Missed

The Bachelors Will Be Missed - Until They Turn Up for Dinner Again!

Winken and Joker did not show up for breakfast.  They did not come in for supper last night. So I am pretty sure they got snatched yesterday.  And I am a little afraid that I inadvertently caused their demise.  Although I will never know for sure. 

I went to Elizabeth yesterday for butter to make cookies for my grandchildren for Valentine's Day.  I was gone about an hour.  I was lazy and did not close the machine shed door when I left.  There was snow forecast for the evening and was going to put the car back in  there.  The machine shed is one of the shelters that the cats run for when there is danger.  They can squeeze under the walls in several places and most other animals cannot.  With the door open, that refuge could have turned into a trap. 

Yesterday morning, I smiled as I listened to the four of them jumping around and playing above me in the hay loft.  They often did this in the mornings in the winter.  It is a sunny, sheltered place to play after being cooped up all night in the tack room.   It was quiet up there this morning.  Both Sox and Nodkin wanted to be handled this morning.  Then Sox went off somewhere alone and Noddie sat and watched me muck stalls from an alcove in the barn wall.  He was very sober indeed.  I wish they could tell me what happened: what they saw. 

But they DID show up for dinner tonight!  'Nuff said!

The Grass/Land - Aerial Photograph of the Farm

Aerial Photograph of the Farm

Last fall, in October, a plane went over when we were not paying attention and took a photograph of the farm.  We had the opportunity to buy a print and a CD version of this photo and I am sharing it here.

I want to share it because it is telling in many ways, both predictable and unsuspected.  The work we have done on this land has been physically hard and demanding.  It has often seemed chaotic: one step forward two steps backward.  It has not seemed orderly or productive much of the time. We have had setbacks, and disappointments, and sometimes it is easier to remember those than it is to see how far we have come.  This photo shows what we have accomplished as well as points the way to what we still have to do. 

The photo was taken about three weeks before we closed the pastures for the winter and it had been so dry, the place looks perilously over-grazed.  I hope it is not.  And I hope we will still get the moisture we will need to bring the grasses back to life.  Time will tell.