Daily Archives: December 3, 2014

Colorado, Holidays, Mountains, The Move

What We’re Getting For Christmas

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Samain                                                                                Moving Moon

It’s quiet. Thankfully. Some guys are running cable along the utility easement on our property and the dogs don’t like that. At all. Lots of warning, warning, warning barks. Lots.

Kate got yet another load of boxes. How many she’s gotten over the course of the last few months I don’t know. A large number. Gives me hope for the AA chapters up here. She also got a barrier for the front seats to prevent the dogs from climbing up for a better view. There’s definitely something better about sitting where the humans are sitting.

It’s like Christmas is coming only in the form of an A1 moving van. If the driver’s a rotund guy in red with ermine trim, I’ll know holiseason has come on full strength.

We’re getting a new life for the holidays. Just what we wanted!

Colorado, Dogs, The Move

Notice to Dogs: New Challenge

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Samain                                                                          Moving Moon

1203140935Our last visit with Mary and Margaret, the Realtor team, before we move. Going through final matters, things we’ve set in motion after we leave, how we’ll communicate once we move. Margaret put a lock box on the front door, a visible sign, a ritual moment when the widdershins movements we have made around the property come to life. This house is now in transition, too, officially.

(Looking north from the far side of the garage, toward the back and the shed)

Got a text of seven pictures today, too, the fence. The fence, our first imprint on the new property, got finished this morning. When Tom and I make it to Black Mountain Drive, the dogs can bound out of the truck into their new home.

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A first task in the new house will be to run the fence line with the little yellow wire of the invisible fence. This will double up the protective capacity of the fence, discouraging leaping over and, I hope, digging under. As to the digging,  I’m prepared to nail 2×4’s all around the perimeter, wooden fence post to wooden fence post, at the base of the fence line.

(Kate’s space is through the door to the left, the entrance to the first garage bay to the right.)

Colorado, Mountains, The Move, The West

Higher, Dryer, Thinner

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Samain                                                                               Moving Moon

The new header photograph is the King Sooper parking lot in Aspen Park, about four miles away from our house on Black Mountain Drive. This King Sooper has a Lund’s type supermarket feel to it though it’s much larger than any of the Lund’s stores I’ve shopped.

We’re moving from an Oak Savannah eco-system, one growing on the Great Anoka Sandplain, the remnant of a glacial river Warren, which cut the bed for the Mississippi, to a montane eco-system, growing on pulverized rock and dominated by lodgepole pine, moss and small alpine plants.

Here the links run east to the Big Woods, north to the Boreal Forest and west to the Great Plains. In the Rockies the eco-systems link north and south along this mountain range, a tall, stone spine which extends far into Canada.

Our lot in Andover is about 900 feet above sea level and the highest point in our immediate area. Black Mountain Drive is at 8,800 feet on Shadow Mountain, approximately 9,200 feet. So the air will be considerably thinner and the nights cooler year round.

The West is arid, being west of the line which separates the humid east, 20+ inches of rain a year, from the arid West, less than 20 inches of rain per year. That means water will be a dominant environmental and political issue in Colorado.

We’ll be in a higher, dryer and far less biologically diverse eco-system. A distinct change.