First Snow

Mike up at the logging site on the boundary of our property with the National Forest

We had our first snow of the season on the ground here at EM on Nov 3, which stuck around in patches for a couple of days but now is gone. We’ve had a particularly wet fall. Based on what we keep track of through our rain gauge, we received 2-inches of rain in October and already 1.37-inches this month in November.

Our early morning temps have been in the high 20’s and low 30’s, and our average day temps have been in the 40’s. Our time of the year for storing water outside is coming to a close. All 3 of our 55-gallon rain water collection barrels are full, which is what we use for washing hands, dishes, and for taking showers. We’ll need to empty those at some point soon, but we’ve got a little more time. But I did bring our potable water jugs inside the cabin a few days ago. I fill our potable jugs (which are around 6-gallons each) in Missoula once a week. We use that water we haul from town for the purposes of drinking & cooking. It’s likely those jugs will now remain inside our little cabin until March or April.

I’m thinking we might make another systems improvement next spring and set up a way to start filtering the rain water for our drinking & cooking needs. We were gifted a filter from our good friend Nikolay we can use for this purpose. We may, however, need to up our rain water collection and add more barrels. But that would be pretty easy for us to do given we only have our porch roof guttered for collecting. Our cabin itself is largely untapped for rain collection, though we do have a trash can catching drips off the back eave. We use that water for washing out our loo buckets for our compost toilet set up.

Folks often make suggestions to us about things we can do to improve our systems out here and/or question why we haven’t done ABC or XYZ. People mean super well and just want to be helpful, but often what they forget or don’t think enough about is this: it’s just the two of us out here. There is only so much time in the day and energy in any one given person. We can only do what we can do as we can do it. We are consistently building and learning and figuring things out here in the woods living as we do, off-grid and without running water, and we can only do so much at any one time with just the two of us. There has been a LOT for us to figure out and learn and research and experiment with since we moved here in July of 2022. And meanwhile, we are also working jobs for pay and hosting events and retreats.

Since the very beginning of our woodland adventure, we have been taking one step at a time, working with the limited financial resources we have, to improve each and all of our living systems. Buying the land with no structures or services and living in our van whilst building a cabin meant that we had to invest in figuring out: how to store food; how to cook meals; how & where to get water; how to manufacture all of our electricity; how to stay cool & how to stay warm; and a hundred other small and large things. We’ve done a lot and come a long way. And we have a long way still to go.

For the first year, I hauled ALL of our water. We had one 55-gallon barrel that just sat in the woods and I drove down the road to a National Forest campground that had an outdoor spigot and I took a bunch of small jugs with me. I filled them up, drove them home, and then emptied them into the barrel. It was the quickest & cheapest way we could get up and going with fetching water during a time when we were on a really steep learning curve with needing to figure out so many other things.

When I think back to our first year especially, I marvel at just how much we did and were able to do. I mean, Mike made our cabin mostly as a one-man band with a chainsaw attachment that allowed him to make lumber from our local trees. And I was working a part time job remotely, which required me needing to leave and find different locations to work from 3-days a week, since we didn’t have cell signal & 4G access to hotspot to my laptop from yet. All this while living in a our van in the summertime heat of the woods. Fortunately for us, we have a lovely river just 2.5 miles down the road that we could go and plunk ourselves into when it got hot.

We’ve been and continue to be on quite a journey out here, is what I’m saying. I enjoy reflecting on how far we’ve come once in a while. It’s good to see and take intentional notice of how much progress we’ve made in a relatively short period of time, especially considering we started from ground zero in terms of having no infrastructure and no services, not even cell signal, on site.

It’s also interesting how surprised people are when they come to visit that things look a lot different from the last time they were here. I guess folks forget that we’re out here slow-growing a larger vision. We don’t anticipate a period anytime soon where we aren’t continuing to upgrade and improve and build and create new things out here. Winters will slow us down in the infrastructure development department, but we’ll be investing in changing, growing & expanding our efforts to provide a place for folks to come and spend time ongoingly. We’re out here for the long-haul. And we have a lot we want to do. And all of it will happen and take place one small step at a time.