Things will get worse before they get better...

We've all heard this before right? Think about taking on a project like cleaning out your closet. The goal is to organize and streamline and make your area better. But first you have to take everything out, try everything on, assess and re-assess, make a keep pile, throw out pile, donation pile, give to your sister pile, and suddenly you've got a big mess in your room. You have to make a disaster before you can make it better.

So it goes with the Alpine Guard Station. We've been working on the three buildings for about 2 weeks now, and let me tell you, we've got a big mess. There's really no other way to do it. We've got foundation problems and rotten log problems, and plumbing problems...all things that require some demolition so that we can actually get to the problem. Let me remind you what the main cabin looked like before we began...
It's a great little building, complete with kitchen, bedroom and living room. Here's pictures of the inside two weeks ago:


Pretty cute huh? The kitchen has great little cabinet space, a sink with pressurized water, a nice stove, it even has a cool retro refrigerator. (Though there's a note in the kitchen stating that this fridge has been recalled and should not be used- I have no idea how very old that letter is.) The bedroom has cute little built in closets and a desk in between. Quite convenient. BUT, we had to figure out why the floor was sagging in the corners, and assess the stability of the foundation, as well as remove the rotten sill and spandrel logs. So here is what the inside of the cabin looks like now:



Demolition is fun, but it is kind of sad to see such destruction of such a great place. In Historic Preservation however, you gotta do what you gotta do. Let me state here that this kind of demo is not recommended! In HP you want to save as much of the original fabric as possible, and do as little alteration to the building as possible. In this situation however, we didn't have much choice. We had to get those rotten logs out, and we had to get to the foundation- sometimes you have to take drastic measures. I might also add that this is a 'Rehabilitation' project; meaning that we are changing the building slightly so that it can be a functional building for people to enjoy (rather than a true fundamental 'Preservation' project).
Cutting into the floors wasn't much of a challenge. Removing the sill log however, was. This is one heavy sucker of a building. Usually you use a couple of bottle jacks and the building will go right up, we had to get creative with this one, and we used lots of jacks. Here's Helaman attempting to jack up on corner:
We finally did get the building up, and then we were able to remove the sill log. It didn't come out as easily as we'd hoped, we wanted to save as much of it as possible, but the whole thing turned out to be pretty rotten. That's what happens when it's sitting on a concave slab of concrete for many years and water has it's way. We ended up having to cut it up in pieces with a chainsaw to get it out. But get it out we did. And here's how it looks now from both the inside and the outside:

Ah, now we've got some serious work to do! Now that we've made one enormous mess, we have to put it all back together. I'm really excited about this though. It's going to be really neat to see how it all comes together. We'll be able to work much quicker now that we've got the major problems out of the way, and we can start to really make the place look nice. Stay tuned!

Pioneer Life...

The world is a cruel place. I have always thought the contrary, but now I know the truth; it's a cruel place indeed. You see, when you're taking a shower in the middle of a wide open valley at 10,000 feet, and you have no shelter what-so-ever, and the wind begins to blow.....it is excruciating. After a long, hot, dirty day of hard work, the one thing I look forward to the most is a nice warm shower. Aaaahhh, the warm water cleansing the filth from my body...oh, but no, don't, AAAHHH the WIND, STOP!! It's soooo c-c-cold!

Don't get me wrong, I am VERY grateful for our solar shower. That's how we bathe. We have a 5 gallon bag that we fill with water each morning, then it sits in the sun all day to heat up the water. We hang it on something, usually the top of the work truck, and gravity does the work. It's so nice to have this I must admit. But seriously, when you're completely naked and wet in the middle of an open field, I curse the wind like you wouldn't believe. Once you get it through it though, it feels amazing to be nice and clean....well for about 15 minutes before you kick up enough dirt to get dirty again. But still, it's better than nothing.
There is a creek about 30 yards from the cabin. On a super hot day I will bathe in the creek, but wow it's still pretty cold. I just like the idea really. It seems so 'in-touch' with nature to bathe in a creek. Usually though I'll stick with the bag, the water gets surprisingly warm. So life goes off the grid. Let's talk about the rest of the day, just like the pioneers may have done it. (Well, modern day pioneers that is....)

I have to say I have a ton of respect for true pioneers and the way they survived life off the land 100 years ago. Those were tough dudes, more power to them. I'm accustomed to the luxuries of the modern day; like pressurized water and indoor heating. This makes me feel pretty weak when I realize exactly what life is like without all these luxuries. This goes far beyond life in the Wild West 100 years ago. Just look up the statistics of the World Health Organization and you'll see astounding facts about people all over the world without access to clean drinking water, sanitary bathing waters, indoor plumbing, electricity etc. So I have nothing to complain about at all. Camping off the grid for three months is a bit of challenge for me though, which just points to the expectations Americans have in the 21st Century.

The day usually begins around 7a.m. I may wake up a little earlier than that, but the sun does not see over the ridge of the mountain immediately to our East until 7:15, and it is still really cold in the morning. (When you can scrape the frost off your car windows, I consider that cold). So I usually lay in my truck until I can see the sun, then I know it's a bit more tolerable to open the topper and climb out. By the way, this is what my sleeping arrangements look like for the summer.
I built a platform in my truck bed and put a futon mattress on the top. You see underneath I have space for storage- everything is under there, all of my clothes, gear, food, stove etc. The topper is lined with carpet, and my Mom helped me make some curtains for the windows from wool blankets so it stays relatively warm at night. It's not a bad alternative to a tent, and way warmer.

So after I climb out of my home, I walk the 80 or so yards to the vault toilet, kicking up lots of dirt along my way. The toilet is one of those Forest Service huts that you see at the beginning of trailheads, which this is at the beginning of trail so there you go. It's not the most pleasant place to be first thing in the morning, but it's better than a tree with scattered pine needles everywhere. Then I walk back to camp and attempt to wash my hands and face. This consists of pumping water from a nearby spring. This is about the best water I've ever tasted, and also freezing cold. Most of the time I resort to baby wipes for cleaning in the morning, it's just too cold for this business. The pump is pretty cool, it takes about 10 pumps to get it going, then about 10 more to fill say a medium size saucepan.
After filling the shower, washing my hands many times, filling water bottles, washing dishes, cooking, etc, I'd say I pump this about 300 times a day, maybe more. It's sooo much better than say, hauling water from the creek!
After pulling out my stove and cooking up some oatmeal or the like, we head straight to work. (This morning ritual takes way longer than it should. In the modern world I can be out the door in 35 minutes, shower, breakfast and all. In the mountains I don't pick up the first hammer of the day until about 8:15 or 8:30, how is that?)

Anyway, to work we go. So far we've mostly focused on demolition and trying to figure out exactly why the floor of the cabins are sinking, and how we can fix them. We're also busily attempting to replace a few rotted sill and spandrel logs. This might not sound like much, but this is serious work. Just check out our tool cache...
We usually work until around 6ish, and we bust some butt. I like the physical labor, it feels good at the end of the day to feel like you really worked, and not just stared at a computer screen all day. My wise father told me recently that it will take about 30 days for my body to adjust. I think he's about right, I'm not getting so sore anymore and I'm feeling pretty good at the end of the day.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty spent. This is when I take out the solar shower and grit my teeth if the wind decides to play. After the shower we pull out the trusty Coleman stove again, make something quick and then climb into our holes (either the truck or Elizabeth's tent). Once the sun catches the ridge of the mountain immediately to our West, it gets cold really fast, so usually by 7:30 or 8p.m. we seek shelter. For the next couple of hours we get to read or perhaps watch a movie on my Itouch if I can stay awake that long- usually not. Morning comes quick and then it's everything all over again....

Lake City Outbuildings...

Last weekend was our first weekend with volunteers. Let me just say, they were awesome! I was so impressed by the hard work and knowledge of these volunteers; we got done in a weekend what would have taken our full-time three person crew several weeks or more. I wish we had them the whole summer!

We worked on the outbuildings of Lake City. If you don't know much of Lake City, Colorado, and most of you don't, you should google it. It's a super cute little town in the Southwest part of the state with amazing mountain views surrounding it. It's a designated Historic District so CPI (Colorado Preservation Inc.) recognized the importance of working on it's vulnerable buildings. We focused on the towns outbuildings. This may seem like a waste of time and energy to some (at least when we could be working on more substantial buildings), but outbuildings are contributing structures to the Historic District, and thus, still very important. They may not have been the grand primary residences of the town, but they certainly add much to the historic fabric of any community.

We worked on three buildings total. The main focus was on the Bent Mule Barn. This old barn was left to fall down, in fact, some hoped that it would fall down just to be rid of it. Others really wanted to protect this historic structure, and so CPI stepped in to preserve the building. Here's a picture of it when we arrived:
This picture actually makes the barn look a little better than it actually was. Here it looks fairly stable and in relatively good condition. What you don't see is the magnitude of the rotten wood from being buried in the ground and the instable surfaces. You also don't see the truck loads of trash we pulled out of the building and hauled off to the dump. When I say truck loads of trash, I mean more garbage than you can imagine...from old tires to broken plates, to an old salad bar, to scrap metal, to piles of old LP's etc. etc. It was kind of like a crazy old ship wreck of retro treasures, only not really savable.

We worked on the barn all day Friday, Saturday, and part of Sunday. I'm still amazed at how much we got done in such a short time. Luckily our volunteers were very skilled and impressive workers like I mentioned above. Our main goal was to stabilize the building so that it would remain standing for many more years. This takes more structural assessment than I am currently able to produce. But I did learn a lot from our amazing team. We dug up around the corners of the buildings to assess the stability and quickly saw a lot of rotten wood (burying logs in the ground is a great way to make your wood deteriorate faster). We replaced the foundation and then worked on the stability of the roof and walls. With some brute force, ratchet straps and lots of nails this proved to be an easier task than I would have thought. (Well, it wasn't easy exactly but it went smoother than I would have anticipated.)

At the risk of getting too carried away or technical on you, lets just say that the entire project came out great. Here's some after photos:

Again, you really can't see how dramatic the change was on this building, but rest assured this building will be standing for many more years to come. Thanks to such a great group of volunteers. Remember, the Alpine Guard Station has LOTS of work to be done and we're always looking for help!! The sight is amazingly beautiful and right on a great little fly fishing stream. We'll even cook for you! Just picture yourself here...

Rat Nasty!

WARNING! READER BEWARE...GRAPHIC IMAGES!

I'm not kidding, the images below might be a bit disturbing, especially if you're an animal lover. I don't know many people that love rats though, so it's not THAT offensive.

I really should have known this going into the Historic Preservation field. I mean I knew that it would be tough, hot, dirty work, but I never gave thought that it would also be nasty...as in, rat nasty.

A few days ago we cleaned out the garage at the guard station. When I say cleaned out, I mean removed every last piece of crap that was shoved in there from the last 50 years, tore apart anything that wouldn't come out, and completely ripped up the floor. Here's what it looked like before:
Actually that was only one side, there's a wall here separating the other side which was also full of crap. And when I say crap, I mean that in every sense of the word. The stench of rat urine and feces was outrageous. Thank goodness for respirators! This was some really gross stuff. Just think of stirring up years upon years of neglected dust and trash, with the pack rats having a freaking field day. The picture below is of the barn, not the garage, but it gives you a good feel for what years of rat urine looks like:
Seriously grody. I can handle this nastiness if I don't really think about it, and I have a mask and gloves on. I actually really enjoyed ripping up that floor. Demolition is just so fun and therapeutic! Along the way I also found a few surprises. This is were the warning comes in, if you're squeamish then don't look. I never had any idea a rat could get this big!
I'd say that mummified head was about four inches. I found another head, and a few detached bodies. To give you scale I'd say there were about the size of a house cat. Ya I know, scary stuff. You can see in the picture above all that debris around it. That's the top of a dresser that we pulled out- all that debris is mounds of rat poop. The grossness just continues. My supervisor Helaman and I were talking about how gross we felt at the end of the day, covered in this contaminated dust. We somehow came up with the term rat nasty, and I think it pretty much sums it all up.

We finally got just about everything out of the garage. But now there are mounds of dust, dirt, and rat poop that needs shoveling out. We have to get some bleach and water to spray on the dirt first, otherwise you're talking about a potential health hazard. Unfortunately we didn't have all the supplies we needed for that, so down to Lake City we go to buy a wheelbarrow and bleach. In the meantime, I found another treasure as I was leaving the garage. Again, reader beware, this next image might haunt you...especially if you're a cat lover. (Amy and Casino, you might not want to see this!)


Poor little kitty! I have no idea how old this mummy was, but I could read the tag on it's collar perfectly. The poor thing was all the way from Ft. Leavenworth Kansas. Perhaps someone brought it there on vacation? Who knows what happened, but clearly it either got lost and stuck in the garage, or the rat nastys got it. Boo rat nasty!
Well, such is life I guess. We all have a fate to live. I just hope mine is not similar in any way shape or form to that of my little kitty friend. On a positive note, the garage is looking good. Check it out now...
And now the work really begins. The stabilization will be tough, not to mention everything else we have to do to turn it into a habitable bunkhouse. But have no fear this will be a place you will want to rent out and bring your family to! Maybe not until next summer but still...I promise you not a single rat will be seen!

Exploring Colorado...traveler beware!

So last weekend we had a couple of days off of work. My coworker Elizabeth and I decided to explore a little bit of Colorado in the area around Lake City where we're working all summer. I have been looking forward to all kinds of road trips this summer. Especially around New Mexico and the National Parks of Utah.

Given that we only had a day and a half free, we decided to make a quick trip of the area. There was a road at the end of town that read 28 miles to Ouray. On the map Ouray looked pretty cool, well, there was a hot springs at least and that was enough for us! And being only 28 miles away, it sounded perfect.

So off we went, driving out of Lake City for 10 miles or so. The road was slow, as many Colorado mountain roads are (they're narrow dirt roads with massive drop offs and no guard rails). I can handle that though, I have a great little Toyota Tacoma pickup which I call Taco for short. Besides, nothing can be worse than the follies of the Alaska road system I'm sure.

At about mile 11, the road became increasingly worse; bad enough that we actually turned around because we thought it couldn't possibly be a road anymore. It was like it suddenly turned into a hiking trail, foot traffic seemed fine, but vehicular traffic seemed out of the question. A few bikers passed us at this point (motorcyclists that is). They assured us that this was indeed the road to Ouray, and that my Taco would make it just fine. Well alright then. We turned around and headed back up the hiking trail slash road. Oh how I wish I would have listened to my instinct! Turns out this was Engineer Pass- a road notorious for four wheeler traffic and Jeeps- stunningly beautiful, but terrifying. I can't believe people actually think it's ok to drive a car on this thing. I was terrified going over massive rocks on gravelly road with the constant fear that I would spin out at any moment, go over the cliff and find an early death. I'm not exaggerating, I was really terrified. Everyone around here says I'm pretty weak for this. I have never considered myself a wus, but there it is. Perhaps if I knew before hand what I was getting into it would have been different. But the truth be known that I do not ever wish to drive this pass again in my life. However, it was incredible.

Ah beautiful day. This did make the trip worth it, almost. Now that we had gotten to the pass, surely going down would be easy, and after going 14 miles in two hours we only had half way to go. Oh but wait, what feels so funny on my Taco, is that a flat tire I have?? Yes indeed, that is one massively flat tire. So we stop, get out and try to change it. It was here that I was happy this road was so narrow. No one could pass us, so they had to help. Thank goodness that two cars approached us within 10 minutes or so. There was no way we were getting those old lug nuts off of that tire!
That was one tough tire. Even with four large burly men it still took us two jacks, a lot of kicking and about 30 minutes to get on the spare and continue down the road. But finally we got it. Down the road we went. It wasn't any quicker, still treacherous and scary, but thank you Taco my dear friend for being such an awesome truck!
We did pass some awesome abandoned mining towns on the way down. These places are everywhere in Colorado. The mining here was just outrageous back in the day. They're pretty cool to walk around and imagine what life was like there 100 years ago.

So I guess the day did end well enough. Finally we made it to Ouray, though about 6 hours later than we had planned. Luckily we found some climbers on the way who recommended that we stay at Orvis Hot Springs. Turns out this was a 'clothing optional' hot springs resort. Well, we were hot, tired, and ready to relax. So you know how the saying goes....when in Rome!

Summer Worksite Preperation

We finally got to visit our summer sites! This was very exciting. Of our five person crew, three of us will be at the Alpine Guard Station in the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre-Gunnison National Forest, and two of us will be in the Rio Grande Forest working on two cabins near South Fork Colorado.

The past 10 days have been incredibly busy. I never realized how much preparation went into working at a remote location for the entire summer. HistoriCorps has been planning these two projects for months, and now we're finally ready to begin. After a few massive Costco trips, some organizing trailers and buying last minute forgotten tools, ordering unforseen items, and lots and lots of driving (with loaded trailers and flatbeds), we've made it to our sites, and they are AMAZING!

I knew they would be cool, but to finally get here and see the beautiful surrounding forest is so great. I will be working with Elizabeth and Helaman at the Alpine Guard Station.

The history of the building is pretty cool, as taken from the HistoriCorps website: "The Alpine Guard Station was first constructed in 1913 as a remote ranger station for the United States Forest Service; the site is located within the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre-Gunnison National Forest, in Gunnison County, and includes three historic log buildings: a ranger’s residence, barn, and garage/equipment shed. The ranger’s residence was constructed in 1920 by rangers Henry L. Spencer and Bill Doran to serve as a seasonal guard station within the Alpine District of the Uncompahgre National Forest (which later merged with the Grand Mesa and Gunnison National Forests). The site is associated with the early twentieth century sheep grazing industry of the Western Slope and stands as a good example of an early Forest Service administrative facility.

The work that needs to be done is extensive. Again, as taken from the HistoriCorps website: "Several projects will be conducted at the Alpine Guard Station site. All three structures will be reroofed with cedar shingles, all doors and windows will be repaired, and all of the sill logs will be replaced. Both the garage and dwelling will have interior repair and will be furnished. The dwelling will also have plumbing installed to accommodate a sink. The extended plan is to turn the garage into a bunkhouse with a wood stove, beds and a table. Crews will construct vault toilet facility and a solar energy shed, modeling a CCC-era equipment shed, to house photovoltaic panels, batteries and an inverter. In addition, the site will be graded for ADA accessibility. The proposed projects at the Alpine Guard Station will provide participants with knowledge of the layout and assembly of wall frames, construction of roof trusses and roofing techniques, construction of historically accurate hinged garage doors, and the siding of walls with board and batten."

I'm so excited to begin working on these buildings. There is so much work to be done it's a bit daunting, but to think about how great it will look when it's done is fascinating. Besides, when I got to sleep every night in the back of my truck, this is what I see: This picture certainly does not do it justice, but you can still see that it is quite beautiful. This is obviously a very remote location, about 20 miles from the very small town of Lake City, Colorado. We won't have internet or cell coverage while on site, and we plan to stay on site for the majority of the summer. I hope to come down at least once every week or every other week. I wish I could blog about this more often because there will be so much to relay, but given this 'off the grid' location, my blogs will be few and far between. Do stay tuned however, because I expect them to be so full of exciting developments as we move through the summer!

Wyoming!!

Since classes ended in late April, I have been looking forward to beginning my internship with Colorado Preservation Inc. during the month of May. After a nice two week vacation in Alaska, I was really anxious to begin working. So on Sunday May 23rd, our 6 person crew headed out to LaPrele, Wyoming to work on an old Forest Service cabin at 8,000 feet. (If you haven't thought much about Wyoming, you really should, it's quite gorgeous and an excellent place to get back to the basics.)
Here is a picture of the cabin we both stayed at, and worked on.

This cabin was the home to forest service personnel, next to this was an administrative office and a barn. It was built in the 1930's, and really is in excellent condition. Today the forest service rents the cabin to the public for a nice get away in the Wyoming high country. Which brings me to my next point- be prepared! When you're dealing with mountain country and high altitudes, you must always be prepared for anything- that goes for animals, weather, cabin conditions etc. You would think that after living for 6 years in Alaska, and working as the Preparedness, Health and Safety Director for the American Red Cross of Alaska that I wouldn't have to even think about this. Ya well, when it's 85 degrees in Denver, it's so hard to think about the cold only 5 hours away. I know I know, I of all people should've known better. I packed for cool conditions, not a blizzard.
I mean seriously, who would have predicted this! You see the picture of the cabin above, that was at about 8am. This next picture, yes, same place, same cabin, only about 2 hours later.
Wow, that was really impressive. It snowed about 4 inches that afternoon. Needless to say, our work was put on hold for the rest of the day. And, I had a very restless, cold and somewhat miserable nights sleep given my lack of preparedness (I hope no one from the Red Cross is reading this!)
Well not to fear, the next day warmed up considerably. It left for some sloppy and muddy conditions, but if you're working, you might as well work hard and get dirty! We had several projects we worked on for the next 3 days, including building a new log gate for the campus entrance, refinishing the cabinetry in the kitchen, fixing a ripped screen door, putting tile up in the bathroom shower, and my favorite, getting fire wood from the surrounding forest! Yay, warm fire!! I got some practice with a chain saw which was much needed. It's not too hard to use, but my scrawny arm needs some serious muscle building.
After gathering some wood for heat, we also got a few small trees that we planned to use for the construction of the new gate. Building this gate was really cool. I learned so much in such a short time about using logs and hand tools. First we peeled the logs using a drawknife (I love this tool!) Then we coped the end of the logs with gauges and chisels. We did the coping so that the logs will sit nicely into the logs they're touching for the gate. You can see Nathan on the right with the drawknife, and Jonas is on the left coping the end of a log.
In the picture below you can see how the logs we're working on are being pieced together to make the gate. The coping of the ends of the logs takes some patience. If you can imagine it's pretty tricky to chisel that log just right to fit over the log next to, below or underneath it. It takes several rounds of chiseling, fitting, re-measuring, and chiseling again. We did pretty good though, as you can see from the pictures below, I think the end result looks pretty amazing!



Log work can be fairly strenuous, and after using that chain saw for the morning I was happy to get a break and do some tiling in the bathroom. I was surprised how easy this was. There's really not much to tiling, just slathering on the adhesive and making sure your tiles fit correctly. Then of course is applying the grout the next day or so after it's dried. I actually really liked working on this. It was a bit monotonous, but I'm a perfectionist at heart, and I really got into my groove fitting these pieces together. It almost felt like a piece of art, and was very therapeutic.

All in all it was a great week. I learned so much about log work and I am really excited to expand on these skills this summer. And, I certainly learned a valuable lesson. My truck is now fully loaded with 2 hot water bottles, two down comforters, long underwear x3, a sleeping bag and a slanket. No way I'm getting cold again! Too bad we're not returning to Wyoming though, it was really beautiful!