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...