Seasonal Shiftings
When August ended, autumn started here in western Montana. It’s been unseasonably cold and rainy since then. Prior to this past Monday, we hadn’t made it to 50-degrees for a string of days here at Empty Mountain.
Fall is a short season here in the mountains. Short and typically super lovely. It’s my favorite season. Last fall, we were living in our van and still in the process of building our cabin, staying warm by the grace of our portable Heater Buddy propane heater. This fall, we have the luxury of our 12x14 cabin, a woodstove, an abundance of wood on site to burn, and awesome insulation value in our walls, floor & ceiling. We have no prob staying warm that’s for sure.
In mid-September, the local National Forest campground where we fetch the bulk of our water supply closed for the season. After learning last year they close in September, which took us by surprise and left us underprepared, we were in-the-know this time around. We filled up our 50-gallon tank and smaller containers before the closure. We’ll see how we do, but I’m thinking we might be good on the water front until we head south in mid-November. Our new & current unknown is: when will our water start freezing over & stay frozen? Time will tell! Did I mention we’re learning as we go?
EM infrastructure updates: We originally planned to get the siding and interior walls done on the cabin this year, but it looks like we may need to wait until next year. We ran into some snags milling the wood we plan on using for such purposes. We milled a bunch of downed Ponderosa Pine, which was infested with pine beetle larva. Our new plan is to keep milling, and then stack and cover the wood to freeze out the critters over the winter.
Other updates: Mike’s brother Charles generously came out and did some dirt work for us a week or so ago, which allowed us to prepare our dirt driveway in order to get a storage container delivered. So we are now the proud new owners of a used 40-foot shipping container. To our wonderful surprise, it turned out to be forest green! So it fits right in out here in the woods (something perhaps I am more thrilled by than Mike is). It wound up having some rust spots and damage that Mike needed to address, so he’s been tending to that project as of late. Once that’s done, we’ll be investing time & energy in transferring the items from our rented storage container to the one we have here on site. No small task, considering our rented unit is 90-minutes away, and the pickup truck we own, while much beloved & super great, is the smallest in size of its kind.
Mike also discovered that fall is when folks start selling their used canvas tents in earnest - often used for hunting in these parts - on Craigslist. After what felt like an eternity of trying to figure out what to do with our lives, we settled on purchasing a 16X20 canvas tent that was being sold for a really good price from a super nice guy in Missoula. It came with a barrel stove, a floor, and a rain fly. We plan to set it up next year, when we get back in the spring. Our thought is that it will serve as a group gathering & meditation place, until we can get something built. We may use it for an outdoor community kitchen space as well.
We plan on heading back to Deer Park Monastery in mid-November, and returning home to EM sometime in March. Unless the weather boots us out sooner (translation: our water starts freezing). Did I mention we don’t have an indoor sink and we wash our dishes outside?
There will be at least two more EM blog posts before we head south like birds for the winter, so stay tuned. Once we roll out, our blog posts will go into hibernation mode until the spring. Thank you for reading and following along with us, dear friends. We’ve had an active productive year at EM, and we’re pleased with our progress. And we still have a few weeks left before we head out, so there may be a little more still to come this year!