The Cabin
My cabin is located at 10,200 feet in the mountains of Colorado, just west of the continental divide. It is rather small at 600 square feet, but we have a barn and storage shed, which really takes the pressure off of the otherwise tight quarters.
The cabin is completely off grid, in that there are no electric lines anywhere near here, and there is also no cell service. I have more details on that in the other pages talking specifically about the network, and the energy systems.
All heating is done with a woodstove, and wood from the property. We have unfortunately had a bad batch of beetle kill, so we have a ton of dead wood we constantly have to remove for fire safety and to help the forest get healthy again.
Live Image of the Cabin
Live Weather at the Cabin
The Live Weather at the Cabin
The Live Weather at the Cabin
Weather and Climate
I also track the weather up here live year round, and report to a variety of different websites. There are not a lot of weather stations in the area, as we are extremely remote, so it helps fill in some big gaps on the weather models.
I will be doing a blog post on how I set all of this up to work from up here, and be available globally, but to summarize it all runs on a small raspberry pi that provides multiple different functions, as reduction of power usage is a significantly better plan than trying to produce more (cost).
The weather is obviously cool up here, but even in the middle of winter it is amazing how warm it feels if the sun is out. Rarely do we leave the 70s in the height of summer, and most morning it starts out in the 30s. We have seen snow every month of the year up here, but that is extremely rare in July and August. Typically, during July, it is sunny mornings, but the monsoonal flow brings afternoon thunderstorms.
In the winter we will see upwards of six feet of snow on the ground at the height of the season. It comes in October as patchy snow, and lasts often into June in spots.
The highest temperature we have seen up here is 78.7 F in July, and the coldest we have seen is -17.7 F in December.
Access
Access is on a small county road. What this means is that when the snow flies, there is no winter maintenance. The road closes approximately six miles from my cabin, usually sometime around Thanksgiving, and does not reopen until sometime after Memorial Day.
We recently purchased tracks for our UTV, which makes the ride a lot more pleasant. Before that, we would either ski in or use a snowmobile. Spring becomes challenging in that as the road melts, there will be a mix of bare spots and snow. The tracks allow us to handle that situation without difficulty.
The rest of the year, it is a 4wd road that requires high clearance. So often we have to arrange with visitors to pick them up about 2 miles from our place where the road becomes impassible to passenger vehicles.
Getting to the Cabin in the Winter