This month, we continued to harvest, process and store fruit, veggies and greens from the garden. The garden was super abundant, so Linc made two more solar drying racks out of rough sawn lumber, screening and old sliding glass door windows to try to keep up with all the fruit and veggies we were wanting to sun dry. Jeanne did a lot of lacto fermenting.
Our rental business required a lot of attention this month, so that kept us busy too.
Linc finished building a new pole shed, mostly built last month, to put our twelve 55 gallon grain storage bales, plus a few garden tools, in. Some of the barrels have hard to diagnose leaks in the lids, and each year we would lose close to a barrel's worth due to mold and spoilage, so getting the barrels under a roof had been on the "projects" to-do list for awhile. We built it of used metal roofing, leftover fence poles and shade cloth, and some fence posts leftover from fencing the paddocks. Came out great!
With that done, he re-piped our cabin rainwater catchment system, and painted it and another storage tank to keep the sunlight from growing algae inside. Also, some stone work to neaten up the cabin foundation a bit. Then, some more earthen plaster work on the cabin exterior and inside our battery/fridge room.
A photo from part way through the rainwater project.
And the final result.
The garden, in it's jungle like harvest-time state. Fun to look back at the June photo from same location for comparison.
Our friend Willow, who we backpacked with on a through hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2006, stopped by to visit while on a tour of as many National Parks (and visits with friends) as she could fit in during a vacation from her job at an outdoor equipment store. We weren't able to join her at some of our favorite Utah spots, as Amber was in the process of moving at the time, so we took a day trip together to the north rim of The Black Canyon National Park where Jeanne belly crawled out to exclaim at Exclamation Point. What exactly she exclaimed we had to edit out of this PG rated blog.
It was great to see Willow again. We had some wonderful times on the AT, and have seen her I think only fairly briefly twice since, until this visit, so it was good to catch up on her life and adventures since we'd last spent any amount of time together.
As the weather slowly cooled into fall, Linc got in some more mountain biking over in Utah. He joined a group of guys from Paonia and Fruita for a couple days of car camping and riding, culminating an all day adventure down the length of The Whole Enchilada bike route. The route starts near the summit of the La Sal Mountains overlooking the Utah desert, and, after about 30 miles involving 1300' of climbing and 7800' of hair raising descent, ends at the Colorado River near the mouth of Grandstaff Canyon.
Here the group takes a snack break at one of the many viewpoints along Porcupine Rim, about halfway through the ride.
The group had some talented riders. Here three of them launch themselves casually off a small cliff beside the trail. It was somewhere around here that Linc decided it's time for a new mountain bike. The 2004 Bianchi that he bought used off a fellow Paonian reached its limit on that trip.
Somewhere in there, Linc drove James over to Glenwood Springs so he could catch a bus to meet a client in Denver for a few days (James does web site design). Linc brought his bike and climbed Red Mountain, overlooking Glenwood Springs and the lower Roaring Fork Valley. At the top, he enjoyed watching three different pairs of paragliders (guide and client flying in tandem) launch themselves off the top for a 15 minute ride down to the valley bottom. Linc likes adrenaline, but there are limits. He happily biked back down the mountain on the Grandstaff Trail.
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