Late last month Jim Neville organized a rowdy crew of REI staff, family, and friends on a ten mile snowshoe hike to Black Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Turned out to be a blizzard; I couldn’t even see the Black Lake slabs from the middle of the lake (sorry, no conditions report!) but it was a strong crew and a good workout nonetheless. Cold temps, highs were in the single digits up high…and we broke trail through nearly two feet of fresh snow, with more every hour.

I landed hard on my backside a week or two ago on tele skis (first mistake?) and made the problem worse with a series of horseback riding and heavy lifting. I’ve been taking it easy for a few days, and was inspired to update the site with some old content and new ways to access it.

I’ve kept a blog on and off for over ten years now, but many of those posts disappeared over the last few years as Apryle and I created and maintained a succession of personal web sites. Over the last few days, I’ve updated and restored a ton of old content.

There are a few new (and old) features to the site. Take a minute and check them out!

We have a new snazzy archive that allows easy access to all the old posts on this site and previous…dating all the way back to the year 2000!

I’ve restored a bunch of old blog posts from 2001-2005, and added a “Time Machine” that displays random posts in the sidebar.

Most importantly, for me anyhow, is that I’ve brought back the South America 2004 expedition page with photos, trip reports, and journal entries from my 2004 trip to South America…including a NOLS Patagonia semester and climbing in the Cordillera Blanca in Peru.

Fun little trip down memory lane, though I am certainly looking forward to putting up new chapters going forward. My desire to climb is back, and Africa is a tempting destination for yet another trip of a lifetime. We’re settled, for now: tending chickens, jobs, bank accounts, and gardens…but before long the urge to wander may overcome us again.

We’ve been feeding our hens 16% protein complete conventional feeds from Ranch-way and Purina. The ladies have a big feeder that holds about twenty-five pounds of feed. It does an amazing job of preventing them from beaking out pellets, and they can go two or three days between refills.

In addition, I can’t resist giving them a small ration of scratch grains each day, ostensibly to help them stay warm…scratch is a high-fat feed, a mixture of cracked corn, wheat, and milo….but also for the sheer joy of seeing them frantically devouring the tiny pearls of grain. We give them a cup or two of dry scratch each day, some days a bit more and some days none at all.

Inspired by The Modern Homestead’s excellent information on sprouting to enhance poultry feeds, I decided to start a small scale sprouting operation. Scratch grains are inexpensive but relatively low quality food for the ladies. By sprouting, we can enhance the nutritional content of the grains. Wheat, for example, increases its vitamin E content by 300% and riboflavin content from 13 milligrams to 54 mg after two days growth. Seven days growth also turns 1/2 cup of dry scratch grains into a full 26oz jar of delicious sprouts. The growing sprouts are an excellent supplement for the birds, especially now when green forage is non-existent in their yard.

So far, it has been working extremely well and the chickens LOVE the sprouted grains. Here’s how it works:

We have seven spaghetti jars lined up on the fridge. Each day I’ve been feeding the oldest sprouts to the hens, rinsing the jar and refilling it with 1/2 cup of dry scratch grains. I give the dry grains a single rinse, then let them soak until the next morning. The other six jars of growing sprouts get a quick rinse in the morning and evening each day. By day seven, the sprouts are about an inch long, green, and taste like, well, grass.

I wonder if the additional nutrition from our sprout experiment helped kick start Lone Feather and the mystery layer to restart/start egg production after the recent (and brutal) cold snap…

Sure, it was twenty-five degrees below zero here two weeks ago. But today it was sunny and fifty, and the snow is disappearing fast. Feels like spring….and not only to me!

The chickens are enjoying the break in the weather, taking full advantage of the dry warm weather to take luxurious dust baths and eat copious quantities of dirt and rocks. I’ve been sprouting their scratch feed, and they are extremely grateful (more on that later).

Lone Feather, our adopted hen, stopped laying again during the cold snap…but was squawking this morning like something was on the way. And some of the “ex-broiler” hens have been acting funny, scratching around in the nest boxes as if to say, “hey, glad this is here….feels like I might want to do something here soon…” The birds are five months old tomorrow, and -should- start laying any day now.

So it wasn’t a tremendous surprise when I found not one, but two eggs in the coop this morning! Two eggs! Lone Feather and a mystery hen! They’ve started…and I can’t wait to see who lays what tomorrow.

I’ve been killing plants here in Estes Park for six years now. Last summer I decided to take a different tack, working with hardy, native and/or short season plants well adjusted to our (lack of) summers. Phase one was a re-landscaping of our cabin, with a combination of native and hardy edibles and perennials…currants, rhubarb, sand cherries, rasberries, cacti, and so on. The shrubs grew nicely in their first year, though we gathered but a single berry from most. We’ll see what bounty they raise in their second year.

This summer it’s all about food! I built six raised beds behind our rental property out of an old deck that was being thrown away and filled them with honest-to-goodness “well rotted manure” from the pile at Elkhorn Lodge stables. I’ll use a bunch of seeds that I’ve had on hand for the new gardens…seeds that I’ve collected from survivors here in the small cabin gardens. I also ordered a bunch of seeds from Seed Savers Exchange. Not to mention a stunning seed catalog, they have a wide…no, enormous variety of cold weather, short season, high altitude seeds available. So we’ll be growing Hidatsa Shield and Dragon Tongue beans, All Blue potatos, Silvery Fir Tree tomatos, Rostov sunflowers, and a delicious looking lettuce mix.

I’m planning on filling out the ranks with some Botanical Interests seeds, including quinoa, amaranth, carrots, and kale. It’s a bit early to start the seeds here, even indoors….so check back in mid March when I will start all the seedlings!

It’s been about six years since I quit eating meat. Since 2004, I have selectively re-introduced meat into my diet. First we butchered a locally killed elk, then a poached mule deer fawn from the local game warden. Especially around the holidays, meat is a difficult tradition to forgo, and I did miss Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas braciole.

For our Christmas dinner this year, though, we roasted a young rooster, raised from a chick and allowed to roam and peck and scratch behind our garage….until his cock-a-doodle-doo led us to behead, pluck, and freeze him. I’d only roasted a chicken once before, so I was nervous. Two hours at around 350 degrees later…

Roast chicken, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. Delicious.

We hit the hills on Christmas day. Planned a really short day, just a quick jaunt into the Terrain Park above Dream Lake. The beautiful sun and dead calm lured us higher, and we skied a perfect pitch of boot-top powder in the early afternoon shade of Chaos Canyon. Conditions were great. I’ve never seen so little wind in the Park. It’ll be sure to return soon, though!