I grew up in suburban Chicago, raised by parents who had spent their youths in Minnesota, “land of 10,000 lakes”. Once a year, we piled into the family car and drove to Minneapolis where we joined our relatives for a trip to the north woods and adventures into the joys of cabin life. Fish fries and massive fireplaces are still fond and vivid memories.

After college, I moved to Denver where I met my husband, Lon, a Colorado native. His great grandparents migrated from Kansas in the early 1900’s and paid $90 for 640 acres in the mountains. They moved eight children by horse and buggy to the rugged wilderness now known as Conifer and lived in a shack attached to a large tent while they built their log homestead. As years wore on, depression blanketed the country, and they sold some of the acreage to family and friends. My mother-in-law bought one hundred twenty acres and eighty went to the family doctor. My husband and I married at the homestead beneath a wrought iron arch, which stood only twenty feet from the old outhouse and not much further from the ramshackle chicken coop.

Lon yearned to live in the mountains, but at that point in my life, I was still not ready, so we spent ten years in the Denver suburbs, often sojourning to the little cabin on his mother’s property, which was an austere retreat. One day, while eating our picnic lunch on the tailgate, Lon lamented to his brother that I didn’t “like” the cabin.

I said, “What’s to like? Look at it! You’ve filled it with everybody’s junk, it smells, it has no heat, no lights and nowhere to sit or eat. You don’t even have a picnic table.”

Thus, began our “Save the Cabin” project. Within a few weeks, we had built a front porch and installed a sturdy front door. We cleared out all of the old trash and swept out the mouse droppings. Lon found a vintage cook stove, and we muscled it into the cabin where it provided much needed heat and a wonderful cooking surface. Each weekend during the warm seasons, we returned bringing treasures discovered at thrift stores and antique galleries. We resurrected the outhouse and built a cover over the cistern that captured the runoff from a natural spring a short distance from the cabin. Lon built a sink cabinet in the kitchen and ran pipes down to the cistern through a trench. A pump brought fresh, sweet Rocky Mountain spring water into the kitchen, but the cabin still seemed cramped, being comprised of only two large rooms.