Free Land for Foxes

Today was a great day! Builder Bob and I have made so much progress in just four days, wow! Good fortune has been smiling on us throughout this whole process. My next blog will tell you about our house plans, ideas, and goals. But today I just had to share the good news.

By coincidence at lunch yesterday we stumbled onto the owner of an adjacent lot. Turns out I used to train dogs with his mother, and Aaron knew his son in elementary school. Also turns out he knows our builder, and wants to bid on the framing. From him I learned lots of little info-bytes about the area, the adjacent owners, the adjacent park, and his plans for building on his lots in the future. This prompted me to go to the County later in the afternoon, where I learned all sorts of cool stuff and began a relationship with the assessor--always good to be friendly with the tax man! That meeting led me to the surveyor today, where I learned that we own 25 extra feet on one side of our parcel, 15 feet on another, and will be getting 10 more feet on a third side. How often does one obtain free land??? Great news!!

The next great gift was working with the fire mitigation contractor who walked the lot with us (along with his yellow lab Lily) and sprayed blue dots on trees that need to come down to create "defensible space" as well as encourage a healthier forest. (Parasites, overcrowding and other environmental factors are weakening many of the wooded areas in Colorado, making the forests more susceptible to beetle damage and fire risk, so they get pretty serious about this stuff around here!). While we will need to drop a number of trees, we get to keep alot of nice ones, improve the health and beauty of our parcel, and make it less fire prone. Best of all....the gorgeous, huge, dramatic dead snag that sits above the house can stay; its now been designated a "wildlife tree." The tree obviously provides cavity nesters and bug eaters an abundance of habitat. I will try to get a good photo of it to add here.

As I write this from the cozy oak-panelled "reading room" in the Evergreen Library, a red fox trots along the rock retaining wall outside, and two good-sized kits sun themselves in the grass above. Fox farms were prevalent around Evergreen back in the '30s when fox fur was popular for apparel. When the fox pelt market declined, fox producers just released the animals to the wild, resulting in a very healthy fox population in and around town. Just one of the many percs of mountain living.

Hope everyone has a safe and sunny Memorial Day weekend!