by Jeannie Newell, Crested Butte, CO

Some communities in far away parts of the world live without water. This amazes me. On this off-grid journey, water was immediately noticeable as the most important and necessary resource. We need it to drink, we need it to flush out the toilet. Yes, we have a toilet in our camper, and a very small shower. We are opting to use a solar shower instead which, of course, requires water - but we don’t need to power the water heater - the sun does that.)

We use the following for our basic needs/comforts:

-propane heat.
- solar for lights (cfl & led) - we have a 15 watt panel that hangs out all day long in the sun. And we have two outlets, that we use to charge phones.
- propane stove/oven which also helps keep the camper warm.
- we use two small milk bottles full of frozen water to cool our fridge. It works really well, though it helps that is pretty cold here in the mountains.

Still, water is the big thing. Water that we are constantly using to wash dishes, to make food, to give to the dogs, to make tea and bathe with. It’s not that having water to use is challenging to us where we are, it’s simply an observation of my own that compared to the other resources we need, water is the one I turn to most frequently. That doesn’t even include laundry that we do in the hostel in town or, more frequently, at Thomas’ place (Michael’s brother.

On another note, we were dismayed to find that we couldn’t compost because composting in bear country is pretty much a bad idea. Then we found a community composting spot! It turns out I work with a really nice woman who owns Round Mountain Organics, the only local organic farm.  Her farm is open to the public for compost drop off - she uses it for chicken feed.

We were also dismayed to learn that the town of Crested Butte doesn’t have much of a recycling program.  We are saving our recyclables to drive down to nearby Gunnison when we have errands to run there - we have to grocery shop there once a week. I was really excited to find that Gunni recycles everything, including white paper! Big deal to me, I can’t help it - and we can drop our compost off en route because Round Mountain Organics is on the way, so less miles, less emissions, which simply put, just makes me happier.

All for now.  Before signing off, I’ll make a quick list of wildlife we’ve seen while out in these parts:

marmot
falcon
beaver
magpies
coyote
ermine
mule deer - at least 1000
elk
bear - we saw a bear!  also, one raided our truck (more on that later)
jack rabbit

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.