FFTA Ranges West!

FFTA ranges West! We at Food for the Ages have moved from our tiny headquarters at the base of Winter Park Resort to the town of Norwood, in Southwestern Colorado.

Many considerations went into our choice of a new home base. The first was that it is difficult to live full time at 9,150 feet above sea level and be our most active.

The second reason for moving was our need for more living space for ourselves and our two extra-small dogs. Upon reflection, our three-year tiny-living experience was far better than living in an RV and having to deal with black, grey and fresh water, insulating pipes for winter and easier than living in a mobile tiny house unit with a composting toilet and ladder to the loft.

Compared to those alternative tiny-home settings, we were living in luxury in 443 square feet with heated, underground parking and an elevator at the base of the acclaimed Winter Park Resort, the top ski area in 2018 in North America, according to USA Today. We enjoyed the natural beauty and unspoiled, outdoor-focused, friendly community of Winter Park Resort and loved being only 160 steps to what is now The Gondola. But in our tiny condo with only one room we missed the privacy to play music and converse without being overheard in the hallway. And we missed other things, too.

I missed the sun of my home memories. With our condo’s northern-exposure windows, except when late afternoon summer rays moved across wall above our bed, I missed the sun falling across the floor and ranging through a larger space, where dogs luxuriate in its warm beams.

…Of course, sun is not an issue in Southwestern Colorado. There is so much sun in Norwood! The first few days here, I came to the breakfast table with my sunglasses on until I finally I became used to it.

In the condo I missed the opportunity to spread out in order to cook more. In my older log cabin here in San Miguel County I can prepare several dishes at once with my five-burner stove top and use both ovens to bake and roast simultaneously.

In our tiny condo I even missed cleaning! The purgative, meditative act of cleaning and restoring my home to order. In our condo cleaning only took about 5 minutes, which wasn’t enough time to achieve cleaning Nirvana. 

Finally, the desire for more space at lower altitude and at a good value became our primary goals. We searched high and low in Grand County. We looked at land and considered building on it. We talked ourselves out of building when we realized the cost to purchase land and build on it in Grand County had gone up so much so fast that the opportunity had slipped away, far exceeding our budget.

Looking back to December 2015, the Grand County condo market was in a trough and we paid about half of what our condo was originally sold for when new in 2007. Two summers later, when we started looking for local places with a house, a bit of land, a yard and a garage, home values had risen by 60 percent! The costs outpaced our budget and we had to look further afield. And though there was a Continental Divide between Grand County and Denver, it was still an easy drive from the big city and we had to get farther away from the spill-over expensive prices of the Front Range to find an affordable home.

After looking high and low around our huge state, we whimsically planned a trip to Montrose County at the end of July to look at 35 acres with a house. Linda Avery, of Avery Land was our very knowledgeable guide around Wright’s Mesa, just west of the majestic San Juan Mountains, and not far at all from the enchanted Canyon Country of Southeastern Utah and the Four Corners region. Though very close to the mega-rich resort town of Telluride, the Front Range inflation hasn’t crept into this corner of the state just yet.

The 35 acres was nevertheless more than we wished for and we returned to Norwood on Highway 145. A log cabin built in 1988 came up in our Zillow feed as we sped past it and we asked Linda to contact the realtor to see if she could arrange a showing while we were in town. 

We saw the custom-built cabin with a view of the San Juans, the La Sal Range in Utah and the Uncompahgre Plateau to the north, with about an acre of land and within our budget. We knew we had found our new home.

On Halloween 2018 we left our condo in Winter Park and began our new life in Norwood, Colorado.

After a six-hour drive we arrived in Norwood and began unloading everything into the garage. It took us days to get used to all the space and find our way around the big floor plan. We would find ourselves in one bedroom when we meant to be in the bedroom with the blue carpet and how do we get to that, again? Where is the front door in relation to the guest room? Is the bathroom in the bedroom or off the living room? Or both? All was evidence that, after living in one room for three years with a separate bathroom, we weren’t used to all the real estate. We had pulled our living space tightly around us like a big closet with a few windows. Our horizons were widening inside and outside the house!

Now began the seemingly endless unpacking of necessities and finding space for them and the old treasures we hadn’t handled in years. We were exhausted and exhilarated, at the same time. 

Flash forward six weeks and now we we are fairly tucked into our new home. We live in a town of a little over 500 people, only 35 miles from Telluride, which will become our new home ski area. There are old ranch families here and offspring of those who have lived here since pioneer times. There are old and young people, many of them entrepreneurs who have started food businesses, bakeries and a food cooperative (where I volunteer) in town and dogs benignly wandering on Grand Avenue, the town’s main drag. I joined the local bridge club, which has been running a game every other week in Norwood since 1924. And the town has its post office, market, hardware and liquor stores, gas station and a few restaurants and a few inns thrown in to make it really livable.

And then let’s not forget the annual rodeo. We are in Southwestern Colorado, after all! And what makes it possible for us to live in a place that relatively recently would have been considered “off the grid?” Satellite wifi and TV and, although we try to buy local to support local businesses, we arrived in Norwood in the age of home delivery of about anything you could want, even to the most remote places, like this one. So everyone has everything they might need here, including good neighbors.

So FFTA is no longer living small. We love more space but already miss the good folks of Winter Park, my good neighbors, the staff at Denver Health, Starbucks, Trail’s End Mercantile and Winter Park Resort, where we once worked, we will miss you but we will be passing through there on the way to visit family on the Front Range so we’ll be back to say hello and catch up soon. In the meantime, we are about as far away from a Starbucks or any fast food as you can be, so we’ll have to take it upon ourselves to grow our own, eat local and healthy!

FFTA’s new focus for Norwood will be farm-to-table, local ingredients, gardening in SW Colorado at 7,000 feet, and profiling the local businesses and people who make them happen. We are very happy to be here and to have more room to grow!