January 28th, 2008 
Today is the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick.
Another bonus to living here is the shear beauty of it all especially when the sun comes out as it did this weekend. So after church Kate and I took advantage of the great weather and went snowshoeing up to the Continental Divide behind our house. The owners of the house we’re renting bought several pairs of snowshoes when they were here over Christmas, so we’re lucky to have some nice equipment to use.
The divide is in plain sight from the road.
Looking back, you can see our development is just at the bottom of the hill.
View from the top of the divide.
For those of you who DON’T know what the Continental Divide is… it’s a line that splits the US (and the continent) in half… so that all water falling on one side of the divide ends up in the Mississippi, and the opposite side into the Pacific.
One of the cool things about living near Breckenridge, is that they’ve always got something going on. This weekend it was the International Snow Sculpture Championships.
Each sculpture starts with a giant block of snow
We’re loving our mountain home, but it doesn’t come without it’s challenges. Many have asked what it’s like to live at this altitude, so I thought I’d start compiling the various oddities that come with our extreme location (it’s been said that we live in the highest residential development in all of North America, although I haven’t been able to prove that yet).
Snow
You really have to like snow to live up here… it never leaves, it just keeps coming. And because of that, it requires a lot of shoveling. For instance, I spent most of my Martin Luther King Jr. holiday shoveling the driveway by hand simply because the snow had compacted so much while we were on vacation that it was impossible to clear with the snowblower. Lets put it this way… the snow drift beside our driveway is getting close to 20 feet and almost blocks our house from the road.
Cold
It gets awful cold up here. Not as cold as other places, but not the temperate winters of Kansas City, that’s for sure. While we were gone for a week in December, we came home to frozen pipes (and were VERY thankful we could thaw them without any damage). After a call to the plumber, he said that leaving the garage door open for only 10 minutes will start the freezing process, and something that I didn’t know… the hot water actually freezes first! Gladly, our gas furnace does a great job heating up our 400 sq ft cabin.
Altitude
For some reason, Kate and I never had to deal with the common “altitude sickness” that many feel when visiting us. But that doesn’t mean that we get off scott-free… we can still get a little winded when climbing the stairs and we seem to have a never ending stuffy nose. The strangest side-effect of all? I can’t seem to sleep. I can probably count on one hand the nights where I’ve slept soundly for a full 8 hours. Typically I’m up a few times a night… with the worst of nights laying in bed WIDE awake at 2am and never falling back to sleep (call it preparation for kids). But as with everything else, you get used to it.
To give you a sense of just how high we are… Alma, CO is considered the highest town in the US at 10,300 ft (Leadville it seems is no longer the highest). We’re a full 1,100 feet higher!
Well, that’s all for now… we’ll hit some more of the high-points next time.
Finally after years of harassing, Alyssa and Brent have finally come into the information age with a broadband internet connection.
Not more than a day into it and my sister has already setup a blog. Good work!
Check out lifeoncedarridge.blogspot.com.
