After the Ark: Touring Two Sustainable Homes

At long last... the blog is back!

Hope everyone had very Happy Holidays!

I am going to try to catch you all up on the last three months... in short order.  So, without further ado, here is what we have been doing since our hasty retreat from the Solar Ark in early August:

(1)  During and immediately after our stay at the Solar Ark, we toured two very cool hand-built homes in Tierra Amarilla.  Sadly, we took no pics of the first (and I can't find my handwritten notes... sheesh), which was an incredible strawbale house built onto an existing tiny two-room home.  It was a veritable cathedral in strawbale, absolutely breathtaking.  The owner/builders Chris and Amelia built it themselves, in under two years, having designed it with the help of Amelia's brother, an Oregon architect.  Chris and Amelia were incredibly gracious, inviting us to tour their home after meeting us just a couple of times, first at the Chama Farmers' Market and once again at the Three Ravens Cafe.  We learned a lot about the building process from them and they, importantly, shared their mistakes with us so we wouldn't have to make them too!

(2)  The day we left the Solar Ark, we visited MadDog Andy's Log Cabin in the hills.  Yes, hills.  You know, those things Baba G doesn't like.

Having being reassured by Andy that the (forest) road to his place was fairly well-groomed and (maybe) passable in an RV when we talked to him a few days earlier, we fled the Ark and hung out in the grocery store parking lot in Chama, waiting for his call to let us know we was home and we could start out toward his place.  We were so eager to escape from the Ark that we took off right away in the morning, so we waited several hours before Andy called.  We were starting to think he might not call at all.  But, at last, the call arrived around 5:30pm.

The road was pretty twisty-turny and steep, so Baba G was having a pretty awful time climbing it.  At one point, there was a fork in the road that Andy had not mentioned: of course, we took the wrong tine and, suspecting as much, I drove the car up the other tine to do a little recon.  In the mean time, Nate and I lost walkie-talkie contact and he decided to back up and follow me... except that he backed right off the road and into a ditch.  By the time I got back to him, he had whipped himself into a pretty good tizzy.  Fortunately, I have had lots of *ahem* inadvertent off-road experience, driving in snow and ice in winter, so I talked him right through a pretty easy extrication.  :)

Then, we decided it was time to call Andy and ask him how much farther we had to go.  Instead of just giving us a simple answer, he came riding down to us on his mountain bike!  We all drove up to his place together, with him hanging on to the driver's side window and talking to Nate the whole time-- a bit of a maniac.  Of course, we liked him right away!

Here are Nate and Andy, at the start of our tour of his place:

Andy gave us such a great tour, regaling us with the tale of how he built his cool log cabin-- himself, with almost no help-- in a SINGLE SEASON!  Since he finished the cabin, he has also put in seating for an outdoor drum circle (he is a professional drummer), with the seats all made from cement-enclosed recycled tires:

At one end of the circle, he has also built a horno (oven) made of red brick pavers covered in stucco.  His cat, named "Bat," loves to sleep in it because it even retains the solar heat it absorbs each day:

He also put in a root cellar and it was full of canned vegetables for the coming winter:

It was really inspiring to see just how closed-loop Andy been able to become: in addition to growing and canning his own veggies and fruits, he also employs a composting toilet (which makes a lovely stuff called "humanure") and has a recycling shed where he collects all his non-compostable trash and turns it into useful and, in many cases, really beautiful fixtures.  Check out the beer bottle-cap lined door of the shed:

And here is his newest pride-and-joy fruit tree, a dwarf Russian giant purple crabapple (wearing jeans and flip-flops... I guess he paid extra so it could have legs!):

 
Once the sun went down, we were forced to conclude the outdoor portion of the tour and head inside.  Andy had spent just as much attention on the internal details of his cabin and it was really beautiful and artistic.   This is the zia symbol (also on the NM state flag) he inlaid into the tile entryway floor:

We ended up hanging out with Andy, getting quite an education about New Mexico history, sustainable building, and-- importantly, for our next destination-- what to do and see in Jemez Springs, where Andy had grown up!  At 2am (!), we headed out past the anti-bear spikes on the front door frame and past Andy's awesome bear-guard-dog, with Andy's warning still ringing in our ears that if we heard a bear while we slept in the RV (a little way down the road... as far as Baba G could climb!), we should just lay on the horn in several long, loud blasts... and he would come out with his bear gun and his dog and rescue us.

Andy, you are just the BEST host ever!  :)

Up Next:  Eight Weeks in Jemez Springs, NM, Part 1.