A Needle in a Haystack

The ironic thing about living in the wilds of Colorado and being worried about being eaten by anything that walks, crawls, or slithers, is that I LOVE animals! I would pet a bear if I were positive that it wouldn’t try to make my children orphans, the same for mountain lions, bobcats, chipmunks, squirrels, coyotes, pronghorn, bison, beavers, marmots, you get the picture right? And yes, even wolves. 

I have to avoid pet shops and adoption days at the pet stores because I literally would bring every. single. animal. home.  I would love to volunteer at the Wildlife Sanctuary or the zoo, but I know that, inevitably, I would try to hug one of the wild animals and I’d become the only volunteer in history that was fired!

Part of the criteria of looking for land has been that it has to have an abundance of wildlife sighting opportunities.  For some reason, maybe because they’re harder to find, it’s been fun to try to see moose.  I found a map on the Division of Wildlife website that had a map of where the moose population is growing in Colorado.  So I started with that. I looked up properties in those areas specifically. If the pictures on Realtor.com contained a moose, it was a definite save. If the listing also mentioned bears, deer, elk and mountain lions it was a definite visit.

Because Colorado still had miles and miles of mountains and beautiful areas I had to pare down where we would be looking even more, otherwise it got to be very overwhelming.  

• I didn’t want to be too far from our kids that live in Colorado.
• We didn’t want to be too far from where we live now so that we could go up on days off and spend time in the mountains.
• I wanted to be kinda central to all of our kids so no-one had to travel too much further to come visit.
• I didn’t want to be too far from some city, restaurants, or things to do.  
• I wanted to be close enough to things to do and see so that I could entice the kids to come visit.  
• We wanted seclusion so that the zombies wouldn’t be able to find us easily. 😉
• We wanted a cabin already built so that we could just start enjoying the mountains and it was easier to finance.
• We wanted enough land that we could later build our “dream cabin” if we decided to. Or maybe we’d build a yurt, we didn’t know exactly what we wanted to do.

So, the criteria ended up being:

• Not more than 4 hours from where we live now.
• Water had to be available and electric had to be close – we wanted rustic, not primitive.  haha
• It had to be enough land at a decent price that we could do the things we wanted to do such as build another cabin perhaps, or that yurt.
• It had to be secluded.  If I can see my neighbors back yard, I might as well stay in the city where I am now.
• It had to be accessible year round, after all we were planning on living the rest of our days there.

That’s how we got started. Some days it was still so overwhelming that I almost gave up. I had to organize the properties that we wanted to look at somehow. We’ll talk more about that next time!