9,200 ft. 70 mph Niwot wind. Waist high snow drifts just off the piss trail. Boots flung off beside the door. Slab of coals in the wood stove. Chunks of fir and pine in the tin tub. A stack of mauls and axes and hatchets, handles propped against the wall. A poster above with Christopher Columbus on one side and Sitting Bull on the other. "Will the real savage please stand up?" it says.

Negative 10 degree bag around my legs but my shirt's off because it's roasting in here. Actually have the window open with blizzard-strength gusts coming now and then, tiny crystals almost like sand, comet tails eddying behind the building and swirling in, flickering the candles which burn quickly down to stubs.  

Sound of pen on paper. Wind. The stove ticking and rumbling.

Leftover paneling on the walls. Recycled 1 X 10 siding on the ceiling. Nothing parallel, joints and seams all off, but we built it ourselves 5 years ago and it's still standing and it stays warm. What else is there on a night like this?

Out of everyone I know, everyone I grew up with, only this familia querida chose the land, and chose it all the way. Carving a life and a family into this mountainside. Carrying in water from the local spring. Composting their waste. Generating power with solar panels. Harvesting a deer for meat. Serving the local community as ski patroller, yoga teacher.

There's a postcard on the wall of two bison, and beside it, a taped-up picture of an orca. Then, written on the wall with a sharpee, cartoon dialog bubbles:

Orca:  ¿Que onda tatanka?
Bison: Siempre la lucha, Señor Orca, pero Pura Vida.

There's no better drink than water that flows pure out of the mountains, no heat as good as a fire. No place that feels like home as much as the one you build with your friends and family, even though it's just a shack on the side of a snow-blown ridge. The dharma shack, we call it.