After working and playing all winter, I knew I wanted to come back to Colorado and continue to have new and unique life experiences. It wasn’t easy to find affordable summer housing in Aspen and I wanted an opportunity where I’d be learning a lot, but I also just had the desire to be outside all day and get my hands dirty. To accomplish this, signing up as a wwoofer ended up working out perfectly.

What the heck is Wwoofing? Good question. It’s one I’ve had to answer about a hundred times since I decided that this is what I’d be doing for my summer. Wwoof stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It’s as simple as it sounds, in that it is a network that connects volunteers with farms to stay at for the price of labor. I signed up and payed a membership fee, which allowed me to create a profile and see where every farm in the network is located and view their profiles. I wanted to come back to Colorado for the summer so I contacted quite a few farms in the state, though most didn’t get back to me or couldn’t accommodate me til later in the year.

Kelly (the man who I am wwoofing for now) contacted me pretty soon after I created my profile and stated on it that I wanted to wwoof in Colorado. His farms profile seemed pretty ideal to me and I’m incredibly happy that I made the choice to some out here. He is a good guy with an interesting background that I am learning a lot from. He’s done a ton of backpacking and rafting, including solo trips through the Grand Canyon. A few years ago he settled down on this homestead where he is taking care of his elderly mother and working on turning this silty land into something productive.

The homestead is about 10 miles outside of the town of Cortez. It’s way down in the southwest corner of Colorado, about a half hour from the Four Corners and only 16 miles from Utah on the road we live on. I haven’t spent much time in the actual town yet, but its very small and centered as a tourist spot around the Mesa Verde National Park nearby. There are a ton of Navajos here since its the closest town with a liquor store and Walmart to their reservation. Their culture is one I’m quite unfamiliar with so seeing them has been an enlightening experience so far and I must say they aren’t as different from most other Americans as I would have thought. The area has a lot of Native American history and a lot of large reservations are close as well as some national monuments, which preserve their history.

The main project that we’ve been working on since I got here is a pheasant run. This is an enclosed area for the pheasants to live in outdoors. They are very skiddish animals and need a good amount of space to move around in, we didn’t clear any weeds out of the pen so that they can use it for habitat.

The other main project I came into is sheet mulching the side of the property where Kelly has planted the berries and fruit trees. This is a super simple and organic way of controlling weeds and retaining soil moisture. We clear the large weeds from a spot then overlap cardboard and carpet (all from dumpster diving) before throwing on wood mulch that Kelly has been getting from a friend in town. Sheet mulching is cool cuz it can be pretty cheap if you use recycled materials, doesn’t involve pesticides, and ends up looking pretty nice.

Spending so much time outside and a lot less on mindless internet and my phone is seeming to have a good effect on my attention span. I’ve noticed in my first couple weeks here that I seem to dream way more and I have fealt really good overall physically (as long as I stay hydrated).

I really think that I want to homestead when I finally settle down (many many many years from now), though probably somewhere with more people I know close by. I am so happy with the experience I am getting and even just doing construction on the pheasant run has been really fun and a great learning experience. I’ve recently come to realize that I don’t know my destination and maybe never will, but I am sure of the direction that i’m heading in and I know that wwoofing is keeping me on the correct path.