Getting ready for winter

The strangest winter we’ve ever experienced, the locals are saying, and it seems a fitting end to what has been a strange old year out there in the big wide world. A year of disturbing political shifts, humanitarian crises, and environmental steps forward and back that knocked us sideways for a while and has had something to do with us not posting here in an age. Sorry.

I’ll try to catch up a bit in this post, starting with this strange winter. One day in mid-November we woke up to a thick blanket of snow everywhere in the village and on our just-finished roof. Weeks of unusually cold, sub-zero temperatures followed.

Still, we were ready for it. With the help of the ever-resourceful, energetic, wonderfully supportive and downright invaluable Workawayers, Skyler and Cait and Victor (and of course, Oliver, it goes without saying), we finished hempcreting through the roof in September, laid the wood fibre insulation and sarking board and handed over to our carpenter and roofer team to close up the roof. In October, I celebrated my birthday having fun slapping first coat, protective lime render on the outside of our ground floor walls. And, because it got too cold and snowy to install windows, we closed up the openings temporarily for the winter and got a wood stove installed to help the walls keep drying from the inside out.

Then followed some 50 days without snow or rain and a persistent high pressure weather pattern that locked in scandalous air pollution levels down in the valley below us that, thanks to local mass protests, generated international media attention. Come and breathe the clean mountain air – oh, the irony of it. As the icy cold weather continued, we kept an anxious eye on our still-drying first coat lime render and hempcrete walls. They did freeze and crystallise a bit on the north side, but now, some time later, don’t seem the worse for wear.

Meantime, our last volunteers of the year, Jonny and Gustavo, helped us batten down the hatches, stack firewood for the new stove and get ready for some work inside over the colder months.

In the end, up here in the village, we had our third green Christmas in a row, or rather, brown, because it was so dry. A neighbouring commune even cancelled their new year’s eve fireworks because of the fire risk. The snows didn’t come again till halfway through January, and then only once and not enough.

In the midst of all that Oliver and I drove to Innsbruck for the first global meeting of Protect Our Winters, the global mountain community against climate change movement that we are involved in. We gave a hitchhiker a ride from Chamonix to Bern who tried to tell us that this winter was just a natural cycle in the weather and things would return to normal again soon. I’m afraid he got in the wrong car. Or perhaps the right one as, credit to him, he left us enthusiastically with a notebook full of links and ideas he promised to follow up on.

It didn’t snow again until just now in March. Great big flakes falling soundlessly through the night until we had a good metre of snow and a few blissful powder days up on the hill. We are again distracted… but in a good way. A bientôt.