Cabin Fever and The Ol’ Wild West~

Oct24

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Okay, this is a big log cabin! The fireplace weighs 500 tons and is 85 feet tall.
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It is of course the six-story lobby of The Old Faithful Inn built in 1903-4.

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I have a fever for all kinds of cabins.
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They remind me of pioneers, fortitude and the American West.

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There seems to be living history you can feel in the real old ones that are still in use.
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Jim loves experiencing this too.
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We like to stay in cabins and imagine a simpler, more natural world.
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With fire for warmth, log walls for safety and wild animals as constant companions.
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At home in the wilderness…..
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Can you imagine what it was like to travel like a pioneer, stake out a claim, and build your cabin?
Okay, okay, there would be no wi-fi, no indoor plumbing, no grocery stores.
Can you imagine NO WIFI…..Ever????
I can bare knuckle it for 10 days max.
Cheers to you from the, almost wild, WiFi-west~

218 thoughts on “Cabin Fever and The Ol’ Wild West~”

  1. Lovely photographs! I love log cabins too. I can’t imagine living in those times… not just the wi-fi, but the lack of connection to people and information. I would find that hard I think!

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  2. We stayed at The Old Faithful Inn last summer, nice to see the lobby and fireplace again. 🙂 All of your cabin photos are so cozy. But, I cannot imagine crossing the country in a covered wagon and building my home. No indoor plumbing is a deal breaker!

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  5. I love log cabins – you photos are display them perfectly. Awesome photos of the Old Faithful Inn. I was absolutely wowed when we visited it this fall – it is almost like it grew out of the ground! All that work that must have gone into building it is pretty amazing. We got a coffee each and just sat on one of those old chair admiring it for an hour! 🙂

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    • The architect, Robert Reamer was really young when he designed this. He also did the Yellowstone Lake Hotel where we stayed. I love both, but they couldn’t be more different. Y, Lake is sort a Rhode Island Victorian mansion style, and OF is rustic log cabin mansion. Reamer sent people all over the park collecting gnarled lodgepole pines to make those fascinating twisted log balcony rails. We’ve stayed here twice and this time we did the tour, seeing the really old rooms in the main building. I love all the old, original craftsman furniture too!

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        • Hey Michele,
          Wonderful to hear from you! And, yes there is life after social work! 😉 I am home now, but we leave in a week for Europe. Would love to meet you in Old Town when I get back. Hope is all is well with you my friend and look forward to seeing you. Be well! ❤ ❤

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  6. Oh, Cindy. Tom and I also both love log cabins and it’s only devine providence and the grace of God that kept us from buying a ‘modern if you will’ log cabin to be built on 3 acres of the most beautiful piece of forested land in the Blue Ridge Mountain area around 2000. I’d retired in Dec 1999 and I wanted away – as far away as I could get. I think Tom was thinking this would be just another adventure. I actually had to live in an equal or near equal log cabin that we would have [yes,tricked out with the latest] but what I realized with Tom’s advancing medical needs, it wasn’t going to happen in our lifetime. I’d come to the conclusion I couldn’t be further than 20 minutes away from major medical and then with the winter weather – well – that was out. We ended up in beautiful rolling hills of horse country, still away from people and our own piece of heaven. However, we continued our trips to gold mines where Tom followed his passion of gold panning and I savored the outdoors and whatever cabin was ours for the 10 days or so.
    You would have made a fiesty pioneer women. Imagine staking our claim to that initial 160 acres and having a house built within the first year. That’s the stock I come from. Always, your photos are exquisite and I always wonder what publication they will end up in. Do I get to say, I knew you when?

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    • “I’d retired in Dec 1999 and I wanted away – as far away as I could get.” No wonder we understand each other so well. We were in exactly the same space psychologically when we left our careers. I retired early in ’97 and I wanted to move to the boonies. As far away from civilization and it’s discontents as reasonably feasible. We were really close to closing on a 20 acre big, gorgeous log cabin outside of Medford Oregon made out of Montana pine for a song! The economy had just plummeted and properties were a steal. I decided against it because the kids were still in college and the commute to Medford via commuter plane would have limitied their visits. If I was making the decision now, I would be blogging from that cabin. Ah well, such is life! It did have tiny bathrooms and a tiny kitchen and I love to cook. I have lots of space at The Holler, but it was a gorgeous ponderosa log home in the pines!
      Thank you for your kind words Sherri. I cleared out photos a week ago from the WordPress media gallery, just to free up space, discarding photos I didn’t want to keep. Lo and behold this erased all the photos from 300 or so posts, 50% of my posts now have fractured links since I deleted them because they were missing photos. I’m not upset anymore. Life is impermanent and my photos are a hobby that I love to share with wonderful friends like you and Tom. This is a true joy for me! You are a true joy for me. ❤

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      • Oh no – I’ve been working on a blog regarding the VA and was just ready to push the publish button when I realized my photo inserts were gone – but they are nothing and I mean nothing compared to the beauty and magnitizim we gain from the magic you bring us week after week. I don’t own a camera – Tom has many and he was taking so many photos when we met and still talking about tramping around with ‘Ansel’ as if it were an everyday occurrance – I wondered why I needed a camera. After all, the only thing i ever did was point and shoot. One of these days I’ll budget for an iPhone but at present am still using a trackphone and the price is right. I usually don’t know where it is. I still hate the sound of a ringing phone.
        Tom swears he doesn’t need an iPad but the problem being – he always has mine marking the photo blogs he wants to view together when I close my office for the night. You are always in the mix, my friend. He always finds one and sometimes two of places we’ve been together and even if his memories have been robbed by ECT, he’s beginning to share the few shadows that remain. He has my photo albums and spends hours going through them trying to put pieces together. This is a new activity for him. He’s never wanted to talk about what he didn’t remember before and that was oh so hard for me. I still have to sit on my tongue and not say, “Remember when.”
        We would have been neighbors had you purchased the log cabin in Medford – and it scares me to think we might have never met. My last assignment was at the Roseburg VA for a year. We’d thought of retiring along the coast of Oregon and then of course circumstances changed again and we went east. That year at the VA in Roseburg was 1 of the worst years of my career. The fraud and corruption was unbelievable and so many layers. It spilled over into the community and it was a dangerous place to be. That sleepy little town with the Umquah River flowing through it was deceiving in its looks. However, I loved living in a late 1800s reinavated farmhouse on the side of the mountain just below an old logging road with a small waterfall coming down into our backyard. The VA didn’t want me [obviously] and I was burned out. I didn’t have anything left to proove so I was content to sit on my big wrap-around pourch and have the deer walk across it while my little dog and I chatted about the wonders of how we had gotten to where we were. You’ll never know how many times I thought I should have gone to Bull Frog, Utah!

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      • “I still hate the sound of a ringing phone.”
        Man, we are so alike!
        It had to be our jobs, which we loved. But when we were gone. We were gone!
        The ringing phone maybe seems to us like another bad problem we are supposed to solve. I cringe everytime I hear it.
        Reminds of Dorothy Parker’s quote when a phone rang, “What fresh Hell is this?”
        BTW I read your most recent post about all the veterans who are dying waiting for a medical appointment.
        It does seem to me, when we say thank you for your service, we ought to have boots on the ground making sure that is not a lie. Making sure, for example, that they don’t die whilst waiting to see a doctor.

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  7. Peggy would live in a log house, given half the chance. And did in her pre-Curtis days, an 1800’s cabin if my memory serves me. I’ve always loved the grand old lodges built by the railroad companies to entice people to places like the Grand Canyon. –Curt

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    • Peggy sounds like a very wise woman. Did you know they called Yellowstone ‘Wonderland’ when OF first opened? Tourists came by train, and were picked up by sleds. They stayed in the winter. They still have these long iron corn poppers the guests used to pop corn in that massive fireplace. They had warmng huts all over the park. The people who came were wealthy and they came in droves. Fascinating history!

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      • Very wealthy, I’m sure. Hadn’t heard the Wonderland story, but it fits. Peggy actually spent the summer of 1969 working at Yellowstone as a waitress. She worked for a while in the Inn, but preferred working in the Lodge. She said the Boy Scouts tipped better than wealthy people did. 🙂 –Curt

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      • Peggy sounds so interesting. So she worked in Canyon Lodge I’m guessing? I believe the boy scouts were good tippers. They saved the Big Horn Sheep. They have always, as an orginization valued the wilderness, after all they trained scouts!

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  12. I adore log cabins and rustic Inns, too! Yes, what can I imagine about life in past eras? I can imagine a lot, but there is no going backwards…. for most of us. 🙂

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    • Maybe we can move forward by looking backward though, getting away from cubicles, offices, living as nature based life as possible given the realities of our circumstances. Just spending time in the natural world is healing and necessary for us. We can all incorporate that. I want to see those photos of Lake Ontario and the black swans in the spring! ❤ ❤

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  13. I love that Old Faithful Inn. The thing that I would dread in Rustic times would be the clothes – they look so uncomfortable…the outhouse in the middle of the night…no hair drying…no showers…OK I think the only thing I would like is the horses.

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    • Getting around by horseback would be a plus. I haven’t ridden regularly since I was young. I agree the clothes and hygiene issues would be a major drawback. It would be fun to pop in with a time machine, and pop-back at bath time!! 😉

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  16. Interesting that you posted this Cindy with the pics and story of the cabins. My husband and I are presently at a wonderful log cabin up along our Cache Le Poudre River about 50 mi. northwest from Loveland, Co. where we live. we had reserved this cabin for two nights this weekend in advance to come up for the weekend and just have a couple of days relaxation. It is great and the cabin though modernized quite a bit is log and stylish and so comfortable. We’ve been hiking today and drove up the road further and over to our own mountain property for a while which is not as far, but we have no cabin or home on our own property, just our old Airstream travel trailer to use up there. But, we wanted to use this cabin here for a couple nights getaway and has been relaxing. We’re going home tomorrow. The Wi fi signal is not very good, pretty sporadic but manage to get on her on WordPress and Facebook to read and post a little. Took a lot of pics too today while hiking and driving around.

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  17. So you know just what I was feeling as I posted these photos, more than just the cabins, but really about the nature of our modern lives, what we do with our time, how much we have lost touch with the healing balm of the natural world.
    I only started to really figure this out when I retired early eight years ago and have now spent so much time in wild places, including the rural Holler where I live and am now typing this to you.
    You know I was a therapist and mental health director before I retired. I see my own former and too many other people’s lives enslaved to work, and I see how much our dependence on civilization, our mortgages, our purchased lives in cities, has harmed our souls and psyches. We all need to spend time in nature, to disconnect our dependence on civilization and it’s discontents, in order to fully understand who we are and what we really want. I know the feedback you receive in the cabin and your property. It is magic. It is the power of nature. Enjoy!

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  19. That lobby of the Inn is out of this world! The details are so incredible. And I love the cabins, inside and out. Especially that fireplace. Cheers to you, Cindy.

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  26. How could we survive with no phones, TV, WiFi, internet, etc. in the past? Nowadays people cannot. They are in panic if anything wrong with these things. Even people who lived all their life without them today are losing control of the situation if anything happens. Few years ago we lived in condo apartment and blackout has happened. It last for three days. We had some senior people beside and in the evening my wife decided to bring them hot tea. They were so glad and grateful but surprised at the same time: “Where did you get it?” People rely on these new technology and forgot how to survive. We have at home portable gas stove just in case and some other things which can helped in unexpected situations. This is why we still like the cabin life in the wild. Cindy, the first cabin in your set is impressive!

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  36. Hi Cindy, what an experience, I often dream of what it was like to prospect for gold and live the adventure. It must have been tough eh? I’d still like to have a go now though!
    Best wishes, James 😀

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  43. What I can imagine, Cinty, is the closest I want to get to the real old west. Those lovely tourist cabins in your pictures were great. My dad used to love reading magazines about the real old west. He was an armchair cowboy. Good piece. 🙂 — Suzanne

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  44. I used to dream of living away from it all. I think I would’ve made good pioneering stock. But now I think of all the hardships those early pioneers lived through and I marvel at their tough spirits and on second thoughts I think I am truly grateful for being born in this day and age, with all its problems and difficulties it is “easy street” compared to 100 years ago.

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