cabin fever

So here I am in the land of chapped lips and nosebleeds. Mang, it is D-R-Y out here; every time I blow my nose it's like a Rorschach test of horror. And there's no air in the air. I'm at 7800 ft elevation or so. Slightly dizzy all the time. But I feel pretty good. I'm hunting all my own food, tunneling through snow, dressed in deerskin, with fishbones in my hair... Well, maybe not quite. But I do have to keep the woodstove going, and I am not very good at that. Took me about an hour to revive the poor thing this morning. Oh well.

We should ride motorcycles out here. The roads are cool. Highway 165 through San Isabel National Forest passes by Bishop's Castle, one of the odder tourist attractions around. The extremely task-oriented Jim Bishop has built / is building it by hand, one rock at a time; it was little and chintzy when I was a kid but now it's HUGE. There's a smoke-belching metal dragon head on one of the turrets. There's an orb. They used to have raves up there. Even better than the castle are the signs he's placed around the castle, hand-painted sandwich-board-type things informing the public that Jim Bishop has built the castle all by himself, without any help from anyone, especially not his dad.