Wrapping up 2011

Well it has been a while, and now the end of another year is fast approaching. As fall has turned to winter Lou keeps busy making wine to keep the stores around the state stocked with Bear Creek wines. This week is the last week of the semester for me, so I will have a bit more freedom come next Monday. We have continued to do yard work between snow storms and have made decent progress.
Over the weekend we got another good dump of snow on the hill tops.
Lou and I left our house while the winds were still blasting sleet against our windows in hopes of gliding across snow at higher elevations. After a mini-adventure with our car we decided it was better to ski the road to the trails then drive there. And what a blast we had skiing down the road. Turns out that the road was much better skiing than the trails as neither had been plowed or groomed. We took ourselves on a 2 hour tour getting back to the car just as it got dark and smiling ear to ear. We are looking forward to our next opportunity to ski commute.
From the more distant past here are some shots from picking apples from our orchard and making them into cider. The cider was ready for thanksgiving. We tried a different recipe from past ventures in cider making and are really happy with the end result.Here is Lou picking crab-apples off a tree in front of the house. This whole "garden" will be a focus for us next spring. Right now it is incredibly overgrown. In fact it is terraced but you can't see where one level ends and the next begins.Here is the harvest. We have three kinds of apple trees (as far as we can tell) and harvested 30 gallons this year.The winery purchased a new crusher to deal with the apples. It made short work of the fruit.The press. Fresh apple juice is amazing.
Graham and Greta came down from Anchorage to spend Thanksgiving weekend with us. As always we had a blast, good food, good drinks (they helped us put a dent in the cider), a little work, and lots of game playing. Below you can see the winery's production building in action as Graham, Greta, and Lou bottle Christmas Berry wine for the holiday shoppers.
We managed to fit in a little trek up the hill behind Bear Greek. Yeah for a snowing Turkey weekend.
Lou did a good job of getting us all in the photo and not cutting off any one's head.
One of the outdoor projects we worked on this fall was putting a metal roof on the shed below and cleaning out the junk left under the lean-to. Hopefully it will stay clear of junk......