Despite mother nature’s slow start to the snow season, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the office this week. Mark, our GM, is enjoying some off-piste skiing in Utah. Tyson and Peter are taking turns at Ski Bowl. Josie’s over in Bend probably causing some mischief on the mountain. And Leigh, well, she’s staring down the steep terrain of the Tetons. She took a break from the mountain to give us the low down on life in Jackson, Wyo.

Even when the snow is low, it’s hard to complain about spending the holidays in the Tetons. Walking through the antler arch at JAC, I couldn’t have been happier to be any other place with my family, 8 adults and 5 kids, to seek some mountain adventures. Over the years I’ve made some of the best turns of my life in Teton Village and on Teton pass, but snow is way down this year and it took a little extra motivation to make the best of this winter playground. In a way, I’ve enjoyed the challenge to seek out a stash here or there, earn my turns in the pass or enjoy a snowshoe in Teton park at sunset. As always, Jackson did not disappoint.

Day 1: we were  a large crew on the mountain. Ten out of 13 on snow—impressive for a crew that flew in from Oregon, Vermont, Florida and Italy.  For the first time in 15+ years, I took my first run of the year with my dad, brother-in-law and ripping eight-year-old nephew. All ages were stoked. Over the next several sunny days, I enjoyed skiing and snowboarding with my four year old daughter, husband, parents and siblings. We made the most of low snow on the mountain and explored the magic of Teton park, enjoyed many après beers at the Moose and shared lots of memorable holiday meals.

Winter wishes from Jackson, and I wish mountains everywhere lots of snow in the New Year!

….Happy Holidays.

Beach, mountains, Veuve: A montage of our holiday….wishing you all the best.

[Editors Note: Our friend and copywriter Alex left Portland last January to start a new life in the French Alps. This month, he’s returned as Guest Editor of The Thought Kitchen to share some of his experiences.]

“Everything on a boat must have a place.”

My father taught me that. He’s a sailor, but I’ve found that the rule applies whether the vessel in question is a 30’ ketch in the North Atlantic or—as in my wife’s and my case—a 10’x14’ French Mazot floating among the landlocked Alps. While it doesn’t take long to clean 140 square feet, it takes even less time to make a complete mess of it. So, though the nearest harbor is some sixty miles away on Lake Geneva, part of life in our Alpine anchorage is keeping things ship-shape.

We moved into the Mazot—a French word that I usually translate as ‘hay shed’—in June. The first thing we learned, from the hand-painted board on the deck, was that our new home had been built in 1806 and was named Le Bouet Nir. (Like boats, houses in the Alps all have names.) The second thing we learned was that it was very, very small.

Of course this wasn’t much of a surprise. We’d known what we were getting into from the start; indeed, the smallness of our new home was part of its appeal—at least to me.

Ever since 2005, when I first saw an article about a 2.6-square-meter dwelling called the Micro Compact Home, I’d been fascinated by the idea of living in a small house. Like a bonsai tree, the beauty of the MCH lay in its combination of perfect execution and miniature proportions. When compared with the McMansions of the 90’s, to me the MCH seemed to be on a scale closer to my own. I wanted one.

Later, while working at Nau, I met Dee Williams and learned about her Little House on the Trailer. (Nau’s film profile of Dee, with over half a million views, is still on The Collective). I visited MoMA’s exhibition of pre-fab housing and read Mimi Zieger’s book Tiny. I seemed to be falling in love with one of the micro-trends of the new 21st century: micro-living.

So when the chance came to move into our Mazot, my wife and I jumped at the chance. We were newlyweds. We had love, optimism, and—perhaps most importantly—blissful naïveté. Maybe it was the kind of idea that only a writer and an out-of-work architect could love, but the romance of a cottage in the mountains overwhelmed the scent of cabin-fever that our friends and family caught in the place. “You’re going to live in there?” our parents asked when we sent them a photo. “Of course!” we replied. “Isn’t it great?!”

And so we set about moving in and finding places for all our stuff. Of course, the easiest way to do this is to just have fewer things. For some, this is part of the appeal—being a smugly self-satisfied minimalist is one of the clichés of small-house living—but we weren’t really into counting all our things and only keeping 100. Instead, we took what we needed, and the rest ended up in a friend’s basement.

This done, we settled, quite snuggly, into our new home. The grand tour takes but a moment: The main room has a bed, a table, two chairs and two small dressers. Behind that, a 4’x4’ kitchen sports two electric burners, a mini-fridge and toaster oven. A similarly sized bathroom manages to fit a shower, toilet and sink. What more, we asked ourselves, could we need?

We’ve found living in a small space to be, above all, practical. It’s less money and less work, meaning we have more time to enjoy the mountains that we moved here for. To us, the choice to ‘live lightly’ isn’t primarily about having a smaller environmental footprint—though that certainly is a byproduct. It’s a choice to have the time to focus on the things that matter to us, by keeping the necessity of shelter in perspective.

We find ourselves visiting our friend’s basement less often; the stuff in storage, it turns out, isn’t all that important. Most of what we really need fits. When the weather is fair, we eat outside in the yard. If it rains, we curl up inside or read on the porch. And when we get cold, we make tea: the mugs are warm in our hands and the stove heats up the whole house.

And when the house is a mess, we take a few minutes and put things back in their places. After three months in such a small home, you find that it’s not just your things that find their rightful place, but you as well.

We love Forest Park; it’s 5100 acres of biking, hiking, walking, running—a few of our favorite things. So last Friday, we were excited to get out of the office and give it some love with the rest of the Backyard Collective. We headed up Ridge Trail with the Conservation Alliance and a few other cool companies in Portland to build turnpikes, pull ivy and put in some hard work for a place we love. Here are few photos from our day in one of our favorite backyard parks.

It wouldn’t be summer without a few broken bones. At least, that’s what Josie and Peter can say. For their summer adventures, they either found themselves on the wrong end of a water ski or wrestling with a few Mastodons. But for most of us at Nau, our warm weather escapes took us to places where time and cell service do not exist, to vast expanses of land where we feel incredibly humbled, to islands where new ways of human living are being tested, or to the edge of our surfboard where everything and nothing exists, all at once.

Oh summer, how we love thee. To celebrate your waning days, we’re toasting a few mimosas in your honor and writing down a few words of remembrance by dedicating this short blog series to you and those moments that leave us humbled, broken and so damn happy we did it.

To kick-off our Summer Departure series, Josie takes us to Colorado where she helped unearth 100,000-year-old dinosaur bones buried deep in her grandparent’s backyard in what is now known as Snowmastodon.

Last October, tusks from a wooly mammoth were discovered in the pond at my grandparent’s house in Snowmass, CO.  Since then, scientists have removed over 4,000 Ice Age fossils that were buried under 40 feet of mud and peat. Eight months after the discovery, I flew to Snowmass, CO to see the dig for myself.

I rolled up the driveway with my mom, hoping to get a peek at the action.  To my surprise, after a 5-minute tour of a big mud pit, the welcoming staff from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science handed my clean, soft, office-working hands a shovel and said “start digging.”

Living in Portland, I get excited when I find a new bike street or a food cart that doesn’t suck. I got to experience the real thrill of discovery when my shovel hit rib bones of a Mastodon that walked on this planet about 999,967 years before I was born (give or take 50,000 years).

We logged the GPS location, size, position and type of bone and kept digging. People around me found molars, femurs and claws from sloths, wooly mammoth’s, mastodon’s and various other species from the Ice Age.  A mountain bike racer/fossil nerd from Grand Junction taught my mom and I how to encase the large bones in plaster to keep them from getting damaged during transport to the Denver Museum.  My hands were so beautifully dirty, I was as giddy as a scientist.

For my Grandpa, one of the biggest surprises of his life was waiting for him at the age 84. For now, I’ll keep getting excited about discovering things in my own city, but in the grand scheme of things, I am ruined. My barometer for discovery is skewed for life.

We’re finally getting a few sunny days in Portland. It’s Friday afternoon and our minds are drifting to post-work brews somewhere outside. And—wouldn’tcha know it?—we stumbled across a video that validates our decision to enjoy one of our favorite local beers. It turns out that Windmer Brothers is making wooden beer taps out of local salvaged trees. Not only is the video of the process mesmerizing, but it’s also a small symbol of a big company’s efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle.

Is it happy hour yet?

I’m kind of obsessed with porteur bicycles, simply because they are so damned beautiful in their simplicity. Though variations of this style of bike have been used around the world for transporting goods on the flat rack over the front wheel, Parisian newspaper couriers owned these utilitarian rides in the mid 1900s, the Porteurs des Journaux.

This obsession, along with the need for a commuter bike, resulted in my buying a plug-and-play version of a porteur last year—a basic Linus Roadster with a Velo Orange Porteur rack. The bike has served me well for the last year on my 10-mile daily commute. I just strap my laptop to the rack and go, no need for a sweaty backpack or unbalanced panniers hanging over the back tire.

But recently I have become interested in the modified, motley porteurs I see around Portland that are jimmy-rigged from old bike frames and clunky racks, and the one above is my favorite of that style. I first saw it parked in front of Whole Foods on Sandy and 43rd and I had to drive around the block to get a second look (and to snap this drive-by photo). I love its garish colors, hot pink heavy-duty rack and mismatched rims, not to mention the green seat and pink break lines. It’s a complete 180 from the precious porteurs I had been fetishizing before—those hand-made versions that take years to actually get underneath you (and to pay for).

A month or two later, I saw the bike again. It was being pedaled down Sandy Blvd. by a guy in lime green coveralls. I think he had dreadlocks. He may have been wearing a pink hard hat. Anyway, we’ve been doing series of posts here called “This Is My Bike” for a while now, and what I loved about that was how it showed how bikes can be a reflection of the rider—in the same way a dog and its master strangely resemble one another. This was one of the most overt expressions of that. It reminded me that we need to resurrect our TIMB posts. And that I should have been on my bike next to him instead of in my car.

Wow. I can just imagine the assignment in preschool: Do a drawing about your dad and share it with the rest of the class.

Now, as a young dad myself, I can totally relate to this scenario. Of course I’d love for my son to immediately whip out the magic markers and illustrate my surf passion just like Kai, the son of our friend Mark Hoffman, did a few weeks ago. In my dreams, the picture would be of a grizzled version of myself screaming down the face of a giant north coast bomb. Fearless. Unshakable.

But when the subject of the piece is the angst that only a surfer who has recently given up regular trips to the coast to be a good father knows, things get a bit bittersweet. Certainly my own son has heard me lament about sub-par surf conditions, plea for more water time, and while watching surf videos, pondered my answer to the question, “Can you do that, Dad?”

Of course, we hope that those little moments of bliss when you score a soft, long, perfectly formed left at Seaside hit home with the kids—or at the very least that fleeting feeling of freedom when you get a few hours away with friends and a few cold beers on the beach. But that’s a bit tougher to explain to a 5-year-old.

Kai’s dad is half of the directing duo, The Hoffman Brothers, and the auteur behind the Nau short video Spring Runoff.

Ever since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by maps. As a child, I would raid my parents’ dusty collection of National Geographics, wallpapering my room with the muted browns and greens and blues of their intricate borders and shaded topography. Perhaps the impulse to live among those maps was an early manifestation of the wanderlust that’s kept me on the move since leaving home, or possibly the maps themselves are to blame for my desire to see the places they represented. Either way, while those maps are long gone, the fascination continues: today, whether it’s Google maps or a historical print, show me a map and I fall into the contours of its coastlines, the mazes of its metropolitan streets.

More recently, I’ve begun collecting maps from the places I lived. So when I stumbled across Studio MKO’s beautiful cut-out maps of American and International cities, my only disappointment was that they hadn’t yet done Portland. Fortunately, they also offer this beautiful (if less mind-blowingly intricate) series of pen & ink city maps, including a wide selection of cities—including Stumptown.

See the entire collection at Supermarket.