‘The Most Amazing Treehouse’: Meet Your New Mountain Home

When Jodi and her husband began looking for a vacation property near Lyons, they needed a place that would serve as a getaway from their bed-and-breakfast in Colorado -- and although they didn’t know it at the time, they were also incubating dreams of a family-grown business providing wellness-based skin-care products.

As she hunted for the perfect retreat, Jodi watched the house on Aspen Drive being built -- a hand-milled log home that she describes as “Telluride-esque” -- but she never thought they would be the buyers.

“I was shopping for three years,” she remembers. In every other home they toured, the bedrooms seemed too cramped or the properties needed too much work. Nonetheless, they were about to put in an offer when the log home on Aspen Drive first came on the market.

“It was a no-brainer,” she says. “Pictures will never do it justice. And I am so glad that pictures didn’t do it justice then -- because we wouldn’t have been able to buy it.”

That was 2008, when they visited their mountain home during the bed-and-breakfast’s “slow” months of the year. “It was like our recharge zone,” Jodi says -- even though the cabin is also where she put in months’ worth of work on the latest family owned business enterprise, Sierra Sage, which makes homeopathic herbal skin care products. (That business is also why the family is selling the cabin -- Sierra Sage’s Green Goo line has exploded to the point where it makes sense for Jodi to spend most of her time near the home office.)

She met her husband in Lyons, and a lot of his friends live in the area, so they hosted parties and barbecues and fishing trips from the vacation home -- plus a wedding, several birthday festivities and one family reunion with about 40 people, she recalls.

There’s a community pool, miles of national forest trails and access to hunting and fishing from the cabin; they’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring the terrain on dirt bikes or four-wheelers or horseback -- or on foot. The property backs up to Roosevelt National Forest, so there’s plenty of wilderness to explore.

As fun-seeking newlyweds, she and her husband set up a Skee-Ball machine, a Wii and three bars in the home; “it was one big playground,” Jodi laughs. And even after they had a little girl and moved to Lyons, Jodi and her family still headed for the cabin on Aspen Drive to enjoy the mountains and get away from it all.

“As soon as you turn on County Road 47, it’s like you’re on vacation,” she describes. “We go up to Estes Park to do our shopping, stock up on groceries and cook really nice meals there.”

On a typical day, her husband is typically the first out of bed, Jodi says. (She wears an eye mask so the sun rising through the eastern-facing windows in the bedroom don’t wake her up before she’s ready.) He turns on the fireplace downstairs -- one of three in the house -- makes coffee and reads while waiting for the rest of the family to start moving.
“We have coffee on the porch and take the dogs for a little walk,” she notes.

Then it’s time for her to retreat to the master suite upstairs -- where Jodi has a full office and a porch in addition to the bedroom and a big bathroom with a massive tub surrounded by windows to gaze upon the forest.

“I’ll work for an hour or two while my daughter has breakfast -- they make pancakes -- and around 10 or 10:30, we have a bath together and look out the windows at the elk or moose or chipmunks or whatever else comes by,” she explains.
After the bath and lunch, sometimes it’s pool time or time for yard work, and there’s almost always a late-afternoon hike with the dogs or four-wheeler ride through nature.

“That’s really fun, too, because you can take the four-wheeler back to some of the more remote areas, see the horses in the community horse pasture or go down to some fun spots where the riverbeds are and look for different rocks and mica,” she notes.

The evening means happy hour on the porch and usually a card game or board game; there are TVs in the house, but they aren’t heavily utilized because the vibe is “really just more about hanging out,” Jodi describes. Sometimes they’ll sit on the porch and count the shooting stars they see crossing the sky; sometimes she’ll have another bath; sometimes she’ll watch a movie -- or a blizzard -- with her husband in their master bedroom while the fireplace crackles next to them. If it snowed enough, they’ll make snowmen or snow angels (or both!) on the porch the next day.

Jodi adds that the community made it easy to be a part-timer there -- the volunteer fire department and friendly neighbors reassured her that even when she and her family had to travel, their home would be safe.
“They plow the roads and look out for you -- and if they see something that looks weird, they’ll call you,” she notes. “It’s so nice to be in a place where you feel it’s safe.”

“It’s immediate medicine,” Jodi concludes. “A lot of places, you have to work to relax -- and this place has a really special way of flipping the switch for you in two seconds.”

Now as Jodi grows and scales Green Goo (with the help of her family), she’s ready to hand the keys over to someone else willing to take on a new adventure.

“Every time I’m up there, I look out the window and feel like I’m in the most amazing treehouse,” Jodi says. “When the clouds come in and sink low and it gives you that foggy, cool feeling, it’s amazing. If you’re looking for that mountain vibe -- you can have it at the snap of a finger.”

1012 Aspen Drive, Lyons
Offered at $987,000

For more information, to view the interactive 3D tour and see a featured video about the property,

please click HERE