About My Journey to Homesteading

Hey there! Welcome to Rocky Mountain Homestead. I am Angela, the creator behind this blog and my youtube channel Rocky Mountain Homestead with Angela.

I am blessed to live in the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado with my husband and our 8 children. I am a former nurse. I have been a full-time home maker and SAHM since 2012. I have homeschooled our children for the past 11 years. In February of 2023, I became a firefighter/EMR with our local fire department. On our homestead, we try to raise as much of our food as our property allows us to. We raise chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, nigerian dwarf goats, silver fox rabbits, new zealand/california rabbits and a couple colonies of honeybees.

Homesteading, for me, is a way to reconnect our severed roots with nature. It is a way to rediscover traditional skills that previous generations once soley relied on. Skills that have been forgotten or are now considered unnecessary. This blog is a window into my life that I created with my hands as I pour out my heart to share the things I love. A place where I can share the things I love, the things I have learned and am learning, the mistakes I have made and the challenges I go through as I navigate this beautiful journey of homesteading that God has led me to.

A litte more on what led me to homestead.

My homestead journey started from a dream many years ago. Having grown up in the city in Massachusetts, the hustle and bustle of the city was deeply engraved in me. Which could explain why I am ALWAYS adding more to my overflowing plate. Most people burn out when their days are overloaded and flow into the days ahead. However, I thrive when I am spread thin. I don’t get it either, but I have found this to be true time and time again.

When we would visit my meme (grandma) as a child, we would have to drive through a beautiful, small town countryside. There was a gorgeous green pasture and a beautiful, red barn right at the base of what people in Massachusetts would call a mountain. After living in the rockies for 10 years, I would now call that a hill. However, I loved that the area. It was not busy. There were no street lights. No smog in the air. No busses or noise. At night you could see fireflies dancing along the sides of the road. I loved the tranquilty of that picturesque image that I had stored in my mind. I then started to dream of what that lifestyle would be like.

Fast forward a couple of decades and finding myself again, I now get to live that dream. Only theres no beautiful, green pasture as far as the eye can see. Nor is there a large, red traditional barn on flat ground. My journey has led me to a beautiful log home on the side of a 45 degree sloped property. A property made up of lots of dirt and rock. There is brush for landscape. There are boulders on our property that are just about as large as our home. There is even a canyon in between them where you will often find bones left from a mountain lion kill.

Through lots of patience, sacrifices, sweat and long years of work, our homestead was carved, literally, through all the rock. We may not have flat ground, but the views from anywhere on our property are breathtaking. We may not have luscious green pasture, but I have fallen in love with all things rustic that comes with living in the west. We may not have pasture for our animals to feed on, but we have been blessed to be able to afford good quality, organic feed for our animals. We may not have the large, traditional barn for our animals, but Mike and his guys built a large log chicken coop for our poultry and a log barn is in the plans to house our goats.

Through hard trials and tougher days throughout our marriage, the need to be more self sufficient and to learn the skills that I never had passed down to me had created a spark that rekindled that dream I had forgotten about long ago. The dream of homesteading. Raising as much of our own food as we were able to. Preserving food. Baking breads and cooking from scratch. Making DIY products for our home. Making soap. Turning our house into a handmade, homemade home.