Anyone who has ever called or emailed us has interacted with Owen at some point or another over the last decade. What some of you may not know is that he now lives on a remote mountainside overlooking a bay in Alaska. Completely off the grid.
Once a city dweller like the rest of the CH Wine crew, Owen had bigger dreams and aspirations (with the blessing of his wonderful wife Allyse) to go polar opposite (pun intended), and travel to the outer reaches of humankind’s civilization comfort zone, towards the top of our rocky earth.
Summer days with no sunset. Winter days with no daylight. Northern lights dancing overhead. Screeching bald eagles, and moose mating calls. Bears passing through, and the local pack of wolves.
You buy pork at the store, Owen has to raise pigs if there’ll be pork this coming winter. You can get a dozen eggs at a farmers market, Owen raises chickens. Thanksgiving dinner? You probably guessed it, Owen has to raise a Turkey for the larger portion of the year to enjoy his festive bird, and the aforementioned local wolf pack and passing bears always make for stressful (to say the absolute least) and often hairy situations.
But the rewards are boundless. The view from his outhouse (yes, no plumbing on a remote Alaskan mountainside) is beyond 4KHD on the most modern television and the most recent nature episode you digested on said high def TV. The fishing is better than any lake, stream, or river in the continental US. Watching the whales come in and out of the bay from Owen’s is something you can’t get anywhere else on the planet. And Owen’s annual Moose hunting antics are always great for an office story (we’re still rooting for him to bag one this coming season!).
Outside of a customer service call, what’s the best way to keep up with Owen? His Instagram feed.
Whether it’s turkeys crash landing, making nachos with a flame torch, or a homemade hot tub in the dead of winter, there is something from the innovative to the inspiring on down to the hilariously funny that emanates from his life (choices). For those of us who live in a 500 sq ft city apartment to those of us in a 3k+ sq ft home, watching Owen’s videos, checking out his photos, and reading his captions gives us a sense of the luxuries we’re afforded by “modern” society, and public services, in a way that we realize fully how much we take for granted all of these luxuries, meanwhile Owen & Co. are literally fighting nature hourly, just to stay alive.
He is the great adventurer of our team, possibly our city, and definitely to be held in esteem alongside the great men and women who went before him to blaze trail in the wild arctic.
Ok, maybe that’s a bit much, but the guy’s tough as nails for chasing away a wolf pack to keep his chickens and pigs safe. We just hope he was wearing clothes (working from home tends to breed way more “boxer days” than ones fully clothed).