Our Goals

We strive to be good stewards of the land here at the Park Cabin Company. You may be surprised to learn that despite the pastoral setting, our cabins actually sit on one of the longest commercially utilized parcels in the area. Formerly the headquarters for the -X6 Ranch and Park Saddle Horse Company, our location has been used to support the local tourism biz for nearly 100 years. (Read more about the history of the -X6 here.)

It is important to us to offset our development of the Cabin Co with efforts geared toward environmental protection and sustainability to preserve the incredible habitat here at the Crown of the Continent. There are few easy solutions, and certainly none of our efforts are perfect- but we’re trying! The very rural nature of our area make some practices that folks in most parts of the country take for granted quite difficult here.

Our Efforts

We started construction of our cabins on a tight budget, but with plans to make them as efficient as possible under the usual constraints of building in such a remote area. All of our cabins are insulated to or past code, featuring windows with Low-E double pane glass and efficient and simple in-wall electric heaters. Every lighting fixture uses LED bulbs, and our toilets, sinks, and showers are designed to conserve water.

Whether you are in one of our larger cabins with a full kitchen, or in a one-bedroom cabin featuring a kitchenette, you’ll notice a nifty little tub on the counter near the sink. This handy (and pretty nice looking, we think) bucket is lined with a biodegradable bag designed to break down in a compost pile. We encourage our guests to add their food scraps (but not meat or dairy, please!) during the course of their stay, at the end of which (or before, if your bucket fills up) we will collect the bag and add it to our compost tumbler. Our compost system, as well as our bear-proof garbage cans, are located off the property to deter any critters from visiting the PCC.

Our most obvious attempt at sustainability is the installation of our solar arrays (you can’t miss em!). The pair of pole-mounted, dual-axis tracking PV systems are designed to provide 80-90% of our yearly energy needs. As of January 2020, we’re sitting right at 97%… which we are very pleased with! They are super-efficient by tracking the sun both horizontally and vertically as it moves across the sky. While a stationary PV system would have an energy output shaped like a curve, ours shoots straight to peak production and plateaus there all day, allowing us to use half as many panels to create the same amount of power.

Our Future

We hope to continue to invest in renewable energy and sustainable practices as we grow our business. We’ve worked on partnering up with the Park and its concessionaires on a recycling program, but have thus far struck out. Hopefully, we will at least be able to collect cans this year and store them in a bearproof manner before taking them “to town” on those rare trips away from Duck Lake.

The next big thing for our PV setup is to install a set of batteries and micro-inverters that will allow our system to both store power to use at night and early in the morning, as well as attack our “peak demand” during the day. This technology will also make the Park Cabin Co. “grid-agnostic” so that we can continue to use solar and battery power if and when the power ever goes out. Self-sufficiency is a way of life here on the Rocky Mountain Front, and this addition will get us that much closer to the ideal! We’d love to have a wind turbine, too!

We also plan to phase out single-use soaps and shampoos and other disposables that create so much plastic waste. And we’ll always be looking at ways to do everything we do better.

How You Can Help

We want you to have the most amazing vacation of your life while staying at the Park Cabin Company. We designed our cabins with relaxation and comfort in mind, and still hold those tenets paramount to our hospitality. We’re never going to guilt-trip you into taking a cold shower or suffering through a 100 degree summer day without a/c!

That said, if our guests really want to help in meeting our goals towards conservation, there are a few things that anyone can do to limit the expenditure of natural resources, at the PCC or at home. For instance, it’s usually unnecessary to run the heaters AND the air-conditioner at the same time (especially when off on a hike)! When you head out for the day, it’d be great if you’d close the blinds and moderate the degree to which the cabin is heated or cooled while you aren’t present.

Additionally, our “peak demand” is usually just before sunrise- just before our solar panels “wake up"- right when most folks are cranking up the heat, showering, cooking breakfast, and getting ready for the day. If you really want to help reduce that demand, try saving the shower for the evening on a long sunny summer day. Every little bit of energy we can conserve is power that doesn’t need to come from a big power plant somewhere further down the grid.

Thanks for you interest in the PCC’s environmentally-minded efforts!