Some houses up in Strawberry Park sit quiet for weeks at a time, waiting for headlights to come up the road. Ethos Private Home Management looks after them while they wait — snow cleared off the drive and walk so an arrival at midnight is uneventful, ice kept off the steps, and in summer the lawn mowed, the edges cut and the beds tidied before anyone pulls in. There is a quiet pride in a place that looks lived-in when nobody has lived in it since October. Steamboat Springs weather does not pause for absent owners; it stacks against doors and fills in tracks by morning. Someone has to stand between a home and the storm when the road is all that connects them.