Hi Allison, I apologize for the delay in responding to your question! I've been away for a few weeks. If ever you're in need of more immediate assistance, please don't hesitate to give our Baker's Hotline a call at 855-371-2253. We're here M-F from 9am-9pm EST, and Saturday and Sunday from 9am-5pm EST. I hope by now that you're happily baking with your new sourdough starter, and have figured out a good routine for taking care of it, most likely with some days spent in the refrigerator, followed by a day or two of room temperature maintenance to revive your starter in preparation for baking. In terms of room temperature maintenance, as long as your home is generally in the 68-80 degree range your starter should be fine, although it will tend to ripen more quickly at 80 degrees than it will at 68 degrees. To keep yeast activity vigorous you want to try to replenish (feed) your starter when it's ripe (at its peak of rising, or just beginning to fall), which means in warmer conditions you will need to be a little more attentive to your starter. Your elevation may also cause things to happen a bit more quickly, since air pressure is lower at higher altitudes, your starter and your bread may rise a bit more rapidly. One strategy you could try in warmer weather is to feed your starter a relatively larger meal, which it will take longer to consume and ferment. Our normal feeding routine calls for a 1:1:1 ratio of starter:water:flour (by weight), but for this scenario you might want to try something more like 1:4:4. A typical feeding for our starter would then become: 28g starter + 113g water + 113g AP flour. The goal here is to adjust your room temperature feeding routine so that your twice a day feedings line up closer to the peak. If your conditions are also very dry where you live, adding a bit more water to your starter maintenance routine won't hurt anything, and you may also have to adjust your bread recipes in this way. I hope this helps! Let us know how it goes. 

Barb

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