Clearing Land for my Cabin in Alaska

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It was June 28th, 2014 the first time I saw the land where I would one day build my cabin. I was living in Girdwood, Alaska with my family after moving up here earlier that year. I quickly started to learn the ropes of how things work in the Alaska wilderness. Even as someone who is very confident in the wilderness, Alaska can be extremely daunting. Moving cross-country is difficult when there are no roads and it requires the use of a plane or snow-machine in order to reach most places.

Since I was a teenager I’d always imagined building my own cabin in the wilderness. I didn’t really believe something like that was possible anymore, until an old guy who I was working with at the local peach packing shed in Palisade Colorado told me about his place up on the mountain. He had told me that his cabin was so remote that one time he had to take his wife down the mountain on a snow-machine when she was in labor with their first child!

I am not sure why, but ever since that time I started imagining living in the woods, being away from civilization. It was a kid’s dream! I already owned 10 acres of land, and now I was about to buy one more. So now I was here in Alaska, looking at property to build a cabin on nearly 20 years later.

The land where I built my cabin, 1-week before closing.

Caswell Lakes

Caswell Lakes is community of cabins and homes just a bit north of Willow, Alaska. It’s a quiet community and the people stay mostly to themselves there. It’s in the center of the mushing community, with the legendary Iditarod race starting line being just 20 miles away. Most people live off the grid or have very few amenities. It typically snows around 4-8 feet each year, depending on how big of a snow year it is.

It was the first summer my family and I were up in Alaska, and Caswell Lakes immediately stood out as the kind of place I was looking for. I snapped up a deal to buy two 1/2 acre lots there, nestled away from the lake a little bit, for a total of 1 acre of raw land.

I paid cash for the lots. It was an amazing feeling knowing that I owned real estate that no one (except the government) could take away from me. I stayed the night on my land on the first night that I owned it in the same spot where the fire ring is located now (as of Feb, 2020). My first lodging was a small two-person tent.

Clearing land by hand

So the first lesson to be learned here is, don’t ever try to clear your land without heavy equipment. It takes far longer and will literally wear you out. The bonus being that you will gain a lot of muscle mass.

When I found the spot where I wanted to build I used fire, shovels, picks, rakes and a chainsaw to slowly clear away the spot where I planned to build the cabin. I usually would sleep in a tent when I was there, so I wasn’t able to bring my kids often at first. But I did manage to get them out there once before the snow fell.

Kiddos love to work on cabins and out in the forest!

Snow comes quickly in Alaska!

It wasn’t long before snow and ice started to show up on the land. Soon the ground was frozen and there would be no way to dig up any of the material. So I switched to cutting trees and burning away brush for awhile. I also set up my first cache of wood and supplies out there and hid it under a tarp. Little did I know that soon the snow would bury that tarp, melt and then freeze into an impenetrable block of ice, preventing me from accessing my stuff for a period of time.

Learning some rookie lessons

Ultimately these first few months on the land taught me a lot about what I didn’t already know. I had put together a preliminary foundation on the land, only to realize that it was a really bad idea to now do more dirt work first. So I had to wait till the next spring before I could work on the cabin.

Also, I didn’t know much about building. At this point I was starting to think about what my plan was going to be. I bought some framing books, and read the Alaska Outdoor Forum Cabins and Remote Living forum and learned a lot from some of the old timers with more experience on there.

So I decided that I was going to build a smaller cabin first that I would call my “tiny cabin”. I knew that it would be a major upgrade from the tent, and would serve as a nice base camp for working out there.

In the upcoming blogs I will share more about my adventure with you. I hope you are enjoying my story!