There are a lot of clichés about "a good foundation." After building our current home on rocks (99 of them to be exact, lovingly lugged up the bluff 2 at a time by Jenna), we realized that if we wanted to build a cabin that would last, the foundation was going to be a beast of a project.  We wanted to do a root cellar under the cabin, so in order to not freeze the cellar, the cabin had to be built on the ground rather a floating foundation.  We wanted to keep the logs off of the soil but have the heated space start at ground level so we have the warmth of the ground (rather than -40 ..read more

When we decide to build a cabin, I foolishly thought to myself "great! no digging!" Unlike the sun lodge, which is dug into the hill, I presumed the cabin would be made with more log and less shovel.  Think again.  This fall we worked on preparing our building site.  This involved: 1. Clearing the site.  The cabin will be 20' x 20', so we cleared a 40' x 40' area in the forest.  We cut down trees and stacked them into future firewood piles, used our new toy- a portable winch to pull out the tree stumps, then chopped the rest of the roots out by hand.  We removed t ..read more

This spring we rushed back from a traveling and hunting in the Arctic with an important task in mind-to protect our logs.  As summer sets in, numerous insects were hoping to call our pile of cabin logs their new home.  We had a bunch of logs that looked like this... That we needed to look like this... "Barking" the logs is the process of roughly removing the bark so that the wood can dry quickly and without becoming damaged by insects or rot.  Luckily, we are no strangers to getting bark off of logs.  There is a magical time window in the spring when it is easy to peel g ..read more

Boat full of fish! We feed our sled dogs a mix of chum and coho salmon caught in the Tanana River.  They're hungry puppies, and the fish this far upriver are not fatty enough to supply all of the dog's nutritional needs so we supplement the fish with fat and rice. We primarily fish with 4 and 6 inch set gill nets.  We check the net with our riverboat or canoe. David, Jasper and Pip cut fish in the river on a hot day. We start fishing in late August and keep going until the river starts flowing ice.  For the first few weeks if the temperatures are warm we c ..read more