By Andrew Flynn, Guest Author
November 4, 2025
50 years ago, just before the close of the Alaska Homesteading Act, my wife’s grandfather and his friend proved up on 40 acres in the vast roadless interior of Alaska. This is the country of endless meandering river plains and nearly impassible swampy terrain, punctuated by the spruce and birch hills and dotted by a thousand lakes. In the distance, the rugged Alaska range shines as a white and jagged line in stark contrast to the richly textured country that sustains moose, caribou, wolves, bears and beavers.
Rather like their neighbors the beaver, our homesteaders worked quickly to finish two 16x20 log cabins just as the snow began to fly. This feat is the more impressive considering the use of hand tools and the small size of the spruce trees in the area (the shallow rooted black spruce tops out at 30’ tall and achieves the unimpressive girth of 6-10” in diameter). Thus began a long year of complete isolation, back breaking land clearing, cultivating crops, fending off moose, bear hunting and all the wilderness necessities and pursuits that make Alaska truly the last frontier.
Within a few years the site became mostly abandoned, and was mainly enjoyed as a sort of squirrel village, as the permafrost sagged the foundations and the harsh weather deteriorated the chinking. The small log-framed cache fell down, was rummaged through by bears and eventually overtaken by moss. The wilderness continued to reclaim the site for 40 years before my wife and I bought the property, and chartered a plane to drop us off with a minimum of both gear and experience. Immediately we began the cabin clean up and restoration. Many times, with the wind and sun moving freely through the walls, we often wondered why these remote wilds never really lose their mysterious appeal? Why do we give up all the comforts of modern living for this kind of freedom?
Each year for a few weeks, when we could get the time, we would enjoy this unique experience of flying over 150 miles of wild country, a splash down float landing, and then the pilot climbing back into his plane and waving goodbye. The drone of the engine slowly fades to silence - complete silence. And you are alone, no phones, no electricity, nowhere to go to buy that bolt or hammer to replace the one you dropped in the lake. After several years of short visits, we took a year off work and settled into the freedom and challenges of living in a leaky one room cabin through the long dark Alaskan winter, and then the long days of the Alaskan summer. The cabin just managed to keep us warm through cold snaps of -60 F. It was a magical year of animal encounters, skiing, trapping, and endless wilderness chores, like chipping through 3 ft of ice to get to water.
Eventually, we both got our pilot licenses, a small two seat bush plane, and the local training to fly ourselves out to the lake on skis in the winter, and floats in the summer. While the transportation got easier, the logistics remained challenging, and the living conditions at the lake very rudimentary.
Those original cabins had their quirks - a family of squirrels hatched out and cheerfully commuted through the walls to play on the counters each day. A friendly ermine would peer down the chimney hole when she wasn’t running around in the ceiling. Even more mayhem was done in the storage cabin where two martens ate too much dog food and spread half our winters ration of oatmeal and pasta on the floor. At some point we realized we needed to build a new cabin… but how? No large cargo plane could bring building materials out here, even if we could afford to buy them in Alaska. We didn’t have the time to devote to another year of laboriously hand-hewing small logs. We definitely didn’t have deep enough pockets to take all our building materials out by helicopter. We needed a creative solution.
Then a good friend threw out an idea: put together a good sized cabin in Oregon where we own a small mill, and then put all of it in a shipping container and send it to Alaska. Then use the frozen river network to freight loads out to the lake by snow machine.
This idea sounded equal parts genius and crazy.
Although outlandish, that idea didn’t leave us alone, and in the Fall of 2021 we began to seriously design a timber framed cabin with a real living room, two bedrooms and a loft. A few years earlier we had begun milling our own wood with a new Wood-Mizer LT35 Hydraulic Sawmill. Then a friend asked us to fell some enormous ponderosa pines, around 34” diameter at the base and 150’ tall with very few branches. The timing had to work out perfectly - we needed to send the shipping container by January so it would arrive in Fairbanks before the ideal time to freight in March, when the ice on the rivers is thick enough and the temperatures have warmed to a brisk -30 in the mornings.
By January of 2022, we had milled over 100 ponderosa beams for what would become our timber framed house. The entire flooring package was cut from local Douglas fir, run through a Wood-Mizer MP260 Planer/Moulder. We also made all our own pine shiplap for the interior walls, tongue and groove for the ceilings, and milled rough 16 inch pine boards for the board and batten siding.
We know almost exactly how heavy our house is… How? Because we had to stuff the whole thing into a 40 ft shipping container, within a 24 hour period, at my shop in Oregon. The weight limit was 40,000 lbs, and we used it all.
We included our handmade juniper wood doors, custom windows, a wood stove, fiberglass insulation, and two new trail sleds (“snowmobiles” for the lower 48 crowd) to help freight it all.. The container made its way from rural Eastern Oregon to Seattle, where it went by barge to Anchorage, then by train to Fairbanks, and then finally trucked out to a village where a number of family and friends unloaded and readied all the equipment and machines to begin hauling the first week of March.
Not having much experience on snow machines, and none at hauling loads, we were very grateful to friends and locals who guided us over both the dangerous Tanana river (a 30 mile run) and then into the lesser known trails and routes across river and forest for another 50 miles. To describe that 80 mile route as grueling is an understatement - breaking trail through 4 feet of powder, breaking straps and reloading heavy beams, the difficulty of freighting long loads through a forest and even making trails and bridges that could handle the 1,000 lb loads without spilling our cargo or ourselves. It took the next 4 weeks to move all 40,000 lb by this route. We wrapped up our last load just as the river ice was degrading, with large swaths of open water flowing by our trail telling us our freighting time was over.
The Build
We flew back to the lower 48 for the Breakup period, when all the frozen interior slowly thaws out and the lakes gradually become suitable for airplanes on floats, then went back to the lake in June and worked for the next few months to cut the timbers to complete the structure of the timber framed house.
A timber framed building, in many ways, is built backwards to the way houses are conventionally framed. In a timber framed building the beam structure is built first, then after the frame has been lifted into place, the wall and ceiling materials (shiplap and T&G) are placed over it, then dimensional lumber studs, rafters, and purlins are used to make the outer shell for the wiring and insulation. Another peculiarity of building in Alaska with its extreme temperatures is the need for a vapor barrier on the warm side of the wall - a continuous shell of plastic sheathing sealed at all joints and corners, to prevent buildup of condensation in the wall.
Two months of work saw our foundation, timber frame, and roof built. With those important items finished, and our building season coming to a close, it would stay essentially as a covered pavilion, with no walls, until the next year.
Another round of freighting happened in March of 2023, which involved the last of the bulky finish materials. Another month of challenging freighting and we had gotten all the major materials out and ready for the summer building season.
During the summer of 2023, we built the walls, installed doors and windows, finished the wiring, insulation, and much of the board and batten siding. It was livable, and an amazingly bright and inspiring place - completely different than the now 50 year old original dilapidated cabin.
The house itself is 24x24, with a 10x24 covered deck facing the lake. The timber frame is composed of five bents (complete truss assemblies with posts). Tie beams connect the bents, and all the mortise and tenon joints are held together with oak pegs.The living room is vaulted to 20 feet tall at the peak, with the middle of the space supported by a Hammerbeam bent - a dramatic clear-span truss that required careful consideration of proportions in order to convert the spreading tendency of the roof load to the floor plane.
The second Hammerbeam bent supports the covered deck facing the lake. Finally, by March 2025, we completed the project.
Why, you may ask, did we go to this incredible amount of trouble to make a building in such a rugged environment, with such demanding logistics? To be honest, I’m not really sure.
But I can say that the result, the completed lake house, was really just a small part of the whole adventure, which would not have happened at all without Providence and the endurance and generosity of friends, family, and strangers. Together, we enjoyed the thrill of doing something challenging, of interfacing with that narrow edge of success or failure in God’s country.
In other words, it’s just life.
Andrew Flynn entered this project into the 2025 My Wood-Mizer Project Contest and it was awarded 1st Place in the Residential Structures Category. He estimates over $75,000 was saved by using his Wood-Mizer Sawmill in the three years it took to complete his project.
