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Iditarod cabin peels away the stress
By SANDI GERJEVIC
ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Shortly after 5 p.m. on a Friday, my husband and I were in traffic in the city.
An hour and a half later, we lit a fire and stretched chilled fingers to a wood stove, so nice and deep in the woods we'd slumber in the company of coyotes and owls.
From the shore of a nearby pond, we saw candles glowing sweetly in the window of our log cabin. Throughout the night, we woke to check the sky for the aurora borealis and track the path of an incandescent moon that hung over the mountains like a Shanghai lantern.
An easy, 40-minute stroll to the Eagle River Nature Center's new public-use cabin on the old Iditarod Trail had peeled away the first layer of the week's stress.
Our prep work for the overnight trip had been hasty and minimal. One sleeping bag short, we'd stuffed a down comforter into an Army duffel and tossed in a bulky frying pan.
For food, we shunned anything dehydrated. I toted salted peanuts, pancake mix and a flashlight. He carried a jug of tap water in one hand and a paper-bag supper of chicken sandwiches in the other. It was our kind of expedition.
Rustic yet accessible was exactly what Dick Lloyd had in mind when he scouted the woods last summer, deciding where to build the center's first trail cabin, which opened Sept. 1. Public-use cabins are sprinkled throughout Alaska, but this corner of Chugach State Park, about 25 miles from Anchorage, was new to the idea. Lloyd is president of Friends of Eagle River Nature Center, a non-profit group that contracted with the park in 1995 to run the center after state budget cuts meant it might close. Funding is still tight, Lloyd said.
"We're always looking for ways that we can improve our financial viability," he said. "We're still just barely making it."
When the center's volunteers learned a public-use cabin at Yuditnu Creek near Eklutna generated $6,000 a year, they decided to try something similar. They would save money by building the cabin themselves. They'd hand-mill their own beetle-killed white spruce, cut selectively from a nearby trail.
As for location, Lloyd first searched the banks of Eagle River, thinking how charming it would be to ski up the frozen ice-way to a warm destination. He decided against it because of the river's potential for flooding. Instead, he settled on a rocky rise on the river side of the Iditarod Trail where a boulder field creates an interesting landscape.
"A section of the mountain broke off and fell across the valley," he explained.
Over thousands of years, the house-size boulders filled in with a layer of soil that supports scant growth. Tender aspens thrive along a carpet of moss and lichen.
With approval from park authorities, Lloyd, an architect, set about managing the cabin project. He was joined by a variety of volunteers, including a work crew from the Glennwood Center, an Anchorage halfway house.
About 500 feet off the Iditarod Trail, they began construction of a 15-by-15-foot cabin with a porch. The volunteers forged a narrow maintenance road through the woods, but also crafted a pleasing footpath of wood chips that winds along the boulder field in a circular route.
"I intentionally tried to hide the cabin until you get right on top of it," Lloyd said.
Over the winter, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, Lloyd and volunteers took down trees, milled the wood and hoisted the huge logs overhead. They raised the cabin the old-fashioned way, with muscle and a gin pole as a makeshift crane. They chinked it with flexible mortar and insulated the floor with two inches of boarding.
Justin Toenes, an Eagle River Boy Scout, built a woodshed using leftover quarter rounds.
As guests in the cabin, we appreciated the work that went into the burnished log walls that glowed in the firelight. We slept on a raised-plank platform and dined by candlelight at a hand-built table.
We'd seen no hikers on the trail that evening and heard only hooting owls and, somewhere between us and the river, a coyote holding a conversation with distant companions.
The following morning, we discovered a crust of frost had settled on the forest's moss and mushrooms, and a translucent film of ice had crept over the pond, which now appeared as a waterscape, framed in glass.
A warming sun illuminated drops of dew on spruce boughs, creating tiny prisms.
Checkout was at noon, so we closed down the stove and swept up, making sure the cabin door clicked shut, secured by a combination lock.
Back at the center, Lloyd was on duty. He thumbed through the reservation book, where names filled every weekend date through the end of the year.
One month after the cabin opened, it had raised $2,000 for the center. Besieged by requests for holiday stays, the staff is holding a silent auction for Christmas and Thanksgiving reservations.
Lloyd, the designer, has yet to spend a night in the cabin he helped build. He said he's waiting for the first good snow.
| If you go: Eagle River Nature Center is at Mile 12 Eagle River Road. The public-use cabin is 1 1/4 miles from the center; the trail goes over some rocky terrain. Firewood is provided. The cabin sleeps eight and costs $45 a night. For reservations, call 907-694-2108. |
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