Kristie Wolfe turns 1950s fire lookout into off-grid shelter

fire lookouts were built everywhere in means to control fires just spot them and be able to get them out right over the hill in the 1800s the Walden fire burnt everything people ran into the river to try to stay out and they got boiled so back when they had no control over forest fires they put up these also an effort to give men work at one time there were thousands and thousands of them all over and now I believe that there's 900 left and then of those just maybe a couple hundred that are actually operating so somebody would come live here for the summer and spot fires [Music] most lookouts are built just like this it's a 14 foot square with the 360-degree windows which is really incredible to lay here and write or just think about life and take in the views especially if there's a storm coming that you get a watch it's like the most epic thing ever to be encapsulated in here with a warm fire when it's pouring rain or snowing outside it's really magical I have 13 acres so it goes down to the road this way and actually down to the road the other way so I don't think I've seen all four corners of the property really I just had a short list of like 10 builds that I wanted to do and the fire lookout it's one of them but they're really hard to come by because there's only like 900 I think still in existence and they're usually on Forest Service land so you have to buy one that's been taken down and then you have to like redirect it and it's that's a big deal to find and to do but I happen to just be googling on the way back from my hobbit hole my mom was driving and I found an article that said fire lookout for sale and I'm like you know the Internet this was probably posted 10 years ago and it's old or whatever but it was only a year old and it was an Idaho which is my home state and so I was like freaking out and so I reached out to the realtor and just said hey this long shot and though it's been a year but is this place still available and he's like oh it is this town is without cell service people don't really operate on the same pages the rest of the world and they're lovely for it so I don't know they might be on to something yeah what's going on are you training behind there oh not all of Idaho looks like this this is not the potato country this is the logging country of Idaho you guys we're looking for a mile marker we need the mile marker four point five over there therefore I'm beside the tree right there it's a four point five is it a four it's a four okay one point five now could be four point five nine yeah and that's a super steep driveway it's four and a half that's it yeah exactly crystal peek look out stop yes only stop yep a perfect perfect mom yeah ATVs can go up here true [Music] nope it's a dead snake snake where bernstone s Christie walking a veil oh my gosh that's a little intimidating I have its rough rough rough roads leads a beautiful destination before we try to sell people on this is the pathway that leads to the treehouse me and my mom came here our last months building the house if I had to say what an occupation was I would say I'm a builder however I make my money from vacation rentals but our building experiences I guess something along those lines and finding these really out-of-the-way places that's sort of a component I think yes there's I look for cheap land I look for cheap deals but there's always like a catch to why it's cheap this one the road and in the winter the snows up to here so I actually bought a snow cat last year a vintage snow cat and redid it and George brings people up in the snow cat it's a tough winter up here then I wouldn't say tough but you got to be prepared I would say it's tough yeah I would it's beautiful and it's hard yeah the toughest part of this yeah is the hike during the winter because we don't have we wanted snow cats that come up but that 90-degree corner at the bottom scary it comes up fine but going down bit scary it's still yeah yeah they guys never knew they're not sure now it's part of the snowshoe now up to do the turnovers so you found when you came it wasn't quite like this no no there's a huge building here where that was super rat infested falling down garbage kind of just from being abandoned for so many years the strap is probably going to break but you needed a little bit more distance between the shed and the truck and the thing seems so flimsy this is actually my most expensive property but there was a building already on it and a really unique one at that so the frame is not the original frame this was off a I think he said a sanitation some sort of government building that he got at auction so the cab is all original I replaced at least half of the windows and then restructured it just so it was kind of bare-bones and and still set up to be a fire lookout and so now it's a little bit more comfortable Roxy stay you stay did you have to bring a lot of material yes clearing everything out all the junk out was one thing but I could just throw it over the edge and then drag it through the forest I did put in the pulley so that helped sometimes but my boards right there yeah bringing it up was tough I actually had to make the hatch much smaller so that there was more floor space so you can see the line here this is how big it used to be and going back to here but that made it so I couldn't really the door was just too heavy I've always I [Music] mean there's something so amazing about a structure that was meant to be yeah yeah exactly so this is where the Sun sets in the summer and you can sometimes see a little bit of the city lights the few of them that there are there's these huge trees if you can kind of see through here this is logging land on the next hump over of the mountain and so that is clear-cut right on the other side of us we have moose up here so sometimes they come in here the moose came back he's right outside the lookout because he loves us we're friendly I really wanted to see the moose and my mom really didn't want to I believe we were 25 feet to the deck so that would be because yeah wherever it was originally and I don't they built like an identical one right by it and so that's why this one had to be taken down so I don't know why they did but it was in the same view so they took this one down the fire lookouts have this round map of the mountain range and it has like this weird dial thing so when they see a fire they can pinpoint it and radio the coordinates and it's just basically a radio log you'll get like hikers coming up or when I was reading in it there was a call for a woman who was having a giving birth and I was like oh that kid would be like my age would be so fun to find him but it doesn't have any name or anything the radio log so this was originally the stranger fire lookout but small to medium fluffy smoke so light blue smoke behind the ridge keeps coming up and then can you describe the smoke better so it's just like a correspondence back and forth and I was so excited when I found this transcription of the communication yes yeah these are Oh so here is the passenger having labour pain she would like an emergency buckle contact the seat role and then the state parole person tells her that she must calm down so I'm sure she was excited to hear that yeah so crazy 83 Oh from 1981 that's when that baby but this is moved in 83 so this stuff is still going on still being used in yeah there are still some there's just not a lot I think that the fire spotting has got they have different means of doing that but they still serve as like kind of a ranger station out in the middle of nowhere and so this one did have one of the circle maps but so usually that would be right in the center of your room because your hatch would be on the deck but I kept to pay homage to the whole map thing I had this one printed which is this drop leaf table and we are right here Crystal peak lookout since the lookouts had that these maps I knew I needed to have that in here way down here is the nearest town how how big he's from um I think there are six hundred people so this just your version of a dining table yeah we have these stools and our doing hot it feels like a good laugh not the last guest but the guests before was like I think we broke her so yeah pretty scary me yes I did this is like a horse blanket for the seat and then built this bed frame out of just pieces it's posts at cedar posts yeah and these built-ins I built all up here the original fireplace and it was right here so I had to move the stovepipe cut a hole in the ceiling I'm like okay be I'm right in the middle I went to go drill my hole and of course there's a that's where the beam is so that's why I have this whoo what do you think to go to the side of the beam and you brought this up here yes I had a plan like because this is hundreds of pounds and I had a whole plan but we pretty much just did it step by step and now it's very heavy you were trying to go over the latest thing possible no I just wanted the window and you can cook on top of it and stuff it's cool so the fire would come Puli yep hey you wanna come up yes bring them up right let me show you how to operate the secret it doesn't have running water but we have a little Colgan thing of water and so you have to pump this just like that how do you get the water we fill it up with a jug we have to bring it up and we usually tell people to bring up a little bit more cuz that's two and a half gallons and I got it like a little cooler here the ice just melts and there's a tube that connects it down to the floor so you just built in I just under mounted a cooler so that you would be able to bring ice and keep some food cold I like how you don't show any cooler yeah I don't want any plastic you for sure yeah so this is a little garbage chute I wanted it to actually go all the way down but there was some beams in the way and sink and then we have a little stove we have a the stove here and then this is the fuel canisters that it takes so can't me stove again yep yep just a camping stove and then we just have you know your normal utensils I mean you can pretty much cook there pretty good meal and we have some cast iron pans and then all these enamel pans and I picked up every one of these from different antique stores so that might have been typical of what people were eating in yeah in the fire lookout its hayday you don't want anything I guess that you're gonna have at your house they don't want you to really feel like you're away so because I wouldn't want you to be like oh yeah my aunt has that you know and so that's why I end up building a lot of the things in my houses this and the side were all one and then I built this too and this and those to match it because this think that I bought was too wide to fit into one of these so I had to create this space for it yeah it's very deep and it wasn't accepting that this is an antique grinder and so you turn it to grind your coffee and then we have pour over coffee here most lookouts I mean all lookouts I guess are closed down in the winter and we stay open I just check - so all of these panels can drop yeah oh that one went down down oh they're supposed to be hinged so I'm gonna have to run down there to bring it back up but so this has the metal roof that protects that plywood a bit but we have to drop them down in the winter and then guests have to lift in the or else it'll get so snow loaded I woke up last winter to a blizzard where there was about a foot of snow and so I had a lower all these and and I'm like I have to get out now or else I'm going to be snowed in and so I had to take these all day out and like you know I have to be on my tiptoes but there was so much snow on it it slammed me everyone against the window and I had to do it all the way around the tech was my whole side was bruised there was no other way I couldn't I tried to like scrape off but you can't get to the corners these usually just stay up in the summer time but when fire lookouts closed out for the winter they would close all of these panels and then just like a winch it to protect it you don't have people getting into it otherwise you're just gonna wake up with a Sun which is fine because there's no shades windows all the way around do you want I don't know what happened if there's fingers here yeah there is put them in the basket I guess oh gosh I thought it would just went sorry did you worry about this at all like safety or no I literally had it open like sleeping everything I would always just have it open there's the other little splitter this one I really like actually it's called the kindling cracker and for somebody who's not good with an axe you can just put that there and and pound it and it splits it really well both in stick out the same amount yeah just kind of balance it on the top of the basket I guess okay coming up watch your head just in case I wish I knew that if they could get in it tell me if I'm going too fast if you think they're gonna fall out there's a lot of books from people that lived in fire our lookouts because a lot of a bit more writers they just spent hours and hours and hours a pair alone so I felt like I got a little bit of that when I built go just up here there was nobody for ever it's a lot of Solitude woohoo okay I wore it because you were up here for how long two and a half months but you lived here full-time yep yeah just working every day although yeah pretty much exactly I wish it was an elevator so I could get in it though my mom came up for a couple weeks and then yeah so you had a lot of time alone up here I'm alone a lot if that was very unexpected yeah so these usually just stay open during the summer you could put it down for shade but most people just let it be open and then I have little tiny solar panels that feed these lights yeah so I got like these really cheap little solar lights and then I found these at an antique store and had a wire and cobble them all together to make it work and then we have just another tiny little panel but it has all these USBs so you can charge your phone there's a little bit of power not a lot but a little bit and we are now part of the lookout Network so we get these every month and so some of these dharma bombs is Jack Kerouac and he stays on the lookout so there's oh I'm like out in there and this is the book that this burn that Teddy Roosevelt initiated all these fire lookouts being burned or being built and this happened just over the hill and like the people literally like boiled in the river the person that sold me this lookout he said that my lookout was in this book fire lookouts at the northwest so I got on Amazon this book is three hundred and fifty dollars on Amazon so I did not buy it instead I found ray and I emailed him and I sent him some pictures and I said hey do you happen to know anything about my lookout here I just bought it and I'm remodeling it and he said yes my son is the one who moved it there and he has a fire lookout Museum in Spokane Washington in his house so it's really a thing yeah yeah fascination let's go hit this way is how we do the sheets but who knows what actually happened I had originally sketched it out that it would go this way but I felt like it was too close to the fire so I ended up making it more this daybed style position that chair was from the original lookout and I went and got like a poncho at Goodwill and that's what it's covered with because the leather was torn up by rats this was very rat-infested probably 20 ish years so yeah so there was this old woodshed and it was up by the lookout and it was literally like the leaning tower it was on its last leg my oldest brother Matt is in town he got in about midnight last night and today we're trying to beat the storm and move this shed Matt is tying an Alpine butterfly knot and then a chain around the tree and we put black ABS pipe underneath of it that was a little wider than the house and we did about 10 rows and then we would move it a couple inches at a time this is falling forward just being held with the rope we used kind of a pulley system my mom held the rope and I would take a pipe from the back and put it in the front and then we'd go four more inches and then again and again and again first attempt actually second attempt we broke a rope oh yeah see that moving awesome [Music] part that was nerve-wracking coming down the hill is it was not only leaning structurally but like leaning forward and so it just looked like it was just gonna topple over and be sticks you know and my mom and I built this deck and I did it out of treated lumber I looked everywhere on the internet to see if anybody had built a deck out of treated lumber because usually it's just the base and you put whatever on the top but I just kept thinking like I'm gonna have to paint or stain this literally every year because of the winners and stuff I didn't find anybody who had done it but I couldn't figure out a reason why not - so it's a whole treated lumber deck and we inset this fire pit in there and I built these anter on deck chairs and then so there's I made it into a sauna on the inside and I think there's water in here so I'm not going to dump it on me but we have a bucket shower again I'm not going to do it but we feel a barrel there is a spring we don't have running water up to here there's a spring I know how far it is but it's down and up back up the mountain so George it fills up a barrel that is in the trees up here and at gravity feeds - right here and then this is our only like your only source of water so the idea is to get all warmed up in there pour this freezing cold water on you hop back in side and I got this door for like seven bucks off Craigslist on one of my lumber runs and then this fireplace was in the lookout this is the original one and I wanted one that had a window in the lookout so I actually repurposed it down here and then these rocks are just from down the road we built this great around it to be able to pour your water on and it heats up yeah yeah we did all the insulation and then put a foil barrier I actually ran out of the foil stuff how to go down to the Merc by tinfoil so it's actually finished off a little bit with tinfoil and then all the cedar planking and we have the timers in the bucket real candles were getting too messy so we have tea lights smells great yeah it's not like the theater has all the age to it yeah it gets made out of the same stuff of the lookout this paddle I found and I could not find the other one I searched and searched and searched but there's a dog bone factory in Twin Falls Idaho that I had my sister go to and she sent me pictures cuz I'm like go find a moose paddle that's the same size you know and they sell it to you by the weight so it was super cheap I think the things that I love the most are it's because it was so hard so I think that's probably why but you know it makes so you don't feel like you ever have to leave here yeah more for me okay ah so mr. bass tastes like Pixy Stix you found some strawberries too no you did you like procedure if the candy you know yeah it's totally it's actually bad yeah maybe that's why they came up with idea we actually have most of the wood delivered but it comes in like these big chunks here and so it still has to be split down and so we have a number of different splitters we have one up on the deck that will fit like roughly this size and a mallet that you hit it with we leave a lot cut then you'll get guests that want to come up here and chop wood and and they'll have split it for us I joke that my property is you just come and do chores but some people's lives are too easy fun vacation here's the barrel that's the system we've rigged up this black pipe at one point they were getting water all the way up here from the creek which is on the other mountain I've only been able to get like a trickle with it being gravity fed because there's no power there's nothing there's a spigot there that he can fill up a tank and then pump it into this one it's just a little 12-volt thing there wasn't really an option no there's no so down here I have the little outhouse this was here and it's the cutest outhouse ever yeah it's it's stout it was a pit one I covered up the pit and now it's like a bucket system with the wood shavings and I mean how it works well I won't show you how it works I'll explain so we have wood shavings here so once you use a restroom you just scoop this cover up anything in there and it's super absorbing this is like guinea pig like pet bedding sort of stuff so it expands really well and then there's just a five gallon bucket and we use these IO degradable composting bags here's the bucket and then the bag is bungeed around it and then the guest will just tie it off and we have a compost bin behind that they just throw it in and it's all covered up and it takes about a year for you to want to put any of that on vegetables we don't really grow anything so it just goes back into the earth and that's it yeah so that's the only thing that I changed in here back here is the compost bin half of that size would support a family of four for a year so it's more than enough people ask a lot because lots of people want to do it and they're like so who'd you get alone or did you get investors and no it's just I do everything myself so it's inexpensive and I look for really cheap deals I just work out of my own capital so if I had more money I would be building a lot faster this is probably a good thing in case it gives me a break so if I was smart I would have built just a dozen tree houses in Hawaii like that's what everybody said because it was so successful but but I don't think it'd be as rewarding if I was just in one spot doing the same thing over and over so I got a potato recently this is the potato which requires some explanation the Idaho Potato Commission has a 6-ton potato that rides on the back of a semi truck around the country and I was their spokesperson for two years and I traveled with it just all over the country I was like this is bigger than my tiny house I'm gonna move it into my backyard I I call dibs on this and then eight years later they finally upgraded to a fiberglass version and they gifted me the old potato so I just recently finished that off and then it's got a grain silo with a really beautiful bathroom in it and that's in Boise Idaho so that's where I was living - the potato and sometimes I've come out of the potato and there be people at the road like looking at it and we were like what just happened cuz you can't kind of see that there's a door so it's crazy but I'm building a little tiny house just for codes there I got in system they don't have a code with my bathroom is separate than the living quarter so their solution is that I build a residence so that this can be the accessory rebuilding so this is it right now so you've done a lot three days there are three very long days but this is the finished version of it I'm actually going to build two of these into end with a space in between and then I'm gonna build a greenhouse around it that will be in this kind of traditional barn shape and those tiny houses will be up in this peak so the one I'm building now is just to get code as quickly as possible so I'm doing bare-bones but my cow since she's like my soul mate I have got Windows that I can open up so she can stick her head in because she is that friendly here she comes look at that cow run run this is her eating the guidebook that I just barely made and protected it I bought an Airstream last summer that just popped up and it was really cheap and I wouldn't bought it and I want to put it somewhere in the southwest so now I'll go look in the Southwest to put it somewhere to me I've never wanted to put a bunch of unique things in one plot which lots of people do and it makes total sense and I can't be bothered with it I actually don't drink coffee I kind of build like people do marathon races or something it's like everything I have emotionally and physically and financially I'm just spent at the end of it and it's so rewarding but I don't know how long I can do that but right now I'm like I'm healthy and I love it so I'm gonna do it for as long as I'm still having fun you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 2,723,501

Keywords: Tiny house empire, offgrid, no internet, abandoned property, elevated home, elevated shelter, offgrid hotel, offgrid lodging, immersive deep-forest getaway, fernwood, idaho, idaho potato hotel, potato home, hawaii treehouse, hobbit home, alternative shelters, alternative homes, no loans, debt free, DIY work, PV, camping stove, pump sink

Id: nfx89LDqrJk

Length: 34min 28sec (2068 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019