Alaska Cabin

Welcome to AKCabin.com! This is the story about how I bought land using just cash and built my own cabin in Alaska, using mostly only hand tools.

My name is Shane, and I moved to Alaska from Colorado in 2014. The year before, I had purchased some land from the State of Alaska that was located in a remote area called Shell Lake. At the time I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but it would soon prove to be the adventure of a lifetime.

Building the cabin was not only a great adventure but it gave me a level of confidence in myself that I had never known I had. It taught me many valuable lessons about life. Among the most important of those lessons is that is you can learn and do anything, you just have to make committed decisions and work really hard to accomplish your dreams.

It all started when I was driving across Colorado on a trip to Boulder to visit the main offices for work. During that time I worked from home as a software engineer, developing financial websites for companies like Merrill Lynch and eTrade, and the NY Times. While driving through rural Colorado I began to fall in love with the old farmsteads there.

I started to become interested in the buying some land and maybe building a cabin on it. But many of the good pieces of land were really expensive and anything that was affordable didn’t exactly provide a place where I could create what I wanted. I wanted my place to be on a forested lot, with some privacy from neighbors.

So one day I found out about how the State of Alaska sells land through an over the counter sales process. I started looking around on there and began to become extremely interested in buying a lot. The problem was, the land was thousands of miles away and it was located in the remote “bush” of Alaska.

Since I couldn’t really go see that land before buying it, I used tools like Google Earth to try to get an idea of how the lot would look. I figured out how to get the lot’s coordinates plugged into Google Earth and then I could see what features the land would have.

I would watch snow-machine videos of Shell Lake, just to get an idea of what it was like. To me, it was the most amazing place on Earth, 5 acres of totally forested wildland in Alaska! So I just did it. I bought the land and booked a flight to Alaska, where I would charter a float plane to drop me off at Shell Lake.

When I arrived I stayed out on my land for around a week. While I was there I created an encampment and started to build a trail back from the lake to the land. it was much more dense brush than I was used to back in Colorado. I would cut the alder branches down using my Stihl Chainsaw and pull them out of the way while I whacked a trail back into the bush.

While I was cutting trail, I heard a strange noise that startled me! I thought it was a grizzly bear, but it turned out just to be a grouse! It had made a noise when it fluttered up into a tree near the trail. I was so relieved to find out that it was just a grouse!

Then my stomach reminded me that I was a little hungry, so I walked back to camp and got my shotgun that I was using for bear protection. That night I had grouse breast cooked on cast iron over the campfire with a little instant mashed potatoes. It was an amazing meal!

The next day, I went out on the lake and went fishing for pike. It didn’t take long for me to catch one and bring it back to camp. I was eating pretty good for my first Alaskan experience!

As the trip started to wind down and I had surveyed my property using my garmin GPS I spent a little more time on the lake. For most of the trip, it had been pretty rainy so it was nice when the rain cleared one evening and suddenly the mighty peaks of Denali and Mt Foraker came into view from my boat out on the lake.

Eventually, I ran out of time and I had to take the boat back down to the southern portion of the lake down to Shell Lake Lodge, where I stayed for one more night before heading back to Anchorage.

Once I got back home, I was ready to buy another 5 acres, which I did. I ultimately ended up with 10 acres of remote land at Shell Lake. Now I just needed to move up there! That was when I started to talk to my fiance about moving our family up to Alaska.

In my next article I will tell more of the story about how I came to live in Alaska and built a small off-grid cabin of my own. Thank you for reading!