(question assuming I'm planning to live on the land year-round)
I'm not planning to live on the land year-round. Everyone assumes that, because that's our cultural myth of homesteading. But I think it's much better for a piece of rural land and a nearby piece of urban land to work together. You can have a family or community whose members cycle back and forth to vary their experience, and each piece of land can contribute things that are more available in its environment. For example, remote land is good for hunting and orcharding and observing nature, while urban land is good for hot showers and internet and selling or trading stuff. It would be nice if I could buy a little house in Spokane to serve as a "base camp", so visitors could come by train, rest up, and bike or catch a ride up to the land.
I would still like to build a cabin with enough insulation and food and fuel for a winter stay, just in case someone wants to spend a winter up there, or in case a local catastrophe hits the city and I need to bug out for a while.
Why did you pick a place with such long snowy winters?
"Picking a place" is 20th century thinking: "I'm going to search the whole world, find exactly what I want, and do whatever it takes to get it." My style is to go with the flow and work with what comes easily. So when I got an opportunity to buy land at the top of a watershed with a year-round spring for a low price, near my long Spokane housesits, I took it. It happens to be in a region with long winters, so I'll work with that. Also I think physical geography is less important than being close to friends and family. And also, with climate change, it's anyone's guess which regions will be most inhabitable in 20 or 50 years. If we get warming, which seems most likely, then a cold place is better. And if eastern Washington gets covered by glaciers, then I'll move south!
You mentioned knowing methods of extending the availability of water from seasonal springs. Could you describe them briefly or point me in a direction to research it myself?
When I wrote that, I didn't know that springs can come from deep in the earth, from water that falls many miles away. So you might not be able to extend a spring. But there's stuff you can do to increase your ground water and extend the season of streams and ponds.
Basically, anything that slows down the surface water is great. The goal is to have all the water that falls on the land stay on the land, either on the surface or in the ground, instead of running off. You can dig swales, which are ditches at a constant elevation along a slope. Normal ditches carry water away but swales hold water so it soaks into the ground. Then you can use that wetter ground to grow bigger bushes and trees, which in turn shade the ground and keep water from evaporating and snow from melting. Over years you can build up a microclimate that's much wetter than the surrounding land.
Some terms to research would be
arid land permaculture and
keyline design. The basic idea of keyline is that you dig ditches to run water from gullies out to ridges.
What kind of cabin are you building?
The latest plan is cordwood cob walls, often called
cobwood. I'm thinking I'll build a small practice hut with twelve inch walls, and then a cabin with 20 inch walls, resting on scavenged broken concrete. For the roof I'm probably going to do metal, ideally some scavenged rusty corrugated iron, which will be much cheaper than new metal and have a more earthy color.
Why don't you build a yurt?
I'm skeptical of the yurt because it's such a good name! I suspect that if you could change history to switch around the names of the thousands of different indigenous structures, everyone would be building whichever one happened to be called a "yurt". But also, a good canvas tent is perfectly adequate for spring through fall, and I want something really solid and well-insulated if I'm ever going to spend the winter up there.
You should use a chainsaw. / You should not use a chainsaw.
The people who make these arguments should fight each other and leave me out. It's a hard decision. At first I bought a Husqvarna 340, but then I decided to try to cut all the wood by hand, because I prefer slow quiet work to fast noisy work, and also because chainsaws spew a lot of toxins. But then in early 2009 I found a source of Aspen 2t
alkylate fuel in Vancouver, and I also did some research and discovered you can get away with food-grade canola for bar oil. So that made a chainsaw acceptable, and I've started using it to cut wood for the eventual cordwood structures.
How do you deal with building codes?
Well, I haven't built anything yet! But I may get away with it because the land is in a poor rural county, it's remote, and I won't be using power tools. If the inspectors do find me, plan B is to try to find loopholes in the code, maybe by building small or staying off-grid, and plan C is to just use tents until the control system breaks down a bit, or the codes adapt to non-industrial building.
Have you considered hauling a trailer or shipping container or school bus or pre-fab shed or section of giant sewer pipe up to your land to live in?
Yes, and I've ruled it out, unless someone offers to haul it up for free. Something like that is more than I need for the warm seasons, and not well insulated enough for the cold season. Also I want to learn to
make shelter.
(last updated september 2009)