The wife & I acquired 50 acres of private wooded land in a fairly remote location early in the winter months of this year. 2 sides border state land that goes on for what seems like for ever.
We have prepared a building site & have started building our hunting cabin. 24 x 32 cabin with 3 bunk rooms, kitchen/dining area, small living room type area & an attached sauna room. Wood and or propane heat, propane range/oven, probably the lights too. No electricity, no running water. Thinking about putting a sand point in & a hand pump for water to wash up with.
It's accessible by truck but it's a slow trail a good 3/4 mile off the closest decent gravel road.
The most notable part of this new camp is a new member to our hunting group. My best friends son, 16 years of age. My best friend, also my cousin, lost his life recently in a plane crash. I invited his boy to take part in the building of this new camp & asked if he could come up & hunt with us as well.
He's taken to me, taken to the project & taken to the idea of calling it his hunting camp with the passion & enthusiasm that only a starry eyed young hunter could bring. It's a true blessing and a wonderful thing. The bond between us is strengthening and it is helping me deal with the loss as much or more than it could possibly be helping him. Me & his dad were only about 12 days apart in age & have been best friends since before we could talk. I suppose we are as people would often say "like brothers". Looked alike, talked & thought alike, I suppose that makes it easier for his boy & I to bond so well.
We're trying to keep things pretty rustic, we like the absence of electricity, the hand pumped well idea…. Wood stove… It's going to be quite the place, a foundation for many memories to come. I have 3 kids of my own, 1 girl & 2 boys, all are already or at least show promise of being hunters. My wife likes to hunt, I have brothers… I'm sure my dad will take part. It's the beginning of something good, the birth of what will be a sentimental memory factory.
I'm standing at the beginning looking forward, and I know well enough to absorb it all, soak it up & live in the moments, because they move so fast.
Well, there's the intro, lengthy, but there it is. Any shack/cabin tips and or considerations from those that are past my point & looking back are certainly appreciated.
Thanks,
Dave
This was my original post which grew into something I could not have imagined back then.
This behemoth thread is 4 years old today.
Not just the thread but the camp itself too. 4 years later things are quite established and comfortable as they should be for a deer camp.
I want to thank Rick Bin for allowing this soap opera of a thread to exist here. I also want to thank the collective core of the campfire forums for the sincere support, interest and helpful suggestions and fun interaction within this thread over the span of 4 years.
As this site is an open discussion forum it is also open to heated disagreements and personal attacks etc. It happens quite often with certain topics.
Butt it hasn't happened here in this thread for 4 years. As vulnerable as the topic itself is, with a family hurting due to a loss, restructuring, strengthening bonds and sharing so openly family photos etc... It's quite vulnerable and open to insults and attacks. Yet it hasn't happened.
It's August 9 2011 today.
There's a lot of financial suffering nationwide, unemployment is high, the economy is in the toilet... A political mess, that's how we will remember these times in general.
It's depressing actually, people are irritable. There has been a recent and popular opinion suggesting that the moral core of the campfire has degraded from what it once may have been.
I disagree with this idea. I believe many of us are tired, tired of waiting for 2012 perhaps. We may be irritable, but our values have not degraded. We may have new members, some of which seem to be here only to taunt our conservative lifestyles and beliefs. But we haven�t become diluted because of it.
I took a glance before I started typing this and I saw around two million one hundred thousand views for this single thread. Four years old, over 2 million views and not a single attack.
The campfire forum values aren�t sick or dying. Are we sick of politics and the direction the country is going? Sure, but the core group here is still good people and I want to thank everybody for that.
I�m going to send Rick Bin a PM today and ask that he pull the sticky from this thread. I have a feeling it will stay around for a while regardless. Like a big ugly beach ball at a party it will likely keep popping up from time to time. But I would feel better if it wasn�t stickied to the top of the page here in deer hunting. The deer hunting section is one of my favorite sections of the campfire forums to visit and I think this thing has hung at the top of the page for too long.
Thanks very much everybody for putting up with this nonsense for 4 years.
