Season One · Custer County, Idaho
Do what you know. The rest gets revealed.
Seven acres of vacant ground north of Mackay, a hand-built log cabin, and a slow education in what it takes to make a place out of a piece of dirt. That's the show.
Everywhere we went filming Season One, written down properly — 17 pages, 12 places, one page each. Drive time from Mackay, what the road actually is, when it opens, what it costs, and the parts that are genuinely risky. The hot spring that washes out every spring. The road nobody takes. The mountain that eats people's schedules.
Mount Borah · North Fork of the Big Lost · Trail Creek Road · Mountain Biking Sun Valley · Mackay · Sunbeam Hot Springs — and 6 more.
10 episodes, 5–7 minutes each, in the order the ground forced them to happen. New at 9 AM Mountain. Next up — Episode 10, Sat Sep 26.
Today the container comes, and the big question is where to put it. I've got seven acres of blank canvas with literally a hundred options, and once this thing goes down it is not going to be easy to move.
The container is on my land and it is in the wrong place, which I'll be dealing with for a while. What it isn't is a cabin. So today I'm going to look at log cabins that real people built and real people live in — walk around them, put my hands on the corners, see how one actually goes together.
One option left. I can't cut logs out in North Fork, the area I checked out, and I can't build one from nothing — so I buy the logs, and the only place anyone's pointed me is Stanley, over the pass. What I know this morning is the name of a town and a road number. That is the entire plan.
Mt. Borah — 12,662 feet — anchors a valley most people have never heard of. The Lost River Range on one side, the Pioneers on the other, the Salmon River country an hour north. No crowds. No lift lines. Just the mountains.
Whitewater on the Salmon, hot springs on the riverbank, bighorn on the road north. Day trips that start and end under Borah.
Earthquakes that moved mountains, copper towns, gold dredges, a river that disappears. Short films on how this county came to be.
The motels, RV parks, cottages and B&Bs around Mackay — small, family-run, and the ones we actually send people to.
