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.
I bought 7 acres in Custer County, Idaho. No water, no power, and no way to drive a truck onto it. What I want out here is a log cabin — not a trailer, not a shed I bought at a store. The largest thing I have ever built is a deck.
Still no cabin. What there is instead is a fence running across this property marking a boundary that stopped existing years ago, and a pipe running under it that isn't mine — sitting in my neighbour's ditch. Technically his ditch. That's how it works out here in Idaho.
The plan for the cabin is logs — cut and dragged out of the backwoods. Which means going a long way into country where it's me and whatever else lives back there. What people up here have told me, politely and more than once: don't go back in there without a gun. Not to hunt anything. So I don't become something's problem.
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.
A hand-built off-grid log cabin on seven acres of sage — plus the motels and RV parks we send people to when we're full.
