The Purchase

Katie and I have been married 2 decades. We just dropped a daughter at school in Idaho. Katie’s driving. I’m surfing Zillow on my iPad as we pass through Coeur d'Alene. Some nice properties, but none we can afford. After we get home I remember “the dream”: A log cabin, in the mountains. We’ve been skiing for the past handful of years at Stevens Pass, so I slowly surf up Highway 2 on Zillow looking for property.

Then I see a little dot about a mile East of Stevens Pass. (What? There’s property there?) The listing shows a few shots of a snow covered Lichtenberg Mountain and a bunch evergreens. Over the next few days I do a little research and realize the listing has been reduced in price each month since it was listed. It’s now ½ price of the original listing, and well below the County’s appraised tax value.

We called our realtor friend to see if he could get us any more information on the property. It just so happened that he had previously worked with the listing agent, so we got “the scoop.” The person who owned the property was ill and in the hospital. He and his wife were trying to divest from as many of his assets as possible because it would be easier to do so before he died than afterward.

We took a trip up to the property to look around. Beautiful view of Lichtenberg Mountain, relatively flat on the front, with a gentle slope for about 100 feet, then a steep slope down to Nason Creek.







I did as much research online as I could to figure out the situation with utilities, water, sewer etc.

They key problem I found was water: Although there was a water system, the property could not hook up to water because they weren’t allowed to hook any more up legally due to water rights being in short supply east of the mountains due to Salmon protection, Indian treaties, etc. But there were a few recent cabins that had been built to use storage tanks, hauling in water during the summer months. We talked to some of the cabin owners, and even found one older guy who lives up there full time in a beautiful secluded log cabin. Another older couple used to live up there full-time, but now only spend brief periods during the year. All of them kind and hardy. This is not hoidy-toidy, gold-plated community of drive-up, ski-out vacationers. There’s a price to be paid in time, effort, and will-power to successfully own and maintain a vacation home in Yodelin.

Winter access is challenging. The road is not ploughed except right near the freeway enough to allow the cabin owners to park their cars. Many owners leave a snowmobile or a snowcat near where they park their cars, and then use them to ferry themselves to their cabins. It’s only ½ mile from there to our cabin.

The biggest challenge is the annual 10+ feet of snow that accumulate there. Most of the cabins set the main floor on the second floor of the cabin, and plan on the first floor getting buried in the winter time. Those who didn’t have enough foresight to do that, have to dig DOWN to their front doors. Even shedding the snow off the roofs causes it to accumulate against the sides of the house, and can create a myriad of problems. Managing snow accumulation is THE problem up there.

I made calls to the county, to the water system commissioner, and to friends in the building trades. Satisfied that we could build *something* up there, we made a full-price offer -- at that time fully 50% off of its original listing price, and frankly not much more than a nice used car. I figured even if we didn’t end up building on the property I should be able to sell it for as much as I bought it for.