Tim Cahill's Cabin
“We kind of like it when the lost hunters find us.”
Tim Cahill chronicles his exotic journeys from a small log cabin in Montana
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
Gallatin National Forest, Montana.
Tim Cahill has traveled to 100 countries, riding on horseback across the steppes of Mongolia, hiking through remote villages in southeastern Turkey in search of the supposedly extinct Caspian Tiger, driving a truck from the tip of Patagonia to Alaska and going swimming in an ice hole on the North Pole.The veteran travel writer chronicles these adventures from a 500-square-foot cabin hidden in a thickly forested river canyon in southwest Montana. The cabin sits in this national forest on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, about an hour's drive down gravel roads from the "big town" of Livingston, where Mr. Cahill has a house."It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air," said Mr. Cahill, a founding editor of Outside magazine and author of nine books, including "A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg" and "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh." Mr. Cahill, whose wife died in a traffic accident last year, often stays at the cabin for week-long stretches, and all told spends a couple of months out of the year there.
Built in 1931 by a dude ranch hand, the Lincoln Log-esque cabin looks like it could have been plucked off of a movie set, so much so that Mr. Cahill's 8-year-old niece asked if it was fake when she visited. Mr. Cahill, 65, bought the cabin, which came with two freestanding log guest cabins and an outhouse, in 1991 for $60,000. He leases the land, about half an acre, from the forest service for $2,605 a year.
The screen door off the kitchen opens onto a porch where Mr. Cahill sometimes makes barbecued chicken "Simon and Garfunkel style," with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. About 30 miles from the nearest town, he subsists on "cabin food" such as chili, ribs, or gamey stews with antelope, elk or venison. It's pretty tame fare compared to what he's sampled around the world: boiled fermented cow's nose in Bali, acacia beetles in Africa, roasted guinea pigs in Peru and baked turtle lung in Australia ("spongy," Mr. Cahill said).Hidden from the dirt road by deciduous trees, the cabin is barely big enough for the basics: a kitchen with a wood-burning Monarch stove and a dining nook, a living room with a pitched, wooden beam roof and a big stone fireplace, which warms the place up in about two hours in the winter, and a cramped bedroom that has an exposed sink, toilet and bathtub in one end (the outhouse is for the guest cabins). The living room is decorated with wicker chairs and a sofa that evokes the 1970s. Mr. Cahill's desk sits in a corner that's crammed with books, including "Edible Native Plants of the Rocky Mountains" and "Field Guide to Western Birds."
The main attraction lies just off the property. The 1.8 million-acre Gallatin forest spans six mountain ranges and is part of the Greater Yellowstone Area, the largest intact ecosystem in the continental U.S. "My backyard, honest to God, is pretty much the size of Switzerland," Mr. Cahill said. The cabin is one of 198 privately owned cabins; the forest service charges private owners an annual permit fee through a "recreation residence program" that dates back to the early 1890s. A similar 546-square-foot one-bedroom cabin in the Gallatin Canyon is on the market for $125,000.
Mr. Cahill has frequently wandered in Montana's vast parks and back country, misadventures he chronicled in his 2004 book "Lost in My Own Backyard." He describes the unnerving feeling of being "alone, twenty miles from the nearest road, and you've just found a grizzly bear track the size of a pizza."
Larry Lahren, an archaeologist who lives nearby, said Mr. Cahill has survived such excursions through "pure luck." Once, when the two of them were hunting antelope, Mr. Cahill forgot his sleeping bag, said Mr. Lahren, who added that Mr. Cahill was "the ultimate greenhorn" when he first arrived in Montana. "He was the world's worst horseback rider," he said.
Southwest Montana has long attracted writers, artists and celebrities. Mr. Cahill counts novelists Jim Harrison, Walter Kirn and Tom McGuane among his neighbors. Mr. Cahill moved to Livingston in 1979, but as the town grew into a creative hub with more than a dozen art galleries, Mr. Cahill decided he needed a place where he could write without people dropping by or inviting him out.
"For a guy who doesn't like crowds, he's always got people seeking him out," Scott McMillion, a Montana native and writer who has known Mr. Cahill for more than 20 years.
Mr. Cahill usually writes in the morning, then takes a long hike on one of the many trails leading up into the mountains of a thickly forested canyon. His favorite walks are along the river, or up into the foothills behind his cabin, to a spot where two branches of creek collide and throw a colorful prism of mist into the air. "The shafts of light that come through have the quality of light that comes through a stained glass cathedral," Mr. Cahill said. "It all combines to make me feel good and rooted."
(Write to Alexandra Alter. Photography by Janie Osborne of the Wall Street Journal)
Adventure writer Tim Cahill often retreats to his remote log cabin in southwest Montana in the Gallatin National Forest:
http://tinyhouseblog.com/log-construction/tim-cahills-log-cabin/ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574527773790795630.html
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