Past Projects

Elk City Open Air Pavilion

Work begins on the Elk City timber frame pavilion. Thanks to Nils Peterson for emailing these first photos taken by school folks, and to Nancy Wilkins, whose report follows.

Ian and Nancy. Ian is the Wilderness Forest Ranger and Nancy, a 4th grader at Elk City School.

Hi, all! Thought I'd sneak inside here this morning to get my fingers warmed up a little and send you an update about how the Elk City project is coming along.

It's Wednesday morning, and it's beautiful, but a little frosty. Our weather has been incredible, and the outlook is for it to do nothing but get better. Frosty mornings, warming to T shirt afternoons, and today some folks are threatening to put on shorts ... which for October 20 in Idaho at 4,300' is quite a statement.

We're working at Trent Woods' home, which is just below the site, so we have power, water, a nice flat place to work, a wood stove to back up to early and late, and a garage to store tools in at night ... it's pretty cushy, really. The school is about a three-minute walk down the hill, and we've been going down there to eat lunch with the kids. For dinners, we go to a different spot in town each night. We've had our stomachs full on turkey dinner, Alice's famous meat loaf, lasagna, and tonight I hear there's a steak dinner on tap downtown.

Last night we ran up to Red River Hot Springs for a dip, and had the entire place to ourselves. The hot springs is about half an hour past the wildlife refuge where we are staying. We listen to coyotes at night and watch them out the window in the morning.

We're going to send the local T-shirt of choice in for the auction next week. It says "End of the World, 9 miles. Elk City, 12." Suffice it to say, it's not a place a person should start up a drive through espresso stand. Buy gas, beer and a head of lettuce and you've pretty well been in every establishment in town.

So, as to the work ... it's going great. We're cutting the frame out of dead standing larch, and Dave Paisley from the mill has been great about recutting a couple of questionable pieces, so we've got very nice wood. We oversized it and are using a square rule layout.

We have had a varied group here. Ken Beiser, myself, and George Nesbitt came in Friday evening, and met up with Ian Barlow, who works here at the Forest Service. We were joined by a few locals Saturday morning for the timber selection down at the mill. We had all the timbers hauled to the site by about 1 p.m., and by that time we had gained Brian Leisz and Rick Hildebrand from Troy, MT, Nils Peterson, Keith Smith and Mary Fauci from Moscow, ID. We spent the afternoon getting up to speed and learning a great radius formula from Brian, who had made the trek in here with his band saw to cut our curved members.

By Sunday afternoon we had all the curved pieces cut and many others laid out. Brian, Rick, Nils, Mary and Keith left that afternoon, and Monday we gained Derwin Hanney and Laura Neary, from Bend, OR, Jim DiSantis from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and Brad Yaeger from Kalispell, MT. Monday and Tuesday we layed out like demons. Derwin and Laura are the kingpost king and queen, George is the plate guy, I took a gang of locals and finished out the common rafters, purlin blocks, and then moved into some miscellaneous layout. Brad and Jim are going at the posts, and we've got a local crew, led by Ian, tenoning all the braces. And we're all doing our best to drive Ken completely nuts with questions.

Today we're starting to really make the chips fly, and the clean-up crew is chamfering and nylon brushing all the timbers as they're finished. They're really cleaning up nicely. Our goal today is to have everything laid out and a lot cut, so we can finish the cutting tomorrow and prefit Friday. We've got a pretty steady crew of four or five from in town, which is helping a lot.

We have gangs of very small people passing through the site regularly - all the classes in the school here are coming up to check on our work each day. They arrive with notebooks in hand, and interview us every which way from Sunday. I didn't know there were so many questions in the world. We've had a few math reviews for the older kids, got the younger ones building with popsicle sticks. Everyone's taken a peg to decorate (I'm operating on faith that they'll all come back so we have them to use!), and are looking up New Hampshire on the map so they can see where Scott Northcott lives, since he donated these pegs to their project. This afternoon Ian has some sort of program planned for them, working with safety issues, getting ready for our big raising day Saturday. We plan to rig up a gin pole so the kids can haul up some of the high pieces. They're skeptical, but game.

So, we're all feeling good. We don't have any extra time, but I think we'll be in good shape with almost everything cut by tomorrow night, if not everything. We're all upbeat, having fun working together and making new friends.

I'll send more updates as we get closer. And when I figure out how to send photos, I'll do that, too. The school has a digital camera, and we've all got the digital equivalent of flash burns! For now, I hear the purlins calling my name. -- Nancy Wilkins