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 7, Sat Sep 5.
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.
Today I find out whether my cabin is already standing in the woods near this property. A cabin the size I want is somewhere around eighty logs — dead standing, straight, twenty feet or better. I have counted those eighty logs on a piece of paper at my kitchen table. I have never counted one in an actual forest.
Still no word from forestry on whether I can get logs from the area I checked out. What I know is that I'm out of food, and I've decided I'm going to Sun Valley — where celebrities hang out, not guys who live in a van. I also know it's one of the top mountain biking spots in North America.
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.
