FIRST-PERSON CONTRIBUTED PIECE — approx. 550 words, byline Jason Leue. Offered for cabin, homesteading, off-grid and outdoor-lifestyle publications. Run as-is or cut to fit; no fee. NOTE TO EDITORS: quotes and byline are the author's own; contact borahvista@gmail.com to confirm any edits before publication.

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THE LARGEST THING I'VE EVER BUILT IS A DECK. I WANT A LOG CABIN.

By Jason Leue

I bought seven acres in Custer County, Idaho. No water, no power, and no way to drive a truck onto it.

What I want out there is a log cabin — not a trailer, not a shed I bought at a store. A cabin made of trees, standing on the spot I'm standing on. The largest thing I have ever built is a deck. I decided to film the whole thing, honestly and in order, and it became a ten-episode series called Borah Vista.

Here is what the first summer actually looked like.

There was a fence running across the property, marking a boundary that stopped existing years ago, and a pipe under it that isn't mine — sitting in my neighbor's ditch. Technically his ditch. That's how water works out here in Idaho, and you learn it fast or you make enemies fast.

The plan for the cabin was logs — cut and dragged out of the backwoods. A cabin the size I want is somewhere around eighty logs: dead standing, straight, twenty feet or better. I had counted those eighty logs on a piece of paper at my kitchen table. I had never counted one in an actual forest. And before I could, I had to find out whether I was allowed to take a single tree — which is its own episode, and its own education.

I live in a van while all this happens. At one point I was out of food and drove over Trail Creek Road to Sun Valley — where celebrities hang out, not guys who live in vans — because it was the nearest place to solve the problem, and it turned out to be one of the top mountain-biking spots in North America.

The first real victory wasn't the cabin. It was a driveway — a real approach off the county road, culvert and all, so a truck could get onto the land for the first time. Then a shipping container, seven acres of blank canvas, literally a hundred options for where to put it — and I put it in the wrong place. I'll be dealing with that for a while.

The theme of the season, and the closest thing I have to advice: do what you know — and the rest will be revealed. Every episode ends on the question I couldn't answer yet, because that's how it actually felt. The season is releasing now, one episode every Saturday through September 26, and I'm not going to tell you here how it ends.

If any of this sounds familiar — the plan bigger than the experience, the land that doesn't care about your plan — the series is on YouTube at @BorahVista, and there's a free trip guide to the Lost River Range at borahvista.com/guide, because the country out here is the reason I bought land in the first place.

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Photos available at borahvista.com/press — free for editorial use with the credit "Borah Vista." Print-resolution versions on request.