Weekend Cabin: Summit Prairie
All the good fire lookouts were booked, so they built their own
Weekend Cabin isn’t necessarily about the weekend, or cabins. It’s about the longing for a sense of place, for shelter set in a landscape—for something that speaks to refuge and distance from the everyday. Nostalgic and wistful, it’s about how people create structure in ways to consider the earth and sky and their place in them. It’s not concerned with ownership or real estate, but what people build to fulfill their dreams of escape. The very time-shortened notion of “weekend” reminds that it’s a temporary respite.
By 2009, Dabney Tompkins and Alan Colley were fire tower veterans. Originally from Texas, the couple fell in love with the lookouts due west of Crater Lake National Park, Oregon, in the Umpqua National Forest and Tiller ranger district, after renting and sleeping in them. One particularly beautiful tower caught their eye, but it was always booked, and they joked they should just buy land and make their own. That joke led to
300 words to go
You’re just getting to the good part.
This story — and 42 issues of them — opens with a subscription.
Either one picks up right where you left off.
Join 7,000+ readers · Independently owned · Since 2008
Already a subscriber? Sign in
Adventure Journal — Print Quarterly
Stories like this, in your hands four times a year.
42 issues. 11 years. Independently owned. Printed on 70lb uncoated paper with a soft-touch cover, solar-powered, and shipped in a brown paper envelope. Free domestic shipping.
