Aerial view of the Burke House and outbuildings in winter

The Burke House

Built by hand in the late 1800s, still off the grid

Augusta Burke, son of Gustav and second generation of a German (Prussian) settler family, raised this log house in the late 1800s, surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness. It has never been on the grid and it still is not. Everyone who has had it since has done the same thing with it: kept it standing, kept it warm, and handed it on.

The Burke House on its hillside under a heavy sky: a two-storey log house in tall grass, with a weathered barn standing off to the left

Still standing where the Burkes put it

The log house on the rise is the one you sleep in, raised by hand in the late 1800s. You are not visiting the history here, you are staying in the middle of it.

Kept, not restored

Nothing here was rebuilt to look old. The logs, the floors and the beams are the ones the Burkes cut, and what has been added over the years was added the way the house was always kept: only what it needed to stay in use.

See the house

Sleeping

  • Sleeps a group, part of the up-to-20 across the property

Power and water

  • Solar power
  • Hot and cold running water
  • Starlink internet

The building

  • Hand-built log house, late 1800s
  • Never been on the grid
  • Cast iron wood stove in the main room

Booking

  • Rents with the two cabins and the Star Roller
  • Up to 20 people across the property
The main room: a black cast iron wood stove on a stone pad, round dining table to one side, sofas beyond
Sitting room with two leather sofas, a heavy timber coffee table and exposed hand-hewn ceiling beams
The room seen end to end: sofas in the foreground, dining table beyond, kitchen at the far wall
Afternoon sunlight falling across a long wooden table and the floorboards
Bedroom with a bed against a barn-board wall under a sloped ceiling, rug on wide-plank floors, guitar in the corner
Kitchen with a white range, deep sink, wooden counter and cabinets along the window wall
A tall window framing the beaver marsh, the treeline and open sky beyond
The wood stove in the foreground with the dining table and the exterior door behind it

The wood stove

Cast iron on its own hearth in the middle of the floor, with the table on one side and the sitting room on the other. It heats the whole ground floor.

The people who cut these logs

The Burkes came from east Germany to settle mountains nobody had a road to, and this house is what they left. The rest is easier to see than to write down.

A weathered barn standing in deep snow at the edge of the treeline, from the film Video

The House the Burkes Built

A walk through the rooms and the family history that came with them, a century and a half after the first log went down.

Fill the house, keep it standing

A house stays up by being lived in, and this land stays wild the same way. Membership opens the trails and the dark sky preserve from CA$20 a month, and Earth members book the house at 25% off. Cancel any time.

Become a member