Final Narrative for the Framing of the Black Rapids Lodge
Final Narrative for the Framing of the Black Rapids Lodge
Summer 2003
by Mike Hopper
As winter slowly returns with the season’s first significant snowstorm and warnings of 50-below by the weekend, the memories of the summer 2003 Black Rapids Timber Framing School are slowly being buried under a flurry of the usual Interior Alaskan winter worries. And so, before they disappear like misplaced summer toys amidst the lawn mulchings, let us recount the true story of a once-upon-a-time Timber Framing School and the birth of a once-in-a-lifetime project…
The project genesis, in hindsight, looks like a series of snapshots: moments in which a vision inexorably took on the potential of reality. But it was like a prolonged Game of Black Jack: As each card was played, we were dared to continue. Spring 2001: In his quiet, cozy Hope, Alaska home, Jon Gantenbein, master timber framer, pronounces the very rough Bent drawings of co-owner Mike Hopper, do-able within the framework of a summer series of timber framing schools. Summer, 2001: A bulldozer pushes aside the brush and slowly exposes the building site on the bluff; Winter, 2001/02: Joe Young of Tok, Alaska, assures us that Interior Alaska can indeed produce 28′ long 8”X16” white spruce timbers; Spring, 2003: We are standing in front of the scale-model timber frame of the new Lodge at the Northern Living Home Show announcing the Black Rapids Timber Framing School…
And from that point on, the hand was played and the images begin to blur into the story of the summer of 2003.
The brochure advertised a “Preliminary 3-day”, no-frills school session, a sort of crash-course on timber floor framing, May 16th – 18th. By the 16th, we’d rounded up Mike’s elder brother, Kim, our partner from Clark, Co, Rich Landon, and our buddy Mark Nielsen. We figured between the four of us and the two registered students, David Savage and Larry Gilman, we could learn the basics of timber framing in this crash course with Jon and frame up and deck the main floor in time for our first bent raising class June 2nd.
The first day of the “course” Mike and Kim Hopper spent brooming black tar over the rotting, sprayed-on exterior insulation coating the aging WWII era Quonset hut that served as our timber framing shop to stem the dripping tide of the drizzling spring rain. Our students set to work installing a barrel stove and setting up the shop, while we awaited the delayed arrival of Jon on the 17th. By the end of the 3-day “course”, we’d offloaded and inventoried our first semi-load of timbers and Jon’s truck and trailer full of tools and timber saw horses. We’d yet to touch tool to timber…And then the woodwork started: Our days were filled with noise: high-pitched Makita power planers truing up our rough sawn timbers, oversized circular saws cross-cutting impossibly large beams and posts and specialized Japanese chain mortises chewing out nearly square holes. Occasionally quiet broke out echoing the satisfying pounding of wooden mallet on long framing chisel. Evenings we set up wall tents, brought in supplies, struggled with balky generators. Jon’s wife Diane and his trained assistant, Witek Markowitz, arrived on site a week into the project. Even with the addition of their skilled hands and positive spirits, and the non-stop labor of all hands, by June 2nd, we’d managed only to cut and oil most of 108 timbers of the floor frame. Students were due to arrive; putting these timbers in place and decking the floor would have to wait…
An emergency-room surgeon from Anchorage, a college language instructor from Juneau, and Larry Gilman (who, true to his word, worked the entire summer from beginning to end on the project) made up our first school session. Recently retired, Larry had previously spent nine years as 1st Sergeant of the nearby Northern Warfare Training Center; his summer with us was not only an intensive, three-month training in this difficult art, but a homecoming of sorts.
That seven-day course was our first indication of what we were truly facing to erect the two story, 32′X64′ frame with a 16′X16′ third-floor belvedere and 16′-on-a-side, half-hexagon dining-room bay, with enthusiastic, but unskilled help. 10-hour days of 24-hour energy did manage to fit the first of six Bents on blocks off to the side of the building foundation. The drama of raising would have to wait more than two months…
Small groups of students from all over the United States kept arriving on schedule over the next six weeks. Annie Hopper and a small army of volunteers including (Shayne and her family from Atlanta, Barbara Mack and Mary Liston) somehow managed to feed and house this steady stream of wide-eyed, would-be woodworkers in this rugged Alaskan mountain center. Janet and Kathi arrived from Texas as a special addition during Annie’s mother’s visit. We hosted a special education voc-ed teacher on summer leave in Alaska from Florida (“Joel” stayed on for over a month), a recent college grad from Texas, a brother and sister from San Clemente, California, a local woodcarver/university biologist, a chemical engineer from Fairbanks, a jet pilot, his wife and teenaged son from nearby Eielson Air Force Base, a martial arts expert from Washington. With each new class session of two or three students, the on-site crew of weary workers was revitalized by their eagerness to learn and thrill of being in school in the heart of the Alaska Range.
The mountains did not fail to deliver. The weather and mountain vistas changed constantly; on July 16th, together they made history: For the first time since records have been kept, four inches of snow fell in July. Our Texan student was enthralled; the site crew was less than thrilled to repeatedly shovel heavy wet snow off the aging and again dripping shop…
And against all odds, the cut and oiled Bent frames kept piling up in numbered stacks awaiting transport, fitting and erection; the floor had been framed in between class sessions but awaited decking. But by the final Bent construction session, we had run out of new students and the final chapter of a truly remarkable story began…
By then it was late July. The on-site crew of Jon, Witek, Larry, and Mike were by now pretty well worn out by the constant demands of planing, heavy timber moving and cutting, while roughing it in the Alaska Range. There was still nothing visible by way of a “frame on the bluff” to the casual passers-by…
Help came in the time-honored, timber frame tradition of family and friends. Mike’s two brothers Kim and Kevin were but the first wave of serendipitous help to arrive over the next five weeks of frame construction. With their help Jon, Larry and Witold completed the cutting of the final bent and Mike, the floor decking.
A couple days after the brothers left, Kelly the father of our children’s friends stopped by on the way home from dip netting salmon to drop off some fish and stayed three weeks; a day or so later, Ian, an apprentice marine carpenter from Washington on an Alaskan motorcycle holiday repaid our offer of a roadside beer by working two weeks. The two of them headed up the crews of volunteers that fitted and assembled the five remaining bents. With the stack of bents in position and tie beams and floor joists piled everywhere, the call went out to all our students to return to school for the long-awaited raisings.
Within a week, the skyline of Black Rapids had changed forever. Down at the shop, the on-site crew continued its preparation of the Belvedere, roof and half-hex pieces. A loaded-down, broken-down Subaru then brought us Victor whose boundless energy helped us through the ten days it then took to top off the bents and finish off this beautiful frame. Rich returned from Colorado with Bob from Indiana and these guys oiled and oiled….the decking, now almost in place.
And then, all of a sudden, we were done…But watching from atop the tall frame as our long-suffering crew of Jon, Witek, and Larry each drove off back to their own lives, we couldn’t help but think we’d just been dealt yet another hand of Black Jack. Annie and Mike returned tucked the project in for the winter, just as the snow dared return to this wild county. Dare we go on to the story of the summer 2004?