The Moose Shack And What It Means to Me

I’ve been part of a moose hunting area since I was six years old. My dad and his buddy Bill Lynch had a makeshift hunting and fishing camp. It was nothing fancy—just plywood walls and a tarp roof—so it stayed inside the rules of “it’s just a tent camp.” They couldn’t buy land or get building permits back then, so this was the workaround.

I used that camp for the next twelve years until one May long weekend when we boated in and found it burnt to the ground. Someone who considered the area sacred didn’t want “squatters” in their neighborhood—even though there’s literally nobody within twenty miles, and even at that distance there are only seven cabins in a hundred-mile radius. That pretty much took the wind out of our sails. We still went back after that, but only with regular tents.

That kicked off what I call our twelve-year “stay-in-the-boat” era. We’d fish all day on the lake system, then just pull the boat up on whatever shore we happened to be near and sleep onboard. Living out of the boat like that forced us to explore every little bay, island, and river mouth. We learned that water system inside and out because we never had a fixed camp to return to each night. I’m glad it happened that way—some of the best spots we ever found we would have never bothered checking if we’d had a cabin to go home to.

I was basically born into this lifestyle. Thirty-nine years later it still feels like it’s in my blood.

In 2008—twenty-two years after I first laid eyes on the area—an opportunity came up to buy a small A-frame cabin. I jumped on it. We had stopped there a few times over the years while exploring, so we already knew the spot. It was a no-brainer.

We bought it from a guy named Butch McMaster. Butch was a very successful logger in the region who had purchased the place from the original owners, Don and Yvonne Hall. He had big plans to fix it up and use it himself, but life took him in a different direction. When I called him out of the blue, he took a few days to think it over, then decided to sell. I’ll never forget that he didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, yet he trusted the deal would go to someone who loved the place. It did. I’m forever grateful to him.

Once the paperwork was done, we got busy cleaning the cabin up. It had only been used a couple of times in the previous eleven years, so the packrats had moved in upstairs and turned it into a five-star rodent resort. We evicted them, dragged the urine-soaked mattresses and blankets outside and burned them, sealed every entry hole, replaced the floor, moved the shed, brought in a couple of futons (one store-bought, one we built), and slowly put our own touch on the place. We were happy, proud, and honestly a little stunned that we had somehow managed to get our hands on something so hard to come by.

Over the years I’ve had a family, and my kids have grown to love the Moose Shack every bit as much as I do. Of course I did my best to “sell” it to them—“God’s water,” “middle of nowhere,” “best place on earth,” all the usual lines.

We’ve had two very close calls with forest fires.

The first was in 2014. Lightning started a fire that came roaring straight at us. We set up sprinklers on the roof and the fire crew was able to bucket water right around the cabin, but it still burned hot and close. The second (and scarier) one was in 2024—another lightning strike. That fire came from a different direction and got within a couple hundred yards before the water bombers and ground crews stopped it. Both times we thought we were going to lose everything.

All the big fires out there in the last twenty-five years have been fueled by dead pine killed by the mountain pine beetle infestation that rolled through in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Now that pretty much everything burnable around us—including the duff on the ground—has already gone up in flames, we should be safe for a long time. My kids, and hopefully one day my grandkids, will get to watch a brand-new forest grow up around the cabin.

For seven straight years I ran a little family fishing derby out of the Shack. It was focused on remembering loved ones who had passed on—celebrating their lives, swapping stories, and just spending a weekend together on the water. I put it on hold when life got busy, but if things settle down with my new outdoor-life projects, I’ll definitely bring it back. It gave everyone a solid date on the calendar to look forward to every year.

As we close in on twenty years of owning the Moose Shack, I feel exactly the same way about it as I did the day we signed the papers. My kids do too. It’s ours. It’s special. I don’t regret a single minute or dollar spent out there. In a world that feels crazier every year, it’s a healing place—a spot that forces you to disconnect from all the noise and truly resets your mind and soul.

That’s what the Moose Shack means to me.

Lyman Miller