Listening Point

(continued)

Sigurd spent some of his spare time in 1956 driving around the back roads of the north woods looking for a cabin that was just right. He didn't want anything fancy; he wrote in the book Listening Point that he just wanted "a simple shelter where we could just move in, spend a few hours, a night or two, or if in the mood even a week, an outpost away from the phone and interruptions:

It must be as natural as a shelter back in the bush, like an overhanging ledge or a lean-to, or a cabin on some trapper's route. We would carry water from the lake, cut our firewood, do all the things we would have done in the wilds, and when we went to sleep at night we wanted the feeling we were still close to the out-of-doors and that the cabin was not merely an extension of our house in town.

In October 1956 Sigurd found just the right structure about seven miles south of Ely, where a farm had been condemned to make way for Ely's airport. He bought it, situated it at Listening Point on a new stone and masonry foundation, added some windows, and hired a local craftsman to build a fireplace with rocks from the property.

The photo of the cabin is by Richard Frank