Building a Life
in the Northern Woods

Once the septic was in, we were finally in a position to put a camper on the property for year-round recreational use. The camper could have cost a lot. Or we could have found a dilapidated one that needed a full interior refinish. We did not know how long we would use it before the full build: a year, a few years, maybe more. So we chose something in the middle. It needed to be usable without major work, but used enough that we would not feel bad modifying it. Unfortunately, this was toward the end of the pandemic, which meant prices had climbed fast. What used to be a few thousand dollars was now often over $10,000. After shopping around for a while, I found one under $10,000 that looked like it was in decent condition.

For the first few years after we bought the property, we were camping there. Sometimes that meant tents. Sometimes it meant winter shelters. Sometimes it meant a setup that was comfortable enough for a weekend, but not quite comfortable enough to make longer stays feel easy. That worked for a while, but it made trips easy to cancel. If the weather looked bad, or the logistics felt annoying, or we knew the whole trip would be packing, unpacking, and trying to get comfortable before leaving again, it became very easy to skip a weekend. We knew we eventually wanted a cabin or a house, but starting there felt too big. There were too many unknowns, too many decisions, and too much work to take on all at once. A camper or RV felt like the right middle step: something stable enough to make frequent visits easier, but temporary enough that we could keep learning the land before committing to the full build. We thought that meant buying a camper, bringing it in, leveling it, and calling that progress. It turns out even a camper needs somewhere for the water to go.

We’ve both spent our lives around forests, camping and watching trees grow, but we’d never really taken the time to learn their deeper history. We knew the basics, a few tree types at a high level, but nothing specific. We couldn’t identify the different parts of the forest or read the story it was telling. At the same time, we’d just bought the property. Property taxes on vacant land were one more cost we weren’t looking forward to. That’s when we found Ontario’s Managed Forest Tax Incentive Plan (MFTIP).

For the first while after we bought the property, we had no electricity on site. We ran battery-powered lights, charged phones off battery packs when we could, and trickle-charged here and there. In practice we were camping on our own land every weekend, and for a time that was enough. When we did need real power (for tools, charging, or the odd convenience), we had to run a generator. That was when the trade-offs became impossible to ignore. Generators also bring real safety concerns, which we knew well as we’d already had one catch fire overnight in our winter setup. The generator was loud. One of the reasons we’d bought the land was for peace and quiet: no traffic, no city hum, just the forest. Firing up the generator meant throwing that away for the whole stretch we had it on. It was also expensive. It needed premium fuel, and we were burning through $30-40 in gas per day whenever we used it. For a place we visited on weekends, that math didn’t work. We needed something that could give us power without the noise and the ongoing cost.

During the first year on the property, we were out there as often as we could get away, including through the winter. To make cold-weather stays work, we picked up insulated ice-fishing shelters to use as tents and ran a generator overnight to power heaters. For a while, the setup did the job. We’d taken what felt like reasonable precautions. The heaters had anti-tip protection. We’d placed the generator well away from the shelters. We were careful. Then one morning I woke up and it was cold.

Not long after we bought the land, it became clear that walking everything in by hand was not going to scale especially as we moved to bring in dump trucks of dirt and gravel. Most of the time, materials could only be delivered to the edge of the...