Thayer Lake North Shelter Cabin – Admiralty Island AK

Description

The Thayer Lake North Shelter Cabin is a historic cabin at the north end of Thayer Lake, in the Admiralty Island National Monument. It is one of the several cabins the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the Tongass National Forest for public recreation during the 1930s, and is part of the Admiralty Island Canoe Route.

A registration form of the National Register of Historic Places reports on the condition of the cabin as of 1995: “The Thayer Lake North Shelter Cabin is a three-sided Adirondack style shelter cabin that was part of the Admiralty Island Canoe Route, a Civilian Conservation Corps project in south east Alaska during the1930s. It has a peeled log superstructure and shake walls and roof. The U.S. Forest Service maintains the cabin. It will need major attention soon. All the sill logs are rotten, and moisture is seeping up the bottoms of the posts and angle braces, staining and weathering the bottom ten inches or so. Wall shakes are thirty inches long and abut vertically. New shakes were put on the roof in the early 1980s. None of the roof or wall shakes is original. The front of the shelter does not have shakes protecting the ends of the horizontal poles used as nailers for the wall shakes. […] The shelter cabin looks out over Thayer Lake. The natural context is similar to what it was in the 1930s. The ruin of a modest bridge consisting of a log with a few shakes nailed to it spans a narrow stream channel about seventy-five feet from the cabin. It is a contributing structure.”