Living Like a Millionaire in a Lakehouse in Washington

September 8, 2010 | Category: Animals, Lakes, Mountains, Timelapse, Travel, Washington

View of Lake Crescent from the lakehouse balcony

By this point in the trip, I’m actually starting to get a bit exhausted of all the traveling. I asked myself.. “If I was a millionaire, what would I do right now?” and you know what my answer was? I’d find a nice place to go sit and do absolutely nothing! Hey wait a minute, I can do that right now! and so with that, I decided to go live like a millionaire. 😀

Hopping onto couchsurfing, I looked up some people who had a place available to crash near Port Angeles where I currently was, where I would be taking a ferry up into Canada from. One guy I’d contacted happened to live right on a lake near the Olympic NP. Turns out he and the few other people who lived here lived in this place for free!!

Le Sage facing Lake Crescent

You see, this place was provided for people who work in the park. These guys did educational stuff, teaching kids about various nature-related subjects when the little guys took school field trips to the park. As a partial compensation for working here, these guys got to live here in this lakehouse. Their only expenses here were utilities and food. Pretty cool, eh? 🙂

Lakehouse, as seen from the water

Now it turns out that the guys who lived here weren’t home all that often, which meant that I get to enjoy this lakehouse almost entirely to myself. A private lakehouse! Woohoo!! 😀

Here’s a video tour I shot of the location if you wanna see what it’s like for yourself. 🙂

and here’s a bunch more cool stuff that wasn’t on the video…

One thing I *really* like about the PNW is how lush and rich everything else! I mean even on top of this storage shed, look at the moss that’s growing on the roof. <3

Mossy roof on the shed

and something else that I don’t think I can explain is how amazing it is to use the bathroom outdoors. Maybe it’ll gross some people out, but it somehow feels so right to take a dump outdoors, as if you’re part of a natural cycle larger than yourself, replenishing the earth with the very nutrients that it supplied you with to sustain your physical existence. It feels good to be a fit in nature’s ecological cycle. In a similar way as you get endorphins when you run or have sex, as if it’s the body’s way of reinforcing positive behaviors, it feels really great to pee or poop outdoors. In a nutshell, it just feels right.

These guys had built an outdoor “toilet” which I loved.

Outdoor rainforesty toilet

One thing that’s great about having a house outdoors is the blend of outdoor/indoor lifestyle. You see, going to the bathroom outdoors feels amazing, but you don’t always wanna do that. What if it’s raining, snowing, or you wake up at 3am and just groggily hop out of a warm bed and just need to use the bathroom real quick? You don’t wanna go outside to have to use the bathroom. Having an indoor toilet is a wonderful option as well. I’m seriously starting to come to the conclusion that what I’m liking best is to have the best of both worlds… To live in a house that’s in an outdoorsy location. To have the comforts of civilized life while having the enjoyment that comes with a more naturey life. After trying a bunch of different lifestyles, this is what I’m finding suits me best. Kinda like dating… 😀

One of the biggest things that I love about the PNW is the variable weather. People who live here complain about how cloudy it is all the time, and I can totally understand that, especially if you live here on a permanent basis, but as a traveling visitor, it’s absolutely spectacular. I stayed at this place for days and was in absolute awe of the changing weather. Here’s the view from the balcony, overlooking the lake and the far mountains on a cloudy/foggy afternoon.

Balcony view on a foggy rainy afternoon

Walk up to the fence and you’ll get a better view of the ground and lake below.

Balcony lakeview on a foggy rainy day

The guys who live here have the option of walking to work, driving, taking the bus, or paddling a canoe! Imagine that… taking a canoe to work!! 😀 It takes a little longer than driving though and so in a practical sense, you do have to wake up earlier to do it. But still, if you have the urge to do it, you totally can!

Speaking of the canoe, I found that if you walked down to the water, it made for a beautiful foreground subject when shooting a timelapse of the clouds dancing across the mountains. 🙂

(and here’s a single still frame from the series, if you wanna buy a print of this image like you can with the other images I post on this blog and help support this traveling adventure.) 😉

Standing by the canoe and the lake on a sunny day as light clouds roll past the mountains

With the weather here, it rains very often. Not every day, but just about. Because of this, I decided to bust out my raingear for my camera when shooting these shots in particularly cloudy weather.

Raingear set up shooting timelapse on the lake

Even with a protective cover on the camera, keeping the front of the lens free of rain droplets is really important. Otherwise you get weird smearing and distortion from the droplets in your image. For example, here’s a shot of me sitting on the dock. You can see some rain on the left side of the image where the trees are.

Ariel sitting on the dock in the fog

By the way, it’s *so* handy to have a timer remote now, not only to shoot a series of images for timelapse, but also so you can shoot shots like these without having someone to trip the shutter for you. If I didn’t have the remote, I’d have to set the 10 second timer, and sprint over to the dock, hopefully taking my seat and not slipping right off the edge of the dock and into the water before the camera’s 10 second timer goes off. Instead, I can tell it to keep firing every few seconds and casually mozy on over to where I wanna go, shooting a series of shots and then picking my favorite one. Just a little trick behind the scenes. 😉

It wasn’t always just me out there. You see, there were some deer who would come join me as well. I heard a rustling sound outside and upon stepping out onto the balcony, I saw a deer nomming away on the grass down below.

A deer enjoying the lakeshore

My friends who went to school at Berry in Rome, GA saw deer all the time, but for me they’re still relatively rare. 🙂

Walking down to the lake and doing my best to not frighten the deer away, I was happy to find that there were several others there enjoying the grass as well, a whole family actually.

Deer feeding on the lakeside

Remember the shots posted earlier from the balcony, looking out over the lake? Well I don’t and I’m the one posting these images, so I’m guessing you don’t either so you can scroll up too to jog your memory. In any event, they were posted in cloudy weather. Here’s similar scenes taken in sunny weather, just for the sake of comparison. 🙂

Looking out from the balcony in sunny weather

and again, without the balcony fence in the frame:

Lake view on a clear day

Yeah, definitely a wonderful place to chill for a little while…

and finally to round off this post, the guys who live here have a sword. and a pair of thick dorky glasses. Yeah… heh. One thing they like to do is with everyone who comes to visit, they have them do some sort of pose with the glasses and the sword, and then they put the picture up on the wall. They have like two whole walls plastered with pictures of people doing funny different poses with the sword and glasses. Here’s my rendition. 🙂

Ariel with the sword and dorky glasses

Ahh life… 🙂

2 Comments

Chuck Belford
on March 4th, 2011
1
I there!
Actually the place is th Belford Homested.
My father purchased the land in 1968 from Old man Trumble. Dad and the rest of the men including my uncle Tom Brown built the cabin in the summer of 1974. My mother sold the property back to the NP back in 2000. I go out there every summer to jump off the dock and bring my daughter out there for great memories….GREAT photo’s.
Will Minehart
on December 12th, 2011
2
Ariel,

I was just working on a Powerpoint presentation for my science class when I came across some of these photos, when looking for a photo of a mossy roof. My heart jumped into my throat when I saw the photo above, and knew immediately where it was, and that I had lived there! I miss it so much! Crazy to have found this today. I miss it all so much. Glad you had a great time.