Summer Camp at Rabbit Rock 2005 A Photo Essay

Larry L. Dill's   New Hope Journal   Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979           September, 2005

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The Zen of Personal Architecture Part 2 The Building of Rockledge, "Le Petit Salon de Roc" A Photographic Essay by Deborah Gaddy with Commentary by Larry L. Dill

Deborah and I began in March, 2005, gathering rocks on the cliffs above Rabbit Rock  Lodge and throwing them down into the road below where I would load them into the ‘93 Explorer (the same car we used to haul the logs out of the woods to build the main lodge) and cart them down to the site for the new cabin, Rockledge.  The original lodge was built at a fork in the main road into Rabbit Rock so that a road passes above the lodge and one passes below.  In the road above we found archeological evidence that the land had once been farmed and forested with horses and mules.  Ancient tree stumps (some 3 feet in diameter) dot the cliffs above the lodge and we found a rusted horseshoe in the road just above the lodge that now adorns the facing above the front door.  The lower road runs on across the lower curve of the mountain to the property's edge and beyond, since the whole cove (or in our case the whole “gap” as it is called because it was a mountain pass for the early pioneers) was evidently once part of one large farm.  The elevation here is about 4,000 feet and so, though it is late

The site of Rockledge is about 100 yards east of the main Rabbit Rock lodge.  Another 100 yards beyond that is the boundary of the property marked by the ruins of an old barbed wire fence and a few remaining split rail locust posts.  Evidently, the fence was erected at some point when two different owners shared the Gap because the remains of the fence (at least 100 years old now) crosses the road with no indication that there ever was a gate.  A number of large trees have fallen over the road just beyond the Rockledge site which we have left as we found them because they provide a barrier to intruders (poachers, dog runners, gensing, ramp and mushroom hunters) who might try at some point to recoup the road which leads up from Black’s gate and the ancient road through the Gap. In the lower right hand corner of the photograph you can see the edge of the road I’ve been describing.  Barely visible is a string I am using to lay out the lines for the foundation of Rockledge.  The road itself was cut into the mountain,  perhaps as I have suggested, at least 100 years ago and so the lay of the land where Rockledge is being built is actually, quite literally at about a 45 degree angle to the almost perfectly level road.  Most of what I estimate to be about 10 tons of rock that Deborah and I hauled down off the mountain has gone into creating an 8x16 foot ledge on which to build my cabin.  Hence the name Rockledge.

Look closely at this picture and you can see a string line that represents level running across the middle of  the photo.  Building the rocks to that line became quite a challenge. Early on I abandoned the idea of using conventional cement to “glue” all these rocks together.  It would have taken tons of cement.  It seemed to me that if you just dry stacked the rocks carefully, each rock laid upon another rock would “cement” it in place.  I wasn’t sure about this but when Deborah and I had built the main lodge at Rabbit Rock there just happened to be a huge bolder  beneath the center of the lodge and so we (and when I say “we,” I mean Deborah did most of this part of the cabin building) dry stacked rocks up to the level of the floor of the cabin (about 5 feet in the front, 2 feet in the back and about 6 feet in diameter) and this became the foundation for the hearth that we have today in the main lodge.  The top of the hearth (the part inside the cabin) is cemented together.  But its base is a carefully dry stacked pile of rocks.  The hearth inside the main lodge which Deborah built in my absence about 5 years ago supports an energy efficient Defiant woodstove that it takes 4 strong men to pick up and a sort of bar built up behind that.  To date there are no cracks in any of the mortared joints. Just to be on the safe side, though, I looked up the great wall of China in Rabbit Rock’s Encyclopedia Britannica.  Sure enough, as I suspected, the great wall, visible from outer space, was built without cement or mortar.  Human labor, rocks and dirt.  I had a lot of rocks and dirt but moving the dirt around turned out to be more work than moving the rocks.  Fortunately, my neighbor, Scott Black came over one afternoon with his front end loader and moved some near by dirt into the rock walled space I was building.

I had originally planned an 8 x 16 cabin with a 6 foot front porch.  That would have brought the front wall of the Rockledge foundation to 6 feet.  I could have done it but it would have taken tons more rock than I had because for every additional foot I went up I would have had to widen the wall another foot to make it stable.  Tons of cement or tons of rock.  I had gathered the rocks in the early spring when the only thing on the ground were the rocks themselves.  By the time I started building in late May and early June, the underbrush had come out and reaching into it to pick up a rock was hazardous to your health because the warm weather was bringing out the rattlesnakes and copperheads.  So I had to try to make do with the rocks I had.  I decided that from a design standpoint it would not be a problem to have a front porch that was a foot or two below the main cabin.  That saved me about 2 tons of rock and allowed me to stairstep Rockledge and be done with the foundation.  Though it is late April when the photo is taken and the ground vegitation is greening out, the tall locust, hickory, poplar and ash trees in the background are holding out against the risk of a late freeze.  Just such a late freeze came in May, killing off our wild rasberries for the year and most of our apples.  The tall trees in their ancient wisdom were in full leaf by June (see Summer Camp at Rabbit Rock elsewhere in these pages).

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Go to Page Two of Salon de Roc           Go to Page Three of Salon de Roc           Go to Page Four of Salon De Roc           Go to Zen of Personal Archetecture Part 1 (March 2004)              Go to Photo Essay Summer Camp At Rabbit Rock 2005     Go to Paris Blog     Go to August New Hope Journal     Go to July New Hope Journal     Go to June New Hope Journal     Go to May New Hope Journal       Copyright 2005 by Larry L. Dill    All Rights Reserved    larrydill@newhopejournal.com    www.newhopejournal.com