I'm reaching way back in my "detail/factual" memory. It isn't ever as clear and accurate as my "feeling/picture" memory. I may have some written material that would corroborate or annul what I remember, but it is somewhere in the chaos of my journals and records and at the moment I don't think the hard facts are necessary.
   It was 1979 when we met Lynn Nelson and signed a contract to purchase our Mink Creek home. Lynn was willing to carry the contract himself, so we were able to avoid banks and the big down payment they would have required. The deal was quite simple. We would build Lynn a one-bedroom log cabin in trade for the house. The rest of the property, which was around 40 acres would be paid for in monthly payments.
   So, I'm backing up in time to 1977. We were still living in Salt Lake on Roosevelt Avenue in the one bedroom apartment. Wynn, had graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor's degree in Psychology, and was still working as a security guard on Temple Square. I was a stay-at- home mom with three daughters. Hannah was born in 1975, Kate in 76 and Josie in November of 77.
    My sister, Mesia, had married a fellow named Greg Simonds, and Greg was helping a friend build a log home at Red Fish Lake in Idaho. Wynn and I went to see their work, and Wynn fell in love with logs and carpentry and construction. He wanted to build a log home. During the late summer, he worked with Greg building a big log porch onto the old hunting cabin at Deseret Land and Livestock and was feeling quite confident with his own abilities. That is why we had stopped to look at the cabin in Mink Creek and why he had offered to build Lynn Nelson a log home.
   I had lived in a log home when I was young, a home my father had built from a Boise Cascade kit, so I wasn't adverse to the idea, and I knew Wynn was capable of doing anything he set his mind on, and so it began. Books on log construction started coming through the mail. And like dominoes other subjects started falling into place as well. Mother Earth News had a regular place on our table as did Reader's Digest Do-It-Yourself books. They were followed by more intense reading like Fine Woodworking, Rough Hewn, and Timber Trusses of the Middle Ages. Companion subjects with titles like Wind Power Generation, Root Cellars and Roughing It Easy were accumulating on the bookshelf. Sometimes, I was sure there was some bizarre reproduction taking place on that shelf. Wynn was a voracious reader and he learned many skills from this literature.
   I didn't know what kind of journey I was headed for, but I was ready to go. My little apartment had become a tiny box, and I was climbing those city walls. The house in Mink Creek was waiting for me. It was run down and primitive, but it was mine. I wanted to tell Henry David Thoreau to move over. I was going back to the woods, and I was going to do it with three kids. I had heard my "different drummer" and was ready to march. Little did I know, that my experience was going to make Thoreau's Walden look like a walk in the park. But not yet, We still weren't ready. Wynn needed a teaching degree, Blanding, Hyrum, Layton, and Millville were interim steps we would take before we could get home. So hold on, it takes a lot of work to have a Mink Creek kind of day.