While on a bike ride outside of Asheville (North Carolina), Doug and Jen Mielke fell in love with an overgrown high mountain pasture and spent the next 10 years convincing the owner to sell. When they finally purchased the land 15 years ago, they began to recreate shelters suited to the place.
source.image: Kirsten Dirksen
Having worked as a pipe fitter, journeyman and welder, Doug wanted to return to his youth when he “grew up feral” building shacks in the boundary waters of Northern Minnesota. In the past 15 years he’s built a cliffside cabin perched on top of granite, a 60-foot-tall treehouse, a “Divide Cottage” where the bed straddles the Eastern Continental Divide.
Now age 71 with plenty of space for his 4 kids and 12 grandkids, he’s just finishing his Treewalk Village, where Ewok Village meets a “symbiotic Swiss Family Robinson”, which has 3 interconnected treehouses with one two-story that sleeps six.
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Despite loving the creative freedom of his new life, Doug says it’s easy to complain on the cold and windy days about carrying firewood up 60 feet to the treehouse, but then the mountain takes over. “There’ll be 80-mile-an-hour gusts and it will be 10 degrees outside and I’ll be carrying wood up there and bouncing off the trunk of the tree from the wind and I’ll just start laughing out loud, ‘This is crazy. This is awesome’”. “One of our family sayings is ‘to not let the mundane cover up the wonder’. So the mountain is never mundane, we’re the ones who get mundane and we’ve got to wake up. The mountain always delivers.”
