High up in the Snowy Range Mountains — off grid, out of cellphone range and deep into black bear country at 9,500 feet — two old guys are building a cabin.
On the one hand, it’s easy to understand their motivation.
The intoxicating smell of spruce hangs in the air. Brook trout jump for flies in the nearby Medicine Bow River, and pine-clad peaks bound up in all directions, creating a sensation that you're being cradled in a pair of giant hands.
But that doesn’t explain why these old-timers think they can manage the task.
Keeping busy in retirement is key to maintaining a healthy body and sharp mind. Yet this enterprise seems designed to wreck what’s left of their bodies, making one wonder if their minds have already gone to seed.
“We’ve worked like dogs to get to this point,” said Dave Simpson, 74, one half of this dubious undertaking, blotting sweat from forehead as he settled onto a cinder block stool to rest.
There’s plenty of explanation for why he feels this way.
Consider that every scrap of material must be hauled in on a ridiculous U.S. Forest Service road that jostles your organs like balls in a bingo tumbler.
Consider also that in addition to being on a budget, road access limits the resources and tools available for the job, which translates to yet more physical work.
Lastly, consider that Simpson and his compatriot have a combined 148 years of life between them. With this project still in the early phases, by time it’s said and done, they’ll think working dogs have it easy.
Nonetheless, here they toil under the punishing sun of July, digging out boulders and making sandwich beams from their limited selection of dimensional lumber. The looks on their sunburned faces suggest they, too, question if the juice is worth the squeeze.
The truth is this cabin is about much more than a place to get away. Rather, it is motivated by loyalty and the honor of a promise made 44 years in the past.
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson, pictured, and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, pictured, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson, pictured, and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily)
Meet The Guys
Larry Ash, 74, is a former Air Force reservist and retired computer engineer. He has glossy gray hair and a pair of unruly eyebrows with jutting strands like frayed electrical wire.
He has a strategic mind that leans slightly toward paranoia. He’s the kind of guy who might begin a sentence saying, “If I were a terrorist ...”
In the early 2000s, he’d threatened to quit his job as computer systems manager for the Casper Star-Tribune after the publisher announced plans to put up partitions in the office.
His reasoning was that in the event of a terror attack, the partitions would funnel too many people out the same exits, allowing snipers outside to pick them off with no trouble.
“I told them, ‘If I were a terrorist, I would love those partitions because I've got a kill zone built in,’” he said. “They thought it would keep [bad] people out, and it's, like, ‘No, it just means that people running away can only go in a few directions.’”
True enough, but still, is that the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the phrase “office partitions?”
Although maybe he was projecting, one of his most recurrent comments is that all life's problems, homeowners’ associations among them, can easily be solved with napalm.
The reason Ash is now here holding a nail gun dates back to 1969. He was a business major at the University of Wyoming, where one night he encountered a fellow student, Dave Simpson, sprawled in the dormitory hallway reading a book.
“I literally stepped over him. He was out there because his roommate had an early schedule,” said Ash. “But he was from Chicago, and 9 o’clock was not the time you go to bed in Chicago.”
Ash at the time couldn’t have imagined he’d one day name his own son after Simpson. Nor would he have imagined that as septuagenarians 56 years later, they’d be working like dogs to complete their long-promised commitment to have neighboring cabins in the woods.
Simpson
Dave Simpson has been in the newspaper industry for nearly 50-years as a journalist, editor and columnist.
He speaks with an impartial tone and a remnant of Midwest accent that nods to a Chicago upbringing. His close-set eyes and baby-round face convey an impression of timid innocence, looking as though he were in a perpetual state of mild surprise.
Among his life’s surprises was the discovery of how hard it is to build a cabin.
As a transplant, he fell in love with Wyoming’s open space and abundant outdoors. It followed naturally that he’d pine for a cabin in the woods.
With that in mind, in 1981 he bought a plot of land in the Medicine Bow National Forest, a rare private holding that originated from a 20th century mining claim.
At the time living in Casper, Simpson and Ash met weekly at a local dive bar to hash out napkin-back blueprints for a cabin, using designs from a DIY pioneer living series known as the “Foxfire Volumes.”
The concept was simple: Logs of downed timber laid crosswise and held in place with crudely axed dovetail corner joints. Cement spackle fills in the gaps. Wood floors and a metal roof. When they decided where they wanted the doors and windows, they simply sawed them out.
“Originally, we figured it would just be a place to get out of the rain,” said Simpson, adding that he was surprised by how long this theoretically simple design took to construct, working weekends through summer and early fall. “We decided on 14 feet by 14 feet because we figured it was the biggest log two guys could pick up. We didn't have any heavy equipment, and it’s not like I had a ton of money.
“We stacked logs for three years. Every Sunday afternoon, we drive back to Casper and say, ‘We got to take a weekend off, this is just too hard.’ But then Thursday came around, and we'd say, ‘Well, we better get back up there.’”
The build has never really stopped.
The roof collapsed, which they used as an excuse to add a loft. They’d built an outhouse but got tired of the trek, so they added a bathroom, shower and kitchen.
Repairs are always ongoing, not least following last winter’s incursion by a black bear, which tore through side panels in pursuit of cooking spice.
“There are not many friends who would work as hard on a project as Larry did. Every log in my cabin, he was on one end, and I was on the other,” Simpson said.
Cabin No. Two
From the start, the plan was always that Ash would buy an adjacent property where they’d build a second cabin. Finally last summer, 44 years later, the pair began work on cabin No. 2 a stone's throw away.
“They couldn't be more different. My cabin was pretty much planned at Frosties bar on a bar napkins. He has an amazing plan,” Simpson said. “I’m paying back a debt. He helped me build my cabin and now I’m helping him build his.”
Just as they started, Simpson was diagnosed with prostate cancer, throwing the project into question.
Following a successful prostatectomy, Simpson bounced back to work. Although, with his physical abilities curtailed, Ash redesigned the structure from a two story to a one story.
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build this cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, pictured, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson, pictured, and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson, pictured, and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily) 
Dave Simpson and Larry Ash, both 74, worked together to build a cabin in Wyoming’s remote Snowy Range mountains 44 years ago and made a pact to build another. Decades later, the retirees are making good on that promise. (Zakary Sonntag, Cowboy State Daily)
The Routine
Ash sleeps in the loft and rises with first light. He heads straight for the build site and mulls over the details of the day over in his mind. Simpson, meanwhile, cooks up a scramble and they discuss the day’s work ahead over breakfast.
“I model everything in my mind,” Ash said. “I walk around here thinking about every board and piece and organize in my mind so I can keep the stupid mistakes to single digits each day.”
Even with a pared-down design, your back aches simply visualizing these two at work — hauling 30-pound bags of cement by hand, digging out boulders to place the foundation piers, hoisting sheets of plywood above their heads.
Next up, building and installing trusses. They’d love to have trusses delivered, but as other cabin owners in the area have discovered, you can have a big truck bring in a truss, but then you’ll have to pay another truck to come in and haul the first truck one out.
For Ash, the hardship is part and parcel of his own survival.
“If you just sit in a rocking chair, somebody will eventually come find you … and you're expired,” Ash said. “You've got to keep your head and your body moving. This has been a lot of head and a lot of body.”
Of course, there’s also a time and place for rocking chairs.
At the end of the day, Simpson and Ash walk the foot path back to cabin No. 1, crack beers and collapse into a pair of rockers.
Sometimes they sit and listen to cassette tapes of Prairie Home Companion. Other times they’ll pull a read from the bookshelf. Today, they stare out at the forest and entertain this reporter with conversation about property taxes and other vexations with potential redress via napalm.
While you may question if septuagenarians are wise to take on such a toilsome project, the image of these two lifelong friends rocking side by side after a long day's work seems to justify their undertaking, whether they survive the effort or not.
“In your 70s, it's one blasted thing — ailment, test, procedure, surgery — after another,” Simpson wrote in a recent column for Cowboy State Daily. “You might be young at heart, but these are your high-mileage years.”
Perhaps because of building this second cabin, the high-mileage times ahead will feel especially sped up, as though he’s aging in dog years.
Zakary Sonntag can be reached at zakary@cowboystatedaily.com.
