AT AGE EIGHTEEN, IN 1974, Yvonne Pepin set out to build a home from trees on eighty acres she bought on an Oregon mountainside. Log by log the following year she created a cabin and healed from her orphaned past, finding a new family in the forest and with people in a valley named John Day.
This true story of one woman's survival in the wilderness puts an honest and gritty face on the fantasy of living alone in the forest. Readers of
My Side of the Mountain
and
Into the Wild
-and fans of
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Walden
alike-will eagerly follow along on Yvonne's journey in this candid, revealing account.
Babe in the Woods: Building a Life One Log at a Time
includes Yvonne's original artwork and ledgers, further authenticating the construction of her three-story log cabin, built by hand from trees on land Yvonne still owns today. It
is the first in a three-book series about Yvonne's time living in this log cabin beside a mountain stream-and it is a story of her relationship with woodsy things in a place of risk and isolation but also peace, quiet beauty, and repose.