Nome Kennel Club, volunteers renovate Topkok shelter cabin
A crew of volunteers with the backing of the Nome Kennel Club have the Topkok Cabin on the Iditarod Trail back in top shape and ready to shelter mushers and local travelers who find themselves caught in bad weather. The Iditarod Historic Trail Alliance provided $15,000 toward the cost of needed repairs and improvements to the NKC, which maintains the cabin. Ragchew Amateur Magic Ham Radio Club also donated $5,000 to the NKC to complete repairs.
The Topkok cabin is situated at a critical spot on the trail, at the infamous Topkok Blowhole, where weather and strong winds can turn deadly. “It’s a critical point for a shelter cabin simply because that’s right in the blowhole that goes from Topkok to Golovin,” said Iditarod veteran Aaron Burmeister. “There’s an eight-mile stretch of the coast there that the wind funnels through going through the mountains. It might be dead calm at Safety, a 10 mile an hour wind in Nome, but going through that blowhole, when you have a north wind, or kind of a northwest wind, it can blow an ungodly wind through there.” The cabin serves the shelter needs of winter travelers between Nome, White Mountain, Council, Golovin and beyond.
The idea to help upgrade the cabin and make needed repairs first came to Evan Booth when he was gathering firewood in the area and having coffee at the cabin. Seeing the shelter’s condition planted the idea in his head. “The cabin was eight inches out of level and had much that needed fixing,” said Booth. “So, I brought it up and got a couple of my friends, Tyler Johnson and Ken Morton together and got them invested in it.”
According to Nome Kennel Club President Neil Strandberg, Bering Air transported NKC board members to the cabin where they inspected it on Nov. 22, 2019. From this inspection the needed repairs were planned. Phase One included jacking up the cabin, putting it on a solid foundation, building a new deck and stairs, and inside work such as putting in a new floor, a new bunk ladder, a table and a shelf.
The three volunteer workmen Booth, Morton and Johnson, got Phase One finished while there was still enough snow on the ground to transport the heavy construction materials to the site. That required two trips. They trucked the material and their snowmachines and sleds to the Bonanza Channel Bridge and made the 11-mile trip from there to the cabin twice. Cargo included two large beams, 20-foot 10x10s, and a number of 16-foot 10x10 beams.
The cabin is 12 feet by 16 feet and was originally set on 10x10x16-foot beams placed directly on the tundra. These had settled down into the tundra over the years and it had become nearly level with the ground. The original light green paint on the exterior siding had nearly disappeared due to weathering and there was recent bear damage to the siding and insulation on the east side of the cabin. The interior had some wear and tear to the floor in front of the stove, near the entryway. The front door and frame had been damaged and stitched together with bolts and screws over the years and the cabin window was cracked and in need of replacement.
“We put in new foundation beams and new pads,” said Tyler Johnson. “The floor joists were OK but the cabin was sitting on the tundra and actually sinking in.” They got under it and jacked it up enough to slide beams underneath. “We were a full day of just going around and around the cabin, jacking it up slowly until we got the front edge about four feet off the ground. The back edge was probably two and a half feet off the ground,” Johnson said. They added a deck for better entry to the shelter and for better storage of firewood. Phase One works was done over five days in late April and early May.
For Phase Two, the trio hauled construction material out to the cabin with four-wheelers pulling trailers. “We went in at the Big Hurrah Bridge,” said Tyler Johnson. “We took the Big Hurrah Mine Road/Trail and we went into the Big Hurrah Mine and then there was a trail that goes back toward Topkok. There was a slight trail here and there that we followed.” Bering Air’s Huey helicopter carried two loads out to the cabin as well. The first was a 2,500 lb. sling load. They also flew out with 1,500 lbs of smaller materials they could fit into the ship’s cabin.
According to Johnson they found the cabin to be structurally sound, but the roof was leaking. They fixed that. “We’d like to do a Phase Three where we go in replace the roof tin and also inspect the roof sheathing that’s under the tin,” said Johnson. “We weren’t able to get to that because we didn’t have time. But we were thinking that may have been compromised by the leaking. Then of course the insulation is under the sheathing.”
Phase Two included the construction of an outhouse, a necessary upgrade as human waste was becoming a problem. The sum of improvements at the end of Phase Two includes new foundation footer pads, new beam supports, a new porch and stairs, new plywood floor, three new windows, exterior weather wrap behind new metal siding, a new entryway door, upgrades to the interior including a table, coat rack, bunk ladder and a fire extinguisher.
The remaining work, Phase Three, will hopefully be completed in October. The plans are for a handrail for the deck and the stairs, interior LED lighting, replacement of the HAM radio antenna and associated gear, a footbridge to the outhouse, and new tin on the roof. The stove also needs to be replaced. “It works, it does the job,” said Evan Booth in an interview last May. “I’ve been looking around for some material to build a stove. I can do that myself. We’ll add that to phase three, a stove and a stack.”
Firewood for the cabin is collected by volunteers. Last March, Marty Ruud and one of his daughters