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| Sod-roofed log cabin in Chicken, Alaska |
Extreme Cold Weather Makes Insulating Homes And Cabins Difficult
Alaskans always struggle with winter. The wanderers that arrived in Alaska from warmer climates found themselves in a desperate situation as winter set in. Here, at a place called "Chicken," the average yearly temperature is only 24.82º.Out in the middle of nowhere, with few supply lines for raw materials, and faced with the coldest temperatures that are usually recorded in Alaska during the winter -- weeks of -50º weather -- settlers scrambled to put together log cabins. This cabin shows the quality of spruce logs in the region; they're relatively straight and large, which is good. The chinking looks like it's made of oakum, a tar-coated jute fiber that was used back in the days of Moby Dick. Oakum made its way into the Alaska Gold Rush to caulk the seams of the small spruce boats that miners whipsawed. Well into the 1970's, oakum was still -- along with sphagnum moss -- a caulking material of choice in rural Alaska, before it was replaced by fiberglas and flexible permachink.
The base roof of this Chicken cabin is made of halved logs. And, on top of them, there's "sod." Actually, though, this is not true sod. Prairie sod is thick; Alaska's sparse soil is thin and often full of sand or clay. This sod is nothing but shovels full of mud, heaped up to a foot or more deep on the irregular but sturdy roof. The R-Value (effectiveness in use as an insulate) for dirt and dried mud is not very high. Fiberglas has an R-Value of up to 4. Foam spray can go to 8. Dirt has an R-Value of only around 0.25. In this cabin, it appears that boards and windows were brought in from the outside world. So was the green and white paint. Because uncovered logs and dirt tend to sift down into the cabin when wet, a second roof, made of boards and metal sheeting, topped off the structure, to stabilize it and protect it during the spring and summer months from turning into dripping wet mud.