Mike Oehler's last hurrah: underground living & lessons from the earth
Back-to-the-lander Mike Oehler reimagined earth-sheltered living in the early 1970s, sure of the potential—and need—of underground housing. His experiments are beginning to make sense.
The story began over a decade ago. On May 16th, 2014, Kirsten got a message from Fred Max via the YouTube channel and *faircompanies:
"Mike Oehler is getting old, and it would be nice if you could visit him before he passes away. Thanks."
By then, we had migrated the site's YouTube channel into Kirsten's, for the videos on both places were similar, if not the same. Many videos had become heirlooms, helping many people in their building endeavors, DIY or not.
However, we got the feeling early on that many core watchers were knowledgeable about the early days of communes, organic growing, permaculture, and DIY life endeavors in general.
Mike Oehler, also known as Mountain Mike, had made himself a reputation on the movement of dropouts and back-to-the-landers, after gathering in and around San Francisco in the late sixties, decided to buy remote land in the wild to tinker with their own utopia.
Building with $50 (plus labor)
We knew Oehler as the author of the broadly referenced, witty books on DIY semi-underground and underground shelters to accommodate the life of people, plants, and pets at steady temperatures all year round at a fraction of the heating costs of conventional constructions thanks to the earth's thermal inertia.
Two self-builders thought about the thermal and environmental advantages of building and growing food in underground and semi-underground shelters across the US West, inspired by the energy challenges of the 70s, but also by vernacular constructions of Native Americans and early European homesteaders settling from Scandinavia across the Great Plains and bringing with them the sod-building techniques of their ancestral land.
Though only partially underground and covered by dirt and turf to maintain the interior's temperature through long, harsh and storm-prone winters, Scandinavian immigrants knew that the earth-sheltered dwellings created by the Sami people and emulated by neighboring survival farmers in Northern Europe could ease their chances when cold waves, blizzards, and dust storms roared through the heart of America.
The connection of the vernacular from the New World and Europe, the semi-buried Native American dwellings (pit-houses, dugouts, earth lodges) and the Scandinavian turf houses happened naturally, and one hundred years after, Mike Oehler and Michael Reynolds reinterpreted the tradition, each focusing on different factors.
Michael Reynolds settled in the plains of New Mexico's high desert and developed the Earthships (passive solar, upcycled materials, some of them controversial due to their potential off gassing), whereas Mike Oehler settled in Northern Idaho and opted for construction on slopes:
"You MUST have a good design if you are to build a fully livable house. Please do not think that you can sink a box into the ground and let it go at that. There is much more to it. Even many of the trained architects building underground today are botching the job so pay close attention. Since you will have to live with your design strengths and weaknesses daily for years, or perhaps the rest of your life, this chapter on design is the most important part of the book for you.
"First off, we will be dealing primarily with underground houses on hillsides. Hillsides are preferred building sites for a number of reasons. For one, the drainage is better. For another, you stand a better chance of getting a sweeping view. Still another is that hilly land is traditionally less expensive than flat land, and it is what most back-to-the-landers usually wind up with. Sewage disposal is greatly simplified when there is indoor plumbing. Then there are the terrain advantages of building on the warm, sunny south slopes in cold climates and on the cooler northern slopes in hot climates. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, flat land is usually prime agricultural land and should be left as such."
Beginning of Chapter 5 (DESIGN), The $50 and Up Underground House Book, Mike Oehler (1978), p.28
Buildings against climate variation & ravaging events
His books The $50 & Up Underground House Book (1978, four editions printed) and the latter The Earth-Sheltered Solar Greenhouse Book (2007) were resources that lived up to their motto: How to design and build underground, filled with practical do's and don'ts, from the quest for a suitable location to structural conundrums and tips against what today we'd call extreme events: big fires, strong gusts, monster blizzards, and what not.
In the last few days, some of the best descriptions of how the Santa Ana winds, which turn high-pressure wind masses formed in the deserts of the Great Basin into hurricane-force winds speeding to the West Coast, come to mind.
As Joan Didion wrote, the Santa Anas get on people's nerves, sometimes turning wildfires into ravaging events around Los Angeles.
"Easterners commonly complain that there is no 'weather' at all in Southern California, that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary non-firefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 1966-67 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains."
The Santa Anas, Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969
The Arctic blast coming down from Canada, battering many parts of the US since the beginning of the year, isn't as rare as we think, and sometimes it can travel further south. It happened during the February 2021 cold wave that caught many Texas residents by surprise, reminding them of descriptions of the bitter cold of northern winds sweeping across the plains heard at the local bar or read in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.
Watching the sheer force of such events from home made me reflect on our conversation with Mike Oehler when he invited us over to his property in July 2015: underground shelters could withstand many weather events and catastrophes unscathed. As his book The $50 & Up Underground House Book advanced through several reprints, Oehler added (1997) a note on how to get building seminars he sold on videotape sets, which he pitched this way:
"The third tape does more, far more. It teaches you how to build a shelter that will take your family and friends through the worst that nature and man can throw your way — for as little as $50 ($1,000 if you buy all new materials.) You will survive nuclear fall-out, high winds and tornadoes, fire, earthquakes, and riots. In gentler times, your shelter is a root cellar, storage area, kids' playroom, or spare bedroom. The tape shows you how to convert the shelter into livable emergency housing with windows when the crisis has passed and most above-ground structures have either blown or burned down."
Ordering form included at the end of the reprint of The $50 and Up Underground House Book, p. 116
One (very big) obstacle: earth-sheltered & building codes
No wonder that BBC documentarian Louis Theroux contacted Oehler to include him in his 1998 series Weird Weekends, hosting Theroux at his homestead.
Mike Oehler's underground living endeavors had started way earlier. In the late sixties, Mike tried to practice his preaching far from the city. In 1970, he bought a rural property consisting of 46 inexpensive acres in the remote northern tip of the Idaho panhandle, not far from the Canada border. The property suited his expectations, with a valley side that could adapt to serious gardening and forested slopes —ideal for forestry and DIY building experimentation.
Mike soon realized that he'd need to endure winters as harsh as the Chicago days of his upbringing. So, he aligned his passion (writing, environmental causes, self-building, gardening) with necessity, building underground and sharing the knowledge accumulated through his popular self-published books. That's how his homestead became the testing zone for Mole Publishing Company, which he incorporated in Bonners Ferry, Idaho.
Despite his disdain of any authority—and of many, if not most, architects—Mike Oehler differed from modern-day snake oil sellers in his determination to truly help people experiment safely and freely with viable (and dirt-cheap) underground dwellings.
That said, Oehler acknowledged the challenge of getting earth-sheltered structures up to code and advised his readers of the resources and time to do so, as well as to seek collaboration with local architects and building engineers.
"Now we come to the most difficult question in the book. Will a home built with the PSP system pass the code? The answer is, sadly, no.
"You are going to have to sit down and figure some way out, through or around this hurdle. If it is any consolation there are lots of other folks, whether they are building above or below ground, who are facing the same problems. All owner-builders in code areas do.
"You may grope for an answer to this dilemma through one of five possible avenues.
—You may move to an area which has no codes;
—You may build underground with concrete or other socially approved material and bring the house up to code;
—You may try to get a code variance for your house;
—You may try to get an underground house amendment to the code;
—You may evade the code, thereby becoming an outlaw builder."Beginning of Chapter 8 (You and the Building Codes), The $50 and Up Underground House Book, Mike Oehler (1978), p.100
Summer of 2015 road trip to meet Mike
Our adventure with Mike started on June 30th, 2015, when we finally could confirm to him that we'd be driving through his area in a little over two weeks. He responded to our interest in meeting him in person right away, and added some of the grudges many early adopters hold with computers and their fathomless workarounds:
"Yes, I'd be honored to have you film my work. I just skimmed some of the stuff you sent me and was astonished how much of it I had already viewed. I'd be pleased to put you up in comfort--your own room, of course, perhaps your own house. The world really needs your stuff! (If this is my second reply, forgive me; my first reply disappeared off my computer without permission.) Please keep my posted on arrival target time. A phone number might help. Mine is XXX XXX-XXXX. I don't have a cell phone. -- MO"
Kirsten replied to Mike's email on June 30th, 2015. She felt flattered that Mike knew her work. She also explained that we'd be traveling from Barcelona, where we lived then (we'd move to Fontainebleau, France, in early November of the same year). We had planned to arrive at Sandpoint, not far from Mike, by July 11th or so. To which he replied on July 2nd:
"Come ahead, come ahead, Kirsten, and bring the gang. We all (and my new WWOOFer assistant Kathryn) will spend the night in the Ridge House, my last hurrah. It's not technically underground, though it is at one point 12 feet below the surface and has earth and grass on all the roofs. It's three stories high and at last winter there was an elk herd crashing on the roof. Keep me posted on your progress so I'll be sure to be here when you arrive. -- MO"
Mike knew that we were traveling with our three children, which in mid-2015 were 8, 6, and soon-to-be 3. He didn't know yet how accurate his description of our party as a "gang" was, for our car carried luggage, camera gear, food, toys, and very loud conversations, songs, tantrums, riddles, and many, many experiences down the road.
One last hurrah: walking around Mountain Mike's homestead
We quite didn't get what Mike implied by saying he wanted to get his last hurrah by staying at the Ridge House, which he had been building at the top of the property, far from the prefabricated cottage he was inhabiting at the homestead's entrance from the road.
Upon arrival, we quickly realized that, indeed, his health was a concern: Mike Oehler struggled walking and got tired very easily, so it was a relief that our three children understood right away, going along with us as external satellites of the party's core through Mike's property, and toying with bushes, branches, dirt.
Kathryn, an intern in organic farming from Canada staying at Mike's property, was of great help to make our walkaround happen. She wasn't as interested in being a part of the video production as in making sure it could take place smoothly. Her help behind the scenes made the production happen. There are so many unsung, patient, talented people in many of the wonderful things that happen to us all, and it's easy to take things for granted.
So, along with Mike, walking barefoot through poky terrain and helped often by Kathryn on one side plus a long cane on the other (picture Rafiki, the old, wise mandrill serving as a shamanistic figure in Disney's 1994 The Lion King), we did a tour of the property partly on foot. As we walked, Mike added to the conversation, explaining the two main stops to see the main underground dwelling, inspiring his writing.
We could observe that seeing our children play around us made him smile, commenting at one point that arthritis was bearable with such good energy around. We stopped first at his early underground building, which was used as a blueprint for his first book; it cost him around $50, excluding labor, and he later expanded it for $500.
The dwelling was now unoccupied and in clear disrepair, but the interior held a nice mild temperature, which contrasted with the hot summer day.
Our presence and the walk made Mike Oehler reflect on the passing of time. He wasn't a person of big speeches and flourishes, but we could tell that the story of the property (and his own story as a pioneer back-to-the-lander and underground builder) went through his eyes. "But let's keep going, we don't want it to be too late when we get up at the Ridge House," he said.
Idaho modern oldtimer
When we arrived at his more ambitious, bigger, and better-located Ridge House, we noticed that the dwelling sat on a mountaintop and had big openings from the southeast to the southwest, following the solar trajectory.
Inside, the Spartan interior was spacious and fresh, without the feeling of stalling air or moisture associated with natural underground spaces lacking mechanical air interchange. We could tell Mike felt comfortable inside and would have used the house as his main residence if his health had been better.
He explained that he needed to prioritize access in and out of the property (to buy groceries, visit the doctor, and get help when needed), so he needed to stay in the cottage at the homestead's entrance.
As often happens with people who endure physical deterioration while maintaining their mental fitness, Mike felt less vulnerable at the big wooden table where we sat. At some point, he called Kathryn so he could dedicate a copy of each of his books as a present.
It was getting late, and we needed to get back on the road so we could find a place to have dinner and stay overnight. As it happened often, our two younger children fell asleep while the eldest talked to us, reflecting on the adventure we had just experienced, wondering whether Mike Oehler and the wise Shaman from The Lion King weren't, in fact, the same being in different manifestations.
When we settled in California and rested at my in-laws, Kirsten published the video on our visit to Mike on August 3rd, 2015. The day after, she wrote to Mike:
Hi Mike,
I wanted to let you know that I edited and just posted your video.
I think it turned out well. You're a great interview and your work is fascinating. I hope you enjoy.
Best,
Kirsten
Mike's response came the next day at 9:24 AM:
"Kirsten Dirksen, you are a wonder! Up at 4 this morning I saw that I had three orders in my email, one from PA, one from France and another from the UK. Two of the orders were for special 3s. Then I saw your notification of the editing and posting of the video about my work. I viewed the video and was delighted.
(…)
Congratulations, you're a real pro and a delight to work with. You and family are welcome here any time!--MO"
We were so glad to see him excited. What's better, people from eastern Washington contacted us to try to reach Oehler so they could organize some parties to help him finish "some projects." To which Oehler replied a juvenile "Thanks a bunch," after confirming that it'd be helpful.
Views from The Ridge House
A few weeks went by, and a new message by Mike arrived on August 22nd, 2015:
Kirsten, I just want you to know that I think the work you are doing is as important to humanity as any being done today. Certain other great folk had a lot of guts and talent (…). You are doing stuff that puts people back in control of their lives in an insane world. Please keep doing the kind of stuff you are doing!
Yr. friend and admirer,
Mike Oehler
Mike passed away on February 2nd, 2016, at 78. His obituary appeared in the local press. His website is still up and running (with a link to our video side by side with a picture of Mike).
Here are Mike Oehler's musings on the Ridge House, which seems to be a blueprint for (some) of the houses of the future:
The Ridge House
There is a design site I haven't mentioned yet: the crest of a ridge. Of all possible underground building sites, I guess this has to be my favorite. It is possible to build a U house through the crest of a ridge which will have optimum drainage, spectacular views, and yet be all but invisible to the neighbors below.
I have such a building site on my property in Idaho. It's on a ridge which rises several hundred feet above the valley floor. There is a house under construction there which when completed will offer a view fifteen miles to the south to a mountain called Roman Nose, and thirty-five miles to the north to the Canadian border. Two valleys are visible from the site—Deep Creek and the Kootenay—and two mountain ranges, the Purcells and the Selkirks. My design fully utilizes this panoramic sweep.Back in 1969 and 1970, before I received the inspiration to go underground, I began a cabin on this ridge. I got the frame up, the floor laid, the roof on, and was beginning to side the thing off when I came to my senses. I was having a problem with winds there. The winds tore off the roofing. Taking a good look at the trees around the building site I could see that most of them were wind-damaged; they had either lost limbs or had snapped completely off at the top. Since the cabin was constructed up on cedar posts with the floor laid on that and the frame built on top of the floor (this is to say it did not have the strength of true pole construction), I began having visions of the whole house blowing off the ridge like a box kite once it was completely sided off. For a while I considered wrapping cables around the roof beams and attaching them to "dead men" (buried logs) to keep the house in place, but it didn't feel right. Eventually I decided to tear the whole mess down and go underground.
Chapter 5 (DESIGN), The $50 and Up Underground House Book, Mike Oehler (1978), p. 51
In Memoriam, Mike Oehler (January 2nd, 1938 – February 2nd, 2016).
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