2021 Off-Grid Waterfront Cabin on Sumner Strait, Skiff Included — $79,000

The cabin sits on a point overlooking Sumner Strait in Port Protection, Southeast Alaska. That view is the whole point. Open water, no neighbors in the frame, the kind of quiet that takes some getting used to.

It was built in 2021, so the structure is young even if the setting is wild. At 608 square feet, one room, no bathroom in the traditional sense, this is a place to sleep, eat, and go outside. The owners cleared the land and hauled materials in by hand, which tells you something about how you get things done out here. There are no roads to the cabin. You moor a skiff in the adjacent bay and walk to it.

That skiff is included in the sale. It's a 16-foot Lund with a 4-stroke Yamaha outboard, which is your primary transportation once you're in the area. Also included: a Honda 2200 generator, a brand-new 2500 generator/inverter, two 1,100-gallon water tanks, a propane range, a propane freezer, assorted tools, and building materials. For a remote off-grid property, that's a meaningful head start.

Getting there requires a plan. You can take a ferry from Ketchikan to Hollis, roughly an hour and a half, then drive 80 miles to Labouchere Bay, then come the rest of the way by skiff. Or you charter a seaplane and get there in under an hour from Ketchikan or Wrangell. Either way, this is not a weekend impulse. You go when you mean to go.

AT&T cell service works from inside the cabin, so you have a line out if you need one. No property taxes.

There's a disclosure worth knowing: several trees have recently come down on the property and some structural damage has occurred. The listing doesn't specify the extent, so that would be the first question to ask before anything else.

For someone who already knows what remote Alaska living involves, this is a straightforward proposition. The land, the structure, the gear, and the view are all there. The work ahead is real but so is what you get for $79,000.