COLUMBIA FALLS — There’s a new two-bedroom cabin being built at Glacier National Park, but this one is being built by a group of high school students.
"You'd think something would be as simple as, cut this board to this length. But, sometimes you have to got to accommodate for this and if you don't, then this is messed up,” said Kobie Larson, a student at Columbia Falls High School and one of the builders of the cabin. “It all connects together... it all connects to the house."
Larsen is one of sixteen Columbia Falls students who are building a cabin that will be used for seasonal housing for Glacier National Park employees.
Columbia Falls industrial technology teacher Jeff Remiker is one of the people in charge of this program. According to him, Columbia Falls is one of the only schools to spearhead this program.
“There’s one high school in Healy, Alaska that piloted this program,” Remiker said. “They did it for fourteen years. And we’re the first high school in the lower forty-eight to do it.”
Only a select few students were able to work on this one of a kind project.
“We asked them to submit a resume, a letter of application,” Remiker said. “We preferred that they had a OSHA ten training.”
High school senior Kyle Thompson says that building something of this magnitude with his peers is sometimes challenging, but he’s excited to be a part of such a special project.
“If I decide one day to have a family, I can take my family up there and say, ‘hey this is the cabin I built back in high school when I was a senior,’” Thompson said.
Pete Webster with Glacier National Park says the cabin will be located at Polebridge.
Webster is excited to be working with Columbia Falls High School, and he hopes to work with the school for another six years to create another six cabins.
