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A short primer of lease land cabins within the National Forest. These were established back in teens and through the 20s as a means of allowing people to have residences within forest land. There was no restriction on use and the leases were 99 year types. These tracts usually adjoined private land tracts that had been grandfathered in when the area became a national forest. The National forests were created in response to the massive land sales at the turn of the century in which lumber barons were making millions and paying almost nothing for the land. The Forest Service is strictly forbidden to sale land. Most lease land cabin owners would love to buy the property their cabin sits on but can't. The only way is a land swap where the cabin owners band together and buy some desirable land that the forestry wants and then swap title (4 to 1 area exchange is not unusual). The process of title exchange takes 4 to 20 years depending on local politics and is very rare.

Currently, the rules are.

You buy/own the improvements and lease the land on a yearly contract from the forestry department. The lease is very little (was $156/year when I had mine).

If the forestry dept. decides to revoke the lease for whatever reason, you have to remove the improvements and restore the habitat to its natural setting at your own expense. The residence is for recreational use only (unless you inherited a 99 year lease which has no limitations). You must maintain a permanent residence elsewhere where the official mail can be delivered (PO boxes are not allowed anymore). You are subject to yearly inspection by the forestry (they used to come inside but they stopped that when challenged about a search warrant). No improvements are allowed without their permission and this includes everything from color of cabin to plants in front yard. If it burns down, you can only rebuild if the foundation meets the latest building code (ha, all were build prior to WWII so not many would meet that standard). When I sold mine, the review was on a 10 year basis but I think that may have changed to a 5 year. The forestry will invoke the latest health codes at time of sale which usually means upgrading the septic system. The value of these cabins is cheap as there is no security from year to year. In some cases, the improvements needed to satisfy the Forestry will cost more than the value of the cabin. At one time, they were insisting that the cabin be brought up to all the latest building codes but that got stopped.

The forestry considers them a nuisance and don't want to deal with them. Since their efforts to burn out many and impose Gestapo like restriction on their use, the cabin owners have banded together to from a National Forest Homeowners lobby which has been successful in thwarting the Forestry plans. I personally had to use the FOIA to obtain records pertaining to mine and the Sierra Club handbook on how the harass Government officials to make them back off. We got an interim district manager reassigned after he had proclaimed that his mark was to remove all the cabins in his district. Our House Representative was also very helpful at the time.