Looking Back at the Cinder Cone Book after 10 years.

I grew up reading books like the American Boy's Handy Book cover to cover. The images and illustrations inspired my imagination, and I did my best to replicate the creations, like traps, forts, and slingshots, I saw in them. Days spent in the woods behind my house working on these creations and forts set me down my path to build my own treehouses in 2014. I knew that I wanted to keep that childhood sense of joy and wonder that I felt when I woke up in a fort I built or floated in a pond on a raft I built with friends. I went into the building of the Cinder Cone tree houses with the intention of making a book that combined the spirit of the American Boy's Handy Book with Lloyd Khan's structure books. More so than an art book, I wanted to create something that would inspire others to build their own projects with friends or their families.

The book documents the 1 year period from May 2014 to April 2015, myself and a group of some 20 others came together and built the five treehouse platforms, the two houses and the skate bowl. Some of us were expert builders while others learned on the job. I took thousands of photos of the process and boiled it down to 150 some pages of drawings, musings and photos from the process. Here are some of my favorite photos from the process.

Tucker Gorman, Ned Segal Michael Garnier cutting and measuring the beams for the platform for the studio treehouse.

Tucker Gorman laying out the rainbow bridge steps.

The twin turbo tub and cold plunge tank.

Ian Weedman laying out the Octagon Tree House Platform.

Brian Sizer and the crew shooting concrete and making the bowl.

Waking up for the first time in the trees.

This year marks 10 years since the release of The Cinder Cone Book and 11 years since building the tree houses. I still sleep in them every night and still wake up with a sense of childhood joy. A few years ago I shut down my webstore to focus on stop motion and kept the few remaining boxes of books I had left for gifts. On the secondhand market, these books sell for amounts that make me shake my head in disbelief. A few weeks ago, my mom was cleaning out a storage unit in preparation for a move and found some piles of books that got lost in the sauce during the building of the studio at Movie Mountain. I just listed 100 of them on the link in my profile. When they are gone, they will be gone for good. They are for sale here.