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"  On a foggy spring morning in 2009, Dartmouth College junior Greg Sokol and a few friends got up before classes and paddled canoes down the Connecticut River in New Hampshire to check on a log cabin not far from campus. It was owned by the school&amp;#039;s Ledyard Canoe Club, of which Sokol was a member. Recent rain had swollen the river, and the current was running fast. Sokol led, angling his canoe away from the mouth of Mink Brook and into a tiny cove along Gilman Island&amp;#039;s steep northeast shore. He picked his way up the bank and glimpsed the cabin&amp;#039;s chimney\u2014too much chimney, actually. Sokol scrambled to the top. In front of him lay the charred remains of Titcomb Cabin. Police would later determine that a fire the night before had probably been set by high school partyers, then blazed out of control.  Like nearly 60 years&amp;#039; worth of students before him, Sokol knew Titcomb well. At Dartmouth, an outdoor spirit is practically grafted onto collegians&amp;#039; DNA. Students maintain cabins and trails throughout the southern White Mountains. This cabin, named for Jack Titcomb, a Dartmouth alumnus who had died fighting in World War II, was Sokol&amp;#039;s outdoor base camp. He had forged friendships around its fireplace, slept on its porch and swum in its shadow beneath the moon. Now it was gone. Oh, well. Sokol was an engineering student. He&amp;#039;d never really constructed anything, but he knew his way around a CAD program. And he had a bunch of smart friends. By the time Sokol had paddled back to campus, he&amp;#039;d made up his mind: The cabin would be rebuilt, and he would spearhead the effort.  Just over a year later, Sokol and a small team of fellow students assembled in a field 3 miles upriver from the building site. Some 97 red-pine and spruce logs (which had been selected and felled at a Dartmouth woodlot) had already been delivered and lay baking under the July sun. The crew planned to spend several days practicing the ancient art of scribing, notching and fitting logs. But first they needed to brush up their skills in using a crucial tool: One by one, they fired up their chain saws.  It hadn&amp;#039;t been difficult to gather volunteers. A few months earlier, a campus-wide e-mail titled build a cabin this summer had pulled in more than 100 responses, and Sokol had chosen five canoe-club diehards for the privilege of doing hard labor. &amp;quot;We were all going to be learning how to build a cabin as we went along,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;What I wanted were people who were invested in the idea of building something beautiful and long-lasting.&amp;quot;  &amp;amp;gt;  Four of the students were engineering majors and one was double-majoring in physics and Asian and Middle Eastern studies. They ran snow-load and stress-load calculations, projected linear board feet of lumber and cubic yards of concrete and pored over a dog-eared copy of the Log Construction Manual by Robert Wood Chambers.  Once the crew peeled the bark off the logs, it was time to move them \u00ADdownstream\u2014somehow. Among the \u00ADstudents was Kate Bowman, a paddling, climb\u00ADing and backcountry ski guide for \u00ADDartmouth&amp;#039;s Outing Club. &amp;quot;When we couldn&amp;#039;t figure out the answer to a problem,&amp;quot; Bowman says, &amp;quot;our instinct was to go to the Internet. But so much of what we needed wasn&amp;#039;t there.&amp;quot; The crew \u00ADstudied old photographs to resurrect the classic New England river drive, which had gone out of style with the advent of the automobile. On the first attempt, two logs floated free of their bonds. But a quick repair held, and the logs glided down the river toward Gilman Island.  On the island, the students used a borrowed mechanical-advantage Grip-hoist to haul the logs up the steep bank to the site, in a 40-foot-long wooden trough they called the Death Slide. It took 20 laborious minutes per log. Next, they tried a long-handled come-along and snapped an axle. Finally, they settled on a chain-saw-powered winch they&amp;#039;d seen in the forestry-supply catalog that served as reading material in the privy. Anchored to a tree, powered by a Husqvarna chain saw, the winch could zip a log up the slide in 30 seconds. Over the steamy New Hampshire summer, revived by daily swims in the river and immersed in the tangy scent of pine and the whine of two-stroke chain-saw engines, the students attacked the project with a mix of old and new technology. They used chisels and drawknives hand-forged by a blacksmith in Idaho and sharpened their tools with a barber&amp;#039;s honing stone found on eBay. They fashioned hardwood handles and 60-pound log butts into mallets that could nudge the heavy logs the final inch into position. They ran foam strips between each course of logs to keep out drafts. They fired up a generator and used halogen lights to work after dark as they raced to get the metal roof in place.  Then, as the foliage peaked, classes resumed and the river turned cold, construction slowed. The crew would leave some work for 2011\u2014installing the door, the windows and a wood stove\u2014but Titcomb 2.0 already looked like a cabin. One day, Sokol took a break from trimming the roof to reflect. &amp;quot;We surprised ourselves,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;We were just an eighth of an inch out on the diagonal. It was within reason.&amp;quot;  He had already begun planning a spring dedication event. He hopes Jack Titcomb&amp;#039;s son, Peter, will be \u00ADpresent. There will not, Sokol said, be a bonfire.        &amp;amp;gt; How to (Re-)Build a Log Cabin &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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