Starting from Scratch: Building Katmai Sky Lodge

Imagine building a fishing lodge by hand, 35 pieces of lumber at a time, with each load transported by float plane. You’re in the middle of a national park, up a mud-slick hill from a weed-laden lake, building on uneven terrain that turns into a muddy tundra bog when it rains—and it rains more days than it doesn’t. The nearest town is inaccessible by land, a 20-minute float plane ride away. There are no roads, no infrastructure, no other people for many miles.

It’s manual labor the old way—the way lodges have been built in far corners of the world in decades past.

It’s the Alaska way.

But what kind of people in this century decide to undertake such a gargantuan task? Turns out, some pretty interesting ones.

Two Wandering Souls

The muscle behind this remote future lodge is husband-and-wife couple Chip and Skylar Lamont. And, as one would expect for a pair of twentysomething anglers tackling a task such as this, they’re relying on their skills, guts, and work ethic to get the job done. It’s a combination that’s done well for them through their short careers.  

During a long chat on the porch of a temporary cook/dining shack/general hangout space at the under-construction Katmai Sky Lodge, Skylar and Chip shared a bit about how they met, and how they got where they are today.

“We actually met in Montana,” Skylar recalls.

Chip was working at a Montana fishing lodge, and remembers hearing rumors about this new, female fishing guide coming in to work. The pair met when Skylar’s dog Django (who also joined us on the porch in Alaska for this talk) hopped into Chip’s 1992 F-150 and went for a ride. Eventually Chip found out just who owned the dingo-looking pup. He and Skylar started fishing together every day after work, and by the end of the summer Skylar asked Chip to move into her homemade teardrop camper with her.

It was the start of a grand adventure. The pair found themselves migrating to Florida after finding out both their sets of grandparents lived in Crystal River. Chip is from Maine, Skylar from Michigan, but their kin ended up in the same small coastal town in Florida. They wanted to be close, but didn’t want to live there permanently.

“Our dream was to live on a sailboat in the Keys,” Chip says. “We got on Craigslist and found this sketchy little 22-foot Bayliner Buccaneer sailboat in Homestead.” It was covered in black mold on the inside but had a new Yamaha motor, and the pair figured they were buying a motor with a free boat attached. They bought it for $4,200. They’d hardly ever sailed before.

Florida To Alaska

After a few adventures with the sailboat, Skylar was guiding in Chile when a client told her, “Oh, you’d love Alaska.” He made a call and connected Skylar with Royal Wolf Lodge. Soon they both had jobs inside Katmai National Park. Skylar had to get her captain’s license in just two weeks, and they didn’t have a reliable car to drive north, so they took Skylar’s mom’s Highlander. But they were heading north to Alaska, and they were happy.

“We wanted a job together, which is super rare,” Chip recalls, smiling at their inexperience that first year up north. “But it worked out. Our first season, the least experienced guide had seven years on the water. We were green.”

It was that summer in Alaska when Chip first got the float plane pilot bug. He watched Chris Branham, the lodge owner, in his planes and saw something in it that he liked.

“Chris flew like he was walking,” he remembers. “So smooth. Never fazed. I wanted to fly like that.”

Over the winter in Florida, Chip dove headfirst into the process, driving two hours every morning to the training center, flying all day, and studying at night. They were both working manatee tours in Florida to pay for the process. Chip was captaining pontoon boats by day, then flying tiny planes on his off days. And finally he got his pilot’s license. It was time to move on to the next thing.

Building A Lodge?

So how does one go from Florida manatee tour guide to manually constructing a lodge in Alaska?

“Chris and his wife Linda retired from Royal Wolf,” Skylar recalls. “We didn’t expect them to tackle another project so quickly. Chris just called and said, ‘Wanna build a lodge?’”

“We thought we were just helping with construction,” Chip adds. “But then he said we could turn our work into sweat equity. It became ours. We were dropped off out here—nothing but a tent, some groceries, and a load of lumber.”

Accompanied by a tundra summer’s load of insects, they started building. Building a lodge, but also a future experience—a future adventure—for a few lucky anglers.

When it’s finished, the goal for Katmai Sky Lodge is to let guests feel like they’re coming into Skylar and Chip’s home—not a big lodge with a strict schedule. It’s set on 60 private acres along the western shore of 120-acre Olga Lake, southwest of Brooks Lake. The future Katmai Sky Lodge is surrounded by the vast wilderness of Katmai National Park, a mix of boreal forest and lichen-covered tundra that’s home to a diverse assortment of wildlife and bird species. The location is only a short float plane ride from Brooks Falls, Becharof National Wildlife Refuge, and all the fishing and bear viewing opportunities of Katmai National Park. The lodge is 300 miles from Anchorage and accessible only by float plane. The goal is to provide a true wilderness experience with a maximum weekly client load of six.

“We want guests who appreciate the land, the bears, the silence,” Skylar interjects. “People who are present. Keep it small, intimate. Tailored to each person. Have the experience be not just about fishing, but about being here.”

Even in its infancy, the lodge carries little touches of home. Most of the dishes in the small kitchen are either thrifted or hand-thrown pottery made by Skylar. Django, the family dog, lounges around. It’s a homespun vibe.

“I think we’ve started to almost take 'lodge' out of the name and just call it ‘Katmai Sky’ or something like that,” Skylar adds. “Because it doesn’t necessarily need to be a lodge. It could just be like, come to Chip and Sky’s house.”

Every angler has a different mental image of “the perfect day,” and they both want to be able to accommodate that. Keep the experience small, intimate, and special. It will be a lodge for active anglers. Most of the fishing is a float plane ride and then a hike away, and two rivers are accessible from the lodge with about an hour of hiking. Bears are in no small supply, and anglers can expect to see as much wildlife as they see fish.

“You know, I love the bears,” Skylar enthuses. “I think that they are one of the things that makes this place so unique. You can go fishing in however many states out there, however many countries . . . but how many places can you fish with bears?”

But fishing with bears will come later. For now, there’s a lodge to build. And from the porch where we all sit, we eyeball the raised platform that will someday be the floor of the main lodge, where we’d put up a few framed-out walls earlier that day. It’s hard to conjure a full-on lodge here when we’re surrounded by lumber and building materials.

“It’s really hard to imagine having guests someday,” Chip adds. “Because it’s just like, this whole watching a wall go up and, you know . . . today, I was like, ‘Man, it’s going to look crazy when there’s a roof on there,’ you know? It’s just like putting those little puzzle pieces together.”

Construction Timeline

The first load of lumber arrived in Naknek via barge in the spring of 2024. From there, it was trucked to King Salmon, and Chip ferried loads to the construction site by float plane. Some of the larger materials like BCI joists, plywood, and 8x8 footings did not fit in the plane and had to come by helicopter. Later that year, a larger Cessna Caravan brought another dozen loads of lumber.

Chip and Skylar arrived for the summer in June 2024, and they had a tiny Kubota U-17 excavator flown in by helicopter in July 2024. It had to be disassembled for four different flights and then reassembled at the lodge. Before they did it, the Kubota dealer in Anchorage advised, “Don’t do it.” But after he saw a video of them putting it back together, he called to ask how they did it. They completed two cabins in the fall of 2024.

They spent the winter finalizing plans for the main lodge, planning the electrical and solar system, ordering furniture and appliances, and working logistics. Two more shipping containers and the rest of the lumber arrived in Naknek by barge in the spring of 2025, and Chip and Skylar returned to the lodge at the end of May 2025 to continue construction.

That summer they got the roof on the main lodge, worked on the plumbing/water system, and built some staff housing. They are returning in June 2026 to build a third cabin and finish the interiors of the buildings. They are booking clients for July 2026 for a “soft” opening, with the understanding that the lodge might not be completely polished.

Sustainability is near and dear to the couple’s hearts. Skylar is a Save Bristol Bay ambassador, and works with Trout Unlimited’s No Pebble Mine campaign. Because having a quiet, generator-free camp was a priority for them, they purchased a new solar power system for the lodge. It’s currently in a container in King Salmon and will be installed in the spring of 2026.

Escape to the River

When I visited the embryonic lodge, we spent days working in camp, taking care of the necessary camp chores of cooking and building, but managed to sneak away for two days of fishing to explore the promising rivers nearby. I was joined by Sarah, a Danish photographer seeing her first-ever bears; Zach, a seasoned world traveler and angler; and Darcie, Chip’s mom and Maine-based “momma bear” with a heart of gold who goes kayaking to commune with the beavers every morning. Toss in me, a globe-trotting photographer/writer trying to catch a quiet moment amid a busy year of travel, and we’re an eclectic crew. But we all fish.

And so we left behind lodge work for a few precious days and hiked, bear-spotting as we chased good numbers of grayling and rainbow trout. During July and August, 6-weight rods paired with floating lines are preferred for the rainbows, and it was a pleasure to drop down to a 4-weight fiberglass rod and a dry fly for grayling. Once September comes around and fish drop back down into the bigger rivers, a 7-weight rod with a compact line or even two-handed rods with sinking-tip lines can be productive against seasonal winds and on bigger waters.

Chip and Skylar have a commercial use authorization permit to operate within the park, and plan to fish most of the rivers within the park and preserve boundary, including some of the famous rivers like the American, Brooks, Funnel, Big and Little Ku, Kulik, Moraine Creek, and others. They have a concession to keep a boat at Big Kukaklek, and they are working on arranging a boat for the Naknek/Big Creek. They will be taking advantage of the creeks within the Becharof Wildlife Refuge as well.

Most anglers traveling to the area come with rainbow trout as their prime targets. The rainbows in Katmai gorge themselves on salmon eggs, and guides typically target them as they stage up behind spawning salmon. Grayling, Dolly Varden, pike, and lake trout are also favored species on the fly. The fishing is solid, but perhaps what anglers will remember most of all is the experience of hiking tundra rivers, watching bears rumble through the underbrush just on the other side, and the wide-open expanses of the lake, tundra, and mountains visible from the porch of Katmai Sky Lodge.

Looking to the Future

For now, though, Chip and Skylar are focused on getting the lodge built and running. Some days it seems like a gargantuan task, something so big it’s not attainable. But other days . . . other days it seems close. Watching alpenglow move across the distant mountains as we sit on the porch and talk, I ask them both how they would describe this corner of Alaska to someone who had never visited the 49th state.

“Beauty. Yeah, vastness like you’d never believe,” Skylar volunteers.

“‘A land unpeopled and still; I want to go back, and I will,’” Chip adds, quoting one of his favorite poems, “The Spell of the Yukon” by Robert W. Service. “A place where, yeah . . . you can look over every horizon and know that there isn’t any human development in any of this.”

Other adjectives are tossed around the wooden decking. Uncarved. Pristine. Makes you feel bad for touching it.

“It’s hard to say, because it’s beautiful. But also . . . it can really test you,” Skylar continues. “And for somebody who’s novelty-seeking—just really likes to be tested—I like to see how much shit I can handle, you know? I think this place could definitely do that to you. Give you as much shit as you ever want to have.”

Chip carries on that train of thought. “We were talking about Chris and Linda when they were building their first lodge [Royal Wolf Lodge]. And I was like, yeah, every time I feel like I’m being a little bitch, I remember—I’m out here. Then I think about the people who were out here in the 1950s doing it, and they had no power tools, no Gore-Tex, no nothing. And like, I think this is hard?”

It’s a rugged place, this tundra.

“It’s the way that it was intended to be out here,” Chip adds.

“As raw as it’ll get,” Skylar agrees with a nod. “I love it.”

Jess McGlothlin is a freelance photographer and writer who has been on assignment in 28 countries on six continents. She lives in Missoula, Montana. Her previous story for Fly Fisherman was “Dorado Cruisin’” for the 2024 edition of Destinations magazine.

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