DIY workshop in Southern Oregon offers chance to build your own custom skis

Michael Lish and Kristin Broumas live and work in a collection of homemade trailers near Lakeview where they teach people how to make skis.
It’s a typically chilly spring morning in the broad high-desert region of southern Oregon nicknamed “Oregon’s Outback.” A gravel road winds past hayfields and around small buttes. A heavy-duty pickup hauls a large trailer, rattling over cattle guards and kicking up a wake of dust.

Trucks hauling trailers of hay or livestock are not an uncommon sight in this vast sagebrush rangeland. But this trailer is like no other in the region; it is hand-made of plywood, rusted machine parts, sun-bleached wood reclaimed from the desert playa and an assortment of salvage windows.

The large trailer looks like a nomadic tiny house on wheels. In fact, it has been used for that purpose. And it is also a classroom. And a manufacturing shop.

The truck pulls up to an unmarked spot on a desolate stretch of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. There is a gnarled tree for shade and a view of an alkali lake. A good view for the day’s work.