Sportsman's private paradise yours for $2.5 million

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By MARK GUNDERMAN
mark.gunderman@lee.net
Sunday, December 14, 2008 8:05 AM CST

 With Foster Lake outside behind him, the polar bear by the patio door keeps an eye on the grizzly bear nearby, while a Canadian musk ox holds its position by the stairs. A giant moose head high up above the fireplace looks down on them all.

And “all” includes several trophy white tail deer, elk, an antelope, a mountain lion lounging on one of the log support beams of the cabin, and a mountain goat on the rocks at the side of the fireplace.

“That one I shot on a hunt with Jack Nicklaus,” says Jordan Pearlman, who turned his northern Chippewa County cabin into his Northern Hemisphere big game hunting trophy room. The exotic stuff is at a place in Florida.

Pearlman is the owner of Foster Lake Deer Farm and Lodge, one of Chippewa County’s best kept secrets. It’s not well known for a reason. It’s more of a private residence and northern get-away cabin for Pearlman and his family than it is a business. However, you can book a three-to-five-day hunt there for between $2,000 and $5,000, depending on how big of a buck you want to harvest.

The property consists of a 3,000 square foot, five-bedroom, three-bath, three-story cabin and three car garage with upstairs quarters on 442 acres, including a 120-acre deer farm and a 30-acre private lake full of muskies, northerns, bass and walleye.

And all this can be yours, as Pearlman now has it on the market. Asking price: Now reduced to $2.5 million.

That comes without the full body mounts and other trophy game, which Pearlman will relocate, but the boat house and another outbuilding are included.

Pearlman, 71, has invested a lot in the place for the nearly 50 years he’s owned it, but if he gets what he’s asking, it will still be a pretty good return on a $20,000 initial investment. But it’s not as if he’s looking to cash in. He feels at his age it’s getting hard to take care of three places. The other one is in Chicago.

The property is in the Long Lake area of northern Chippewa County, in the town of Sampson, not far from the Rusk County line. The road to it goes past one of the Chippewa County forests. A long, long gravel driveway through a forest leads to the cabin — a decent sized house to most people — overlooking the picturesque lake where otters could be seen playing on a thin skim of ice during the recent gun deer season.

“This is a natural log cabin. All of the logs are at about 20 inches in diameter,” Pearlman said.

Most log cabins, he explained, are manufactured homes, with identical sized logs fitting together in a pre-set pattern. The Foster Lake cabin was constructed from an architect’s design, with Hank Petit of Ojibwa Log Homes in Hayward as the contractor. The logs are scribed to fit together with just one piece of caulking between them.

“It’s incredibly tight,” Pearlman said. “We’ve only had six inches on shrinkage.”

The roof is two feet thick with insulation, topped by a steel roof.

“It’s unbelievable how economical it is for heating,” Pearlman said.

The place started out as a private retreat for Pearlman and his brother. Pearlman, a chemistry major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, returned to Chicago and the family business, a steel drum reconditioning business that was a market leader. He also picked up a real estate license on the side and saw a listing for 242 acres in Chippewa County with a private lake, a two-bedroom cabin and a few boats. He and his brother bought it, sight-unseen.

They started using it as a business retreat, added a bedroom and another bathroom to the cabin, and put up a garage. He later added 160 acres, then another 40 acres. The old cabin was torn down and the log cabin built in 1994, with matching garage, boat house, and storage building.

Eight years ago, Pearlman put up an 8-foot fence around 120 acres. Fifteen deer captured inside were inventoried by the DNR, and he had to pay the state for them.

He brought in some breeding stock from time to time and started to manage the deer farm for trophy bucks. Optimal antler growth comes at ages 6-7 for deer, but few live to be older than 2-years-old in the wild, he said.

“Only about one percent get to be 3 to 4-years-old,” he said. “We let them get to at least 4-years-old before we harvest them.”

The herd, now about 50 deer, is managed so there are a number of deer that would make the Pope and Young scoring standards.

“At the height, we probably had about 70,” Pearlman said.

The trophy whitetails Pearlman has mounted in the cabin did not come from the deer farm, though. They were harvested on one of his many hunts around the world.

“Every one of these mounts is a memory for me,” he said.

The musk ox was harvested by his wife in the Northwest Territory. The polar bear was taken on a dog sled trip.

But the most exciting wildlife is outside — and alive. Besides what’s on the deer farm, there are bears, wolves, probably some bobcats, and plenty of small game around the property. The beavers can be a pain, but those playful otters are fun to watch through binoculars from the deck of the cabin.

“It’s great living here,” Pearlman said, realizing he will miss the place.

It’s possible someone will call it home again, but the cabin and property are also set up as good corporate retreat facilities. Or, for some wealthy person, it could become the hunting cabin others can only dream about.

Interested?

The property is listed by Mary Rufledt of Haselwander GMAC Real Estate, www.maryrufledt.com.