Battling technology and rabbits from a hermit's cabin
(CNN) -- Ted Kaczynski lived as a modern-day hermit. His ramshackle plywood-and-plank cabin was without electricity, telephone or plumbing.
A visitor would have a difficult time finding him. The gravel road to his adopted home of Lincoln, Montana, population 530, takes you through lush woodlands of Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine and up over Stemple Pass, elevation 6,376 feet.
The forest trail to his 10 by 12 feet cabin leaves the gravel road a few miles from the center of the small logging community. It's about a 15-minute walk up the trail to get to the tiny cabin Kaczynski built in 1971.
Police say it's where he built dozens of terrorist bombs.
Prosecutors say the bombs were ingenious, but the cabin was rough and primitive. He used a wood stove to keep himself warm, and a Coleman stove for cooking. The single room had a few chairs, a table, a bunk bed and some carpenter's tools.
In the yard, he had a block and an ax for firewood and a ring of stones and a metal grill for cooking. The property was small, but the cabin was set back on a dirt road and the nearest neighbor was a quarter-mile away.
He made his own candles and bread. He grew potatoes, parsnips and other vegetables, hunted rabbits, and managed with little money. A neighbor said he once heard him complain about his costs rising to $300 from $200 a year.
The county assessor's office valued the land at $4,200 and the cabin at $350. The annual real estate tax was $110.26.
FBI Special Agent Donald Sachtleben, a bomb expert, walked into the cabin to arrest Kaczynski on April 3, 1996. He was among the first federal agents to see its cramped interior.
"I observed chemicals ... from which a destructive device could be readily assembled," Sachtleben wrote in an arrest warrant.
The cabin, Sachtleben said, contained a small cache of bomb-making equipment.
He also came across powders labeled "KC103" (potassium chlorate), "NaCl103" (sodium chlorate), "Silver Oxide" and other chemicals.
Among the stacks of books, Sachtleben pulled out a pile of 10 three-ring binders.
"These binders contain page after page of meticulous writings and sketches," Sachtleben wrote soon after, in the warrant. The drawings were for bombs.
Lincoln resident Irene Preston, 84, was one of the few people Kaczynski had invited into his home. They played pinochle.
She told reporters that she had once asked about some boards that covered a hole in the floor of the one-room cabin. Kaczynski told her that it was a potato cellar.
On the day they searched the cabin, FBI agents ordered Kaczynski to remain outside.
As the agents rifled through the diaries and notebooks that recorded his inner torments about modern technology, Kaczynski stood near the source of another agony, one he had discussed openly with his neighbors.
Rabbits had looted his well-tended organic garden, digging under chicken wire and ripping out his carrots, potatoes and parsnips.
"He had a war going with those rabbits," said Daniel Rundell, another of the few Lincoln residents -- a census taker -- who had been to the cabin.
The flimsy cabin no longer stands. It has been disassembled and carted away by the FBI. Its secrets have been studied by prosecutors seeking evidence against the man known around Lincoln as "Ted."
But the cabin, like the man, was never truly part of Lincoln.
Dick Lundberg delivered mail to Kaczynski's address, 30 Highway Construction Route, for many years.
Asked about the cabin, Lundberg said, "Never saw it." The cabin was too far back in the woods. "It was a dead end. And you couldn't drive in."
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