Goose Creek Tower: Alaska’s 185-Foot Dr. Seuss House

Fly low over the forest near Talkeetna, Alaska, and you may spot something that looks lifted straight from a storybook. A tower of cabins stacked on cabins climbs roughly 185 feet out of the birch and spruce, each level a little smaller than the last, until the whole thing tapers to a lookout in the sky. Locals long ago nicknamed it the Dr. Seuss House. Its real name is Goose Creek Tower, and it remains one of the strangest and most wonderful homes we have ever featured.

A Cabin That Refused to Stop Growing

The man behind the tower is Phillip Weidner, an MIT-educated Anchorage attorney with a poetic streak and a serious stubbornness about ceilings. What began as a conventional 40 by 40 foot log cabin kept gaining floors, porches, and turrets until it reached the legal limit of the airspace above it. Weidner has said he simply wanted to keep going up, and that he hopes the tower inspires other people to think big. On a clear day the upper decks look out toward Denali, with views that stretch for hundreds of miles across the Susitna Valley.

We first covered the project via DesignBoom back in 2016, and the aerial video below still captures the scale better than any still photo can.

Built Without Blueprints

Part of the tower’s charm is that it was never drawn up by an architect. Weidner worked without formal blueprints, sketching ideas and solving problems as the structure rose, which is exactly why the proportions feel so gloriously improvised. Balconies wrap around corners that seem to exist for the fun of it. Windows appear wherever a view demanded one. It is folk architecture at a heroic scale, closer in spirit to a treehouse than to anything with a permit binder, and it has earned a place among the most extraordinary buildings we have covered.

Can You Visit the Dr. Seuss House?

A decade after the internet fell for it, the tower still stands, and it is still very much a private home. Goose Creek Tower is not open to the public, there are no tours, and the property sits well off the road behind posted land, so the polite way to see it is from the air. Flightseeing trips out of Talkeetna sometimes pass nearby on their way toward Denali, which feels appropriate for a house that was always meant to be admired from the sky. Interior work has continued slowly over the years, the way any hand-built dream does.

For more far-flung wonders like this one, our travel archive runs deep.