Between President Biden warning about “Armageddon” and “Putin’s potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological and chemical weapons,” New York City releasing a PSA about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack, and the news that the US government has spent $290 million on anti-radiation drugs — is it any wonder people want to learn to survive off the grid?
And it’s not just doomsday “preppers” stocking up for “SHTF” — as in, “s–t hits the fan.”
Bronx resident and author-journalist Ted Conover, 64, first went out to the desolate San Luis Valley in South Central Colorado in 2017 to explore rural life on the margins in a place where land was cheap. He ended up buying his own five acres there, where he still lives part time, and chronicling his experiences in the new book, “Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge.”
“One of the big challenges about off-gridders is generalizing them,” Conover told The Post. “I came with the stereotypes that a lot of city people have — that this is red country and it’s all about guns and flags. But the third person I met out here was Paul, and he was gay and didn’t have a firearm. He came from the Bay Area 20 years ago and has a social anxiety disorder. He doesn’t fit the mold or the expectation.”
Conover bought his five acres for $15,000. Some sites can be had for $4,000 but those don’t come with any type of shelter, well or septic system. Conover said that, while it’s challenging to live without urban comforts, it’s opened up his eyes to have neighbors like a bail bondsman also who’s a 23rd-degree Mason and carries a sidearm. Indeed, he said he’s met people of every stripe.
“However different they are, they do share a few main characteristics,” Conover explained. “They have a distrust of authority and an admiration for people who do it themselves. Being independent is really admired. They associate city life with being dependent.”
Some of Conover’s neighbors in the San Luis Valley, as well as numerous off-gridders interviewed by The Post, say they’re worried about possible cataclysmic events such as nuclear war or a hit on the electric grids. Others want out of official society because of what they see as governmental overreach and hyper-polarized politics.
And just as many love what they call the “homesteading” aspect of leaving the modern world behind.
“I couldn’t live any other way,” Tammy Trayer, a Pennsylvania native who moved into the remote northern Idaho wilderness with her husband and autistic son 12 years ago, told The Post. She now teaches others how to do it.
The family, whose site, Trayer Wilderness, is now a beacon for other “off-gridders,” bought their land south of Coeur d’Alene sight unseen. Trayer and her husband left their jobs to go off the grid but Tammy, a web designer, still has clients and operates their extensive website.
“We saw aerial views but not the place. We loaded up,” Trayer said. “The realtor brought us to the property for the first time — and it was total overgrown wilderness. We were like kids in a candy store.”
Trayer, 52, her husband, Glen, 42, built their log cabin from scratch, and they now garden, forage for berries and hunt wild animals for their food. She calls it “returning to old paths.”
Their current home includes a goat barn as well as an outdoor cast-iron pot for making soup and a log smokehouse for wild game. Trayer said her family also uses a solar-powered outdoor “sun oven” to cook dinners which, she added, taste “amazing.”
“We raise chickens for fresh eggs, rabbits for meat and goats for milk, and we harvest all our meats from the wild each hunting season,” she added. The Trayers dehydrate, smoke, cure and can to preserve their food, which is kept in the downstairs pantry or “cold cellar.”
While solar power means the family can access wi-fi, it’s limited. “Which is fine by us,” Trayer said. “We don’t need to be connected to the outside world.”
But there are others who say that leaving the 9-5 grind to go off on their own in uncharted territory is not about escaping something — or returning to old ways.
“‘Off the grid’ is already getting to be kind of an old term,” said Norm Vaux, 68, a former real estate developer-turned-environmental activist who left his life in Colorado five years ago to relocate in an isolated coastal Mexico village south of Puerto Vallarta. There, he’s helping the town build schools, gardens and a medical clinic.
“It makes it sound as if we are just withdrawing from society as we know it. No, it’s the opposite,” Vaux added. “A lot of people like me are being pushed toward something that better aligns with their values. I’m as connected to the world as I ever was.”
He also runs Final Cycles, an organization fighting the global plastic waste crisis, from the beach — where he gets his Internet through one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites and his electricity from solar-powered battery walls.
“I can ride out any storm, I can talk to my friends on crystal clear connection,” Vaux said. “I don’t have to worry about brownouts or a civil war. I am playing with a blank slate.”
Interest in going off the grid has spiked since the 2020 pandemic, which jump-started a wave of Americans fleeing cities and suburbs and inspired some people to try to make the change permanent.
But not everyone who wants to get away from it all knows how.
Christian Elliot and his wife Nina, longtime self-improvement coaches, bloggers and nutritionists, have recently started a program called the Sovereignty Project, which teaches people how to “disentangle” themselves from the grid and what they say is too much governmental and global control.
“We’re entangled everywhere in their system,” Christian, who’s based with his family in Panama City, Fla., told The Post. “We had to start by figuring out where we were entangled and how to get out, and now we’re teaching what we learned to other people. Our demographic right now tends to be people over 50, but it’s younger families too.”
For $2,497, the Sovereignty Project guides clients through what the Elliots call “six essential aspects of sovereignty” — involving how to manage health, finances, food and schooling and learn skills like hunting and fishing.
“There’s a palpable anxiety out there now about where [society is] going and what’s going to happen to our children,” said Nina, who homeschools the couple’s four kids. “In our case we’re giving our kids more of an extended childhood than what they would have if they were going to public schools. We’re curating their introduction to technology. We’re slowing things down for a better life and that’s what we’re teaching others.”
The Elliots and clients of the Sovereignty Project say that going off the grid doesn’t always mean cutting yourself off completely.
“People may want to unplug but they often feel very unsettled about what steps to take,” Dan Johnson, 39, a former Toyota production manager who left the city of Eau Claire, Wis., for the state’s rural Northwoods area about nine eight years ago.
Johnson, who is now a Sovereignty Project consultant, said he and his family experienced a “huge learning curve” when they moved to a small house on an acre and a half in Rice Lake, Wis., and began adding rooms to their home — and learning how to garden and raise chickens.
“I’d always been freaked out about chickens,” Johnson said. “Nothing about them impressed me. But we figured out how to raise them, and it turns out they have a lot of personality! And it turned out that they are a low-input, high-output deal. We spend only about three minutes a day dealing with them.”
But Johnson wants to be clear that he and his family don’t consider themselves fully off the grid. Many who have signed up with the Sovereignty Project say they want to learn the basic skills of living completely on their own before cutting all ties.
“For us it’s about getting off the digital grid and doing the preparation we need should we someday have to live completely independently,” Johnson said. “I know I can take care of my family should something happen where we are cut off – or we want to be totally cut off.”
One surprising pro tip: It’s not necessarily states like Montana, Idaho or Maine that are the best for unplugging. Expert Daniel Mark Schwartz of Off Grid Permaculture, which helps people learn the most sustainable and inexpensive way to go off the grid, said the best place in the country to go off grid is Alabama — based on its cheap land costs, ultra-low property taxes and the number of counties that don’t have building codes.
The worst states to try to go off grid, according to the Elliots, are California, Oregon, Washington and New Jersey, because of high property taxes and what they say is more intrusive governmental control.
Going off the grid is not for everyone. Ted Conover said that after he bought his land in Colorado, he “excavated” the existing mobile home and cleaned it up so it would be habitable. His wife back in New York is not as enamored of the place as he is — nor was the first overnight guest he had just recently.
“They stayed one night,’ Conover said. “Then they moved to a hotel.”