The Bear Ridge Project is my journey to move out of a consumer based, wage slave existence to a self reliant, energy independent life style. In late June I will move permanently to my off grid cabin on Bear Ridge in Southern Colorado the cabin is roughly finished...I am still preparing. The next five months are the critical final push to move me into to a place where I can get by without an employer and live off what I produce. Buying the land and building the cabin were the easy part, surviving removed from the institutional support structures that we overly rely upon is difficult.
There are two driving issues that have pushed me to this change in life style, government involvement in our private lives and unchecked corporate greed. The corporate elite want to utilize America’s skilled and highly productive work force…they just don’t want to pay for it. To tap America’s production might, at slave labor rates, two things have to happen. First they must break the economic back of the country second they need to monitor and control the population. I see a future, not to far off, where we are conscripted by debt and scarcity of resources into indentured servitude bound to the corporate overseer holding our unpaid dues.
I have a check list of things that needs to be finished before June. In January a few of the things on the list included getting an old reliable 4x4 truck, experimenting with stored food, working on indoor gardening and bloging daily about the process. Daily bloging is a lot of work by the way.
In February some of the priorities are; storing at least another years worth of food (I have about one year now), doing a couple of “Bug Out Drills” taking various routes to the land, looking at different ways to conceal and protect the food and supplies stored at the cabin, mapping access routes to the land for use and monitoring, and putting the land in some sort of protected trust that will insulate it from my identity allowing relatively anonymous habitation. I also look forward to continuing my daily updates on this site.
Speaking of this site…I will be working on some usability issues in February, things like making it easier to subscribe to feeds and adding a daily email subscription. Also adding easy links to the big social book marking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Most popular article was Bread, Beans, Bullets and Booze written back in November.
In January I had a little over 4600 visitors to the site. Reddit.com by the way is responsible for over half my traffic so I am going to work quickly to get those site links embedded. A couple of other folks worth mentioning are James over at Bison Survival Blog and Ryan at Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest. The are both great survival resources and have given me some much needed press which I greatly appreciate. I read them daily.
Everyone, thanks for the support.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
January Recap
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6 comments:
We've got very similar views concering the corportate future, you an I.
I hope you manage to properly dislodge your life from the grid. you got a final backup plan involving a return to "civillization"?
Of all the changes you meantioned weening ones self off of the tit that is a full time job is probably the biggest single jump. I can see myself making most of those steps at some point. Until the point where I can retire in the traditional sense or even an early retirement allowed by lowering my cost of living I can't see myself getting to a place where I would be secure without a job. Even if the only expenses are: property taxes, various insurance, some fuel, bulk food purchases, bullets and other odds and ends having enough cash to do that without touching principle is going to take a decent amount stashed away. I have no clue what your finances are but you seem like a smart guy so I'm sure you will be fine. Remember that a physically intense lifestyle which you enjoy now may not be possible at 65 or 70 which would necessitate a move of some kind and probably a significant jump in cost of living.
Here is the key…I am out of debt. I just need to save up enough to live on at the cabin for a year or so, enough to keep me on my feet until I can start earning whatever is necessary to sustain me, hopefully it will not be much. There will be some higher ticket items, satellite internet access, XM radio these kind of things but the plan is to pay a couple of years up front then I don’t have to worry about it for a while.
If for some reason it does not work out I have a “retreat” fund set aside to return to “civilization”.
I just got a cell phone modem from alltel which I think is the best alternative to road-runner that I have access to. It is essentially a dedicated cell-phone for my computer. Other phone co. have them but alltel has a tower closes to me.
The cost was $180 for the equipment & first month, & I got a $50. rebate.
It runs about $60. a month. Do you have cell phone access at your cabin?
I get 3 to 4 meg. bites transfer rate.
Larry Ohio
Larry,
I have cell service but it is only an analog signal. They have not upgraded the equipment in the area to digital. I used a verizon card like that for years and thought it was great but not at the cabin. It looks like WildBlue satelite internet is the way to go. I think $250 for the dish and $50 a month. I may work out a deal with my neighbor who already has a dish...split the cost or something. I am at the edge of her wireless but if it was upgraded for around $100 it would be perfect.
Or I may just ride my bike to town every day for coffee and free internet.
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