You wanna be high up but not on a ridge line. Find a dirt road that goes halfway up the holler and set up there at the end of it. Your water is from a well high up in the water table and from a creek or spring fed by that water table and rainfall. Because no one’s above you, clean waters no problem. No more of a problem than it is for anyone who relies on rainfall.
You want to be in the woods. Wood is a raw material that can be used for everything from heating to construction and can be cut, handled and worked by one person with hand and power tools. Woodlands are home to massive amounts of biomass and as climate change drives more people into the working poor, the state sanctioned harvest of game animals will grow smaller and smaller. Even now we’re seeing a boom in whitetail and turkey populations. People living in woodlands will be well positioned to take advantage of that turkey population. Maybe not the deer so much as cwd advances inland and north. Woodlands in mountains have both elevation and plant biomass to blunt extreme weather as well.
You’ll need a car and the ability to do regular maintenance on it. Shoot for 15-20+ year old fleet vehicles. Don’t worry about trucks, they’re nice to have but a crown vic will pull a trailer just fine when you need to move big stuff. That doesn’t mean don’t have a truck or a bicycle, just recognize that you need a car and it needs to be reliable and repairable.
Don’t hoard food, but have a pantry with the maximum amount of staple foods that you can reasonably expect to eat before they go bad stocked up. Follow fifo and keep a ledger of what you have. Fluctuating food prices aren’t as much of an impact when you’re buying oatmeal for three months down the road as opposed to next week.
You need some kind of house to live in. An old single wide is fine but bear in mind parts for trailers are different than parts for stick built houses and they can me more difficult to find. Don’t rely on living in a van or camper, once it starts to fall apart you gotta be able to fix it yourself or buy another one. If you’re building, consider earth sheltering techniques.
You need power, but there’s no cheap ways to get in on making it yourself. Theres an old 70s book called how to make electricity from water wind and sunshine that has some good diy options. There will be some kind of sustainability weirdos near you. Hook in with em and ask questions but don’t give away what kind of person you are. It’s not their business why you wanna build a waterwheel on your creek or whatever. Consider smart breaker panels that will do switchover from mains once you have a backup supply.
Satellite internet seems like a good idea but it’s very susceptible to weather conditions. Pay for fiber if you can get it where you are. Have em drag a real land line out to you. Plain old telephone service works in a power outage.
This is not meant to be self sufficiency or prepper territory. You don’t wanna be so far away from people that you don’t have neighbors or avoid the community around you and you can’t survive on your own.
Make friends with the people around you. If you find you have too many bags of flour or something from the latest shopping trip, take a stroll down the driveway and offer it to your neighbors. Bake some kind of cake to give out on holidays. When you make a huge batch of blackberry jam, save some jars back for everyone around you. If you feel safe doing it, help people by the side of the road.
Go to church. Or mosque or temple or whatever. It’s where people meet up and talk and you can make connections and just be normal there. You’re not the first person to treat Sunday like a social club and you won’t be the last. If you need to avoid the holier of the rollers, Methodists are pretty bland.
Try not to be a weirdo.
If you’re doing your own oil changes (or doing changes for the block), a waste oil heater can keep your garage or shed warm for possibly free.
Places to look for this type of zone: older, hillier mountain ranges, the Catskills and appalachians.
Recognize what you’re trying to get prepared for. Global climate change isn’t gonna make the whole earth do storm of the century or day after tomorrow, it’s gonna make things slowly get worse and harder.
How will those things effect you and how can you take action now to mitigate them?
You’re not trying to build a fortress to protect from mad max, you’re trying to put together a safe life for yourself and family and friends. You’re not trying to hunt and farm enough to restart human civilization, you’re supplementing your groceries with food from the garden.
This is all great advice! I’d like to add that having books is great too. You can’t always rely on the internet in certain situations. All of the off-grid knowledge you need can also be found in books. Plus, books are heavy, durable, and in a pinch make a good firestarter.
You wanna be high up but not on a ridge line. Find a dirt road that goes halfway up the holler and set up there at the end of it. Your water is from a well high up in the water table and from a creek or spring fed by that water table and rainfall. Because no one’s above you, clean waters no problem. No more of a problem than it is for anyone who relies on rainfall.
You want to be in the woods. Wood is a raw material that can be used for everything from heating to construction and can be cut, handled and worked by one person with hand and power tools. Woodlands are home to massive amounts of biomass and as climate change drives more people into the working poor, the state sanctioned harvest of game animals will grow smaller and smaller. Even now we’re seeing a boom in whitetail and turkey populations. People living in woodlands will be well positioned to take advantage of that turkey population. Maybe not the deer so much as cwd advances inland and north. Woodlands in mountains have both elevation and plant biomass to blunt extreme weather as well.
You’ll need a car and the ability to do regular maintenance on it. Shoot for 15-20+ year old fleet vehicles. Don’t worry about trucks, they’re nice to have but a crown vic will pull a trailer just fine when you need to move big stuff. That doesn’t mean don’t have a truck or a bicycle, just recognize that you need a car and it needs to be reliable and repairable.
Don’t hoard food, but have a pantry with the maximum amount of staple foods that you can reasonably expect to eat before they go bad stocked up. Follow fifo and keep a ledger of what you have. Fluctuating food prices aren’t as much of an impact when you’re buying oatmeal for three months down the road as opposed to next week.
You need some kind of house to live in. An old single wide is fine but bear in mind parts for trailers are different than parts for stick built houses and they can me more difficult to find. Don’t rely on living in a van or camper, once it starts to fall apart you gotta be able to fix it yourself or buy another one. If you’re building, consider earth sheltering techniques.
You need power, but there’s no cheap ways to get in on making it yourself. Theres an old 70s book called how to make electricity from water wind and sunshine that has some good diy options. There will be some kind of sustainability weirdos near you. Hook in with em and ask questions but don’t give away what kind of person you are. It’s not their business why you wanna build a waterwheel on your creek or whatever. Consider smart breaker panels that will do switchover from mains once you have a backup supply.
Satellite internet seems like a good idea but it’s very susceptible to weather conditions. Pay for fiber if you can get it where you are. Have em drag a real land line out to you. Plain old telephone service works in a power outage.
An addendum:
This is not meant to be self sufficiency or prepper territory. You don’t wanna be so far away from people that you don’t have neighbors or avoid the community around you and you can’t survive on your own.
Make friends with the people around you. If you find you have too many bags of flour or something from the latest shopping trip, take a stroll down the driveway and offer it to your neighbors. Bake some kind of cake to give out on holidays. When you make a huge batch of blackberry jam, save some jars back for everyone around you. If you feel safe doing it, help people by the side of the road.
Go to church. Or mosque or temple or whatever. It’s where people meet up and talk and you can make connections and just be normal there. You’re not the first person to treat Sunday like a social club and you won’t be the last. If you need to avoid the holier of the rollers, Methodists are pretty bland.
Try not to be a weirdo.
If you’re doing your own oil changes (or doing changes for the block), a waste oil heater can keep your garage or shed warm for possibly free.
Places to look for this type of zone: older, hillier mountain ranges, the Catskills and appalachians.
A second addendum:
Recognize what you’re trying to get prepared for. Global climate change isn’t gonna make the whole earth do storm of the century or day after tomorrow, it’s gonna make things slowly get worse and harder.
How will those things effect you and how can you take action now to mitigate them?
You’re not trying to build a fortress to protect from mad max, you’re trying to put together a safe life for yourself and family and friends. You’re not trying to hunt and farm enough to restart human civilization, you’re supplementing your groceries with food from the garden.
This is all great advice! I’d like to add that having books is great too. You can’t always rely on the internet in certain situations. All of the off-grid knowledge you need can also be found in books. Plus, books are heavy, durable, and in a pinch make a good firestarter.