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Transcript

Solocast: What It's Like to Live Off-Grid in the Wilderness · Lean Out Podcast

• 0:06
  Welcome to the lean out podcast.
• 0:08
  I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:09
  Don baker.
• 0:10
  Are you looking for a new approach to finding authentic and sustainable work-life balance?
• 0:15
  You've come to the right.
• 0:16
  Place.
• 0:16
  For inspiration.
• 0:17
  information.
• 0:18
  and a community.
• 0:19
  community.
• 0:19
  of like-minded.
• 0:20
  Professionals.
• 0:21
  Let's get to the show.
• 0:29
  Hello?
• 0:29
  Hello.
• 0:29
  Thanks for being here.
• 0:32
  Fall is in full swing where I live and the tree colors are just going off.
• 0:37
  It's amazing.
• 0:39
  And I've shared some videos and images on my Instagram account.
• 0:45
  If that sounds at all, appealing to you, go over to Instagram and give me a follow.
• 0:49
  My handle is at practice balance.
• 0:51
  If you haven't done so already.
• 0:54
  Today for this solo cast, I thought I'd share with you, but it's like to live on a large mountain homestead in the wilderness.
• 1:01
  As a long time traveler and having done lots of slow travel in the past, I find different ways of living fascinating.
• 1:08
  People's lives are so varied and individual in terms of what they enjoy for their lifestyles.
• 1:13
  It's just like work-life balance.
• 1:16
  Not many people live like me and my family do, especially in the professional space.
• 1:21
  So I thought I'd give you a glimpse today of our lives and the physical and mental benefits we've experienced from living this way.
• 1:29
  And I'll also share some reality checks to.
• 1:32
  I think it's helpful to show that you can live an alternative lifestyle and still work as a professional, especially with the many technological advancements we have nowadays.
• 1:41
  Also, I hope with this podcast to inspire you, to find ways to get a little bit more wilderness.
• 1:47
  And wildness in your everyday life, no matter where you live.
• 1:53
  So first off, I'd like to describe where we live.
• 1:57
  Our home is in a vast valley with a 10,000 foot mountain and a red rock bluff in view.
• 2:03
  Our property is located about an hour away from a decent size town of roughly 50,000 people.
• 2:09
  It's not a large city center by any means, but there is a college there.
• 2:13
  So it's a nice size and there are a lot of amenities.
• 2:16
  We're also near some major tourist attractions, like Zion, national park, and also lesser known, but locally celebrated recreational areas like a lake and a ski resort.
• 2:27
  Once you get off the major highway, you drive around a lake for a few miles, and then you come to a gravel road.
• 2:34
  You then must drive on that road for about six miles to get to our place.
• 2:39
  It's a windy and slow road being that it's gravel, but it's not a scary road.
• 2:44
  Our property is 80 acres at 8,000 feet.
• 2:47
  Elevation it gradually slopes from north to south and has a more abrupt slope from west to east.
• 2:54
  So there's a big hillside on the west of us.
• 2:58
  And then at slopes down toward the road on the east.
• 3:02
  After looking at many options for building a home, we settled on building tiny shipping container homes.
• 3:08
  And I'll include a picture in my next newsletter, which by the way, if you are not getting go to practice balance.com and put your email into the purple box to receive newsletters about one to two times a month for the latest happenings and things that I've been reading or that I'm recommending you check out.
• 3:25
  We are completely off grid.
• 3:27
  We have quite a bit of solar power and what isn't powered by solar works on propane.
• 3:31
  And this includes all of our appliances.
• 3:34
  Our lighting our water system and everything a couple of times a year, the propane company hauls a truck into fill our huge tanks.
• 3:42
  We have our own water from a nearby spring that goes into a holding tank and then a small filtration operation.
• 3:49
  There is no mail service here and no delivery of packages.
• 3:52
  We rent a mailbox in the nearby town.
• 3:56
  So the terrain on our property is really varied from dense forest in one section to open Meadows in others.
• 4:03
  There's a decent size stream that bisects the property And then there are multiple side streams.
• 4:10
  There are also multiple types of pine tree species and there's Aspen trees, maple Oak, Juniper, and many others.
• 4:19
  We're surrounded by large acre pieces of land on one side of the road, and then smaller ones across the way.
• 4:26
  But mostly the other people around us are just seasonal users.
• 4:31
  Traffic picks up a bit on the weekends with visitors and tourists and people writing side-by-sides and ATVs.
• 4:38
  There are only a couple of other people along the whole 15 mile stretch of dirt road that are, full-timers like us.
• 4:47
  First I'd like to talk about the physical effects of what we've experienced living on this property.
• 4:52
  I've never felt as healthy as I feel now, living here with the exception of the occasional smoky day from a nearby forest fire, or even fires that blow over from a nearby state.
• 5:03
  The air is pristinely clean.
• 5:06
  Our water is sourced from an underground spring that is fed by Alpine runoff and it tastes amazing.
• 5:12
  There's no light pollution at all.
• 5:14
  At night, you can see any star you want to on a clear night.
• 5:19
  And there's hardly any unnatural noises.
• 5:22
  If you hear a car on the road, you really notice it.
• 5:26
  There are no sirens, no den of mechanical noises.
• 5:30
  There's just got to be some health effects to all of these things.
• 5:34
  I definitely have noticed it.
• 5:37
  Every day there's an amount of built-in exercise because we have to do more chores on a piece of land like this.
• 5:44
  I need to walk up a hill to go do a load of laundry in our guest house, which is where our washer and dryer are located.
• 5:51
  We have a lot of hiking trails on our property and we walk one of the paths at least every day.
• 5:59
  You can modulate it and do very easy walks or you can do a lot more steep walks depending on how you're feeling.
• 6:07
  And let's face it.
• 6:08
  We're living in a comfort crisis in modern urban society.
• 6:12
  But on this property, we're forced to sometimes be uncomfortable because we're beholden to the weather and being that all our structures are tiny houses.
• 6:20
  Sometimes we have to be subjected to the elements to get things done.
• 6:25
  And I'd argue that this causes us to be more Hardy, even though sometimes I happen to complain about it.
• 6:31
  If it's really cold.
• 6:33
  Onto the mental and psychological effects.
• 6:37
  This property is like our own personal playground.
• 6:40
  My child can play safely outside.
• 6:43
  Go ride a bike and be very independent all over our property without worry about safety.
• 6:49
  The statistics are that you're much more likely to get hit by a car in a neighborhood than you would be to have like a bear attack you on a property.
• 6:59
  Yes, of course we have bears, but really we don't see them.
• 7:04
  The animals that are predatory really hide in this area.
• 7:09
  So it's not something that we've ever encountered in a scary situation.
• 7:14
  We take walks, like I mentioned, on different trails each day and you also have to get dirty sometimes.
• 7:21
  Dirt on your hands and feet is actually good for your mind and body.
• 7:26
  We move at a slower pace.
• 7:27
  Living here, you can't drive super fast down the road because it's a bumpy gravel road.
• 7:33
  And when weather interrupts a day, your plans might change and you have to slow way down.
• 7:38
  Maybe the water system has a problem that we have to fix or the internet goes out and we have to troubleshoot that.
• 7:45
  And these may seem like annoyances, but they're also something that imparts a sense of time.
• 7:51
  Abundance.
• 7:52
  We're never really rushing unless it's to get down to town by a certain time of day.
• 7:56
  That's the only time that we ever really after rush.
• 8:00
  But at the same time, there's a constant force of change.
• 8:03
  We watched the sun rise and set every day and we noticed the changes in time, intensity and location of the sun in the sky.
• 8:12
  I mean, have you ever noticed where the sun moves as it changes in the seasons?
• 8:17
  When you live amongst a hundred foot tall trees, you do actually notice these things.
• 8:22
  And it's an amazing thing to be able to take note of.
• 8:26
  The changes serve as a reminder of the life and death cycles in nature as well.
• 8:31
  I see change not only from season to season with wild animals that live grays and maybe even die on our property, but also you can notice changes from year to year.
• 8:41
  The same spot on the property will not look alike next summer.
• 8:46
  And that is just awe inspiring when people experience awe it also imparts in them a sense of time.
• 8:52
  Abundance.
• 8:53
  And a sense that we are all much smaller than this universe.
• 8:58
  And what does that mean?
• 8:59
  It means that our problems are, but a speck in this life.
• 9:04
  Living here brings an element of challenge to our lives as well.
• 9:08
  Challenges one of my, and my family's core values.
• 9:12
  Some recent examples of the way that we incorporate challenge into our lives are solving a problem of you're gating, the lower part of our land.
• 9:21
  Fixing culvert.
• 9:23
  That is something that we need to have a road across the stream.
• 9:28
  Managing dead tree piles, and avoiding any sort of fire danger there.
• 9:35
  Learning to plant from seed and our greenhouse and taking care of chickens.
• 9:40
  These are all new things to us, and they sure aren't things that I learned in medical school, but I love learning new things and pushing my skills to a new level.
• 9:49
  Lastly, living here provides creative inspiration for my writing and for this podcast.
• 9:55
  I've always got stories to share with you.
• 9:57
  And I love that.
• 9:58
  I love taking photographs, which I have done a ton of here.
• 10:03
  I love watching my daughter be independent, playing outside.
• 10:06
  I love seeing my 15 year old dog frolic in our Creek and spring around like a puppy.
• 10:12
  And I love seeing my husband work hard on his projects.
• 10:15
  Like figuring out how to use his skid-steer to move big logs.
• 10:19
  It's very satisfying and fulfilling.
• 10:22
  Now for the reality checks.
• 10:25
  Don't get the wrong idea.
• 10:26
  We may live in a tiny shipping container home, but it's a modern home and it has modern appliances.
• 10:32
  We have internet and TV.
• 10:34
  My husband and I can both work using satellite internet.
• 10:37
  That's how I do my coaching business.
• 10:40
  And my daughter does an online school program.
• 10:42
  So we still embrace technology, even though we're living in this wild space.
• 10:47
  We own a condo, a few hours away in a large city.
• 10:49
  And I also use this condo when I go to do my clinical work.
• 10:53
  So there's always an escape valve if something stops working, or if the weather is particularly bad.
• 10:59
  In the first couple of seasons of owning this homestead.
• 11:02
  We definitely used our condo for a number of months in the winters, and we have been using it less and less each year.
• 11:09
  Soon though we will have a small house in the nearby town.
• 11:12
  One where we can keep our animals and spend longer periods in the winter.
• 11:18
  When the road access gets difficult.
• 11:20
  Sometimes this is a problem for us to go back and forth between town, which is something that we need to do for our daughter in particular.
• 11:28
  So having a house in the nearby town is a longterm plan for sustaining our homesteading.
• 11:34
  Yes, we have to drive a lot, but there are days when we don't drive at all.
• 11:40
  It's just shy of an hours drive to get to our nearby town where we shop, play with friends, go to the gym, et cetera.
• 11:47
  This can be looked at it as a negative or a positive on my dry eyes.
• 11:51
  I often catch up on podcasts, listen to audio books, or discuss things with my family members that are driving with me.
• 11:58
  It's a pleasant dry for the most part.
• 12:00
  If the weather is bad and you get behind some construction or some traffic, it can be a drag, but usually it's a very pleasant drive.
• 12:10
  I recently responded to a Facebook group post, where someone was asking others thoughts on if it was worth it to have a beautiful property in the country, but it was an hour away from work.
• 12:19
  And I responded to that person that you need to figure out how many times you're willing to make the drive per week and arrange your work schedule accordingly.
• 12:27
  If you can.
• 12:28
  So for me, the amount of times that I'm willing to drive to town.
• 12:32
  Living on this property is two or three times per week, but everyone is going to have a different number.
• 12:38
  All in all this lifestyle is very aligned with our family values of challenge, continuous learning, freedom, health, and adventure.
• 12:47
  We're very much enjoying living here.
• 12:50
  You likely don't live on a big piece of property in the mountains like this, but you might live somewhere near some open land or at least a large park.
• 12:58
  So how can you get some of these health benefits where you're living right now?
• 13:03
  Create some outside time in your schedule every week, whether it's taking a walk after work with your family or friends or a pet or making a trip to nearby public lands on the weekend.
• 13:14
  Spending some time in the outdoors does wonders for physical and mental health.
• 13:18
  And it's demonstrated in research on Shinran Yoku, which is also called forest bathing.
• 13:25
  Some of it is summarized in the book, the comfort crisis by Michael Easter, who you probably know I'm a big fan of, and I've mentioned before on my podcast and in my newsletter.
• 13:34
  Spending time outside has been shown to bring people a sense of time, abundance and awe, and the feeling that there are bigger things.
• 13:41
  In life than our small worries.
• 13:44
  So what else can you do?
• 13:46
  How about taking up a mindfulness practice, even one that you need to do inside something that allows you to slow down and not feel like time is constantly taking away.
• 13:56
  You could also experience the challenge of trying something new, take a new class, or learn a new skill, whether it's a work-related skill or a hobby, this is something that will foster your confidence and build up your ability to see yourself as resilient and tough.
• 14:13
  When the seasons change around you, even if they just change in a very subtle way, make a point of noticing those changes.
• 14:20
  And when I say subtle, I mean, someone who lives like in Arizona, There are even changes that occur there.
• 14:27
  I know what it's like, because I lived there for a long time of my young adult and teenage life, but there are even changes to notice in a place like that.
• 14:38
  What reminders do those changes bring up for you?
• 14:42
  And how does your life change when the seasons change?
• 14:45
  How do your habits change or the things that you like to do?
• 14:49
  Well, there, you have it.
• 14:51
  A description of.
• 14:53
  Where I live, what it's like to live here.
• 14:56
  And what I feel the benefits are.
• 14:59
  Do you have any other questions about this lifestyle?
• 15:03
  Is there anything where you're like what or anything that you want to know more about as always, you can leave a comment on the corresponding blog post for this episode@practicebalance.com.
• 15:14
  Or send me a DM on Instagram at practice balance.
• 15:18
  Thanks for listening today.
• 15:21
  Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast.
• 15:24
  If you find these conversations inspiring and useful, please forward them to a friend and also leave a review on iTunes or Spotify so that other people can find them easier.
• 15:36
  If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at my website, practice balanced.com, where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get updates regularly about new podcast episodes, blog posts, speaking, engagements, and coaching services.
• 15:52
  You can also support my work by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance for yourself, a friend, family member, or coworker.
• 16:05
  Have a great day and we'll see you next time