The grid is there for a reason. You can’t just walk out the door and go live off the grid. You have to know how to live off the grid, and make intelligent choices about exactly where off the grid you decide to live. You also have to know when it’s time to go back to living on the grid, if you don’t want to be a pile of rotting remains found months after you stop living on or off anything.
Three members of a Colorado family died while attempting to live “off the grid” in the Rocky Mountains, family members and investigators say. The emaciated remains of sisters Christine and Rebecca Vance and the latter’s 14-year old son, were found in a remote campsite this month. On Tuesday a coroner ruled that they probably died from starvation or exposure during the cold winter.
It appears that the group began camping last summer and died over the winter.
Camping is all very well, but once you run out of food it’s time to go back inside, where the grid is.
Rebecca Vance’s stepsister Trevala Jara, told the Washington Post on Wednesday: “She didn’t like the way the world was going, and she thought it would be better if her and her son and Christine were alone, away from everybody.”
The group – including the sisters who were in their 40s – had no outdoor survival experience and had watched online videos to learn about how to survive in Colorado’s rugged backcountry, Mrs Jara told US media.
They should have read Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and stayed on the grid, instead.
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7 responses to “Respect the grid”
I actually wrote a play about that. So far it hasn’t been picked up.
Well, they’re away from everyone now. Mission accomplished.
I’ve come across a say that says “One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee,” that an isolated specimen of a social species is a stunted, incomplete example of that species. I guess, in cases like this, you can add “dead” to that list, too. The grid may have its down sides, but it keeps us from dying in multiple ways, all the time. And it’s not just the gadgets and technology , but the people and institutions that create and wield the devices and technology, centuries of embodied and formalized knowledge we draw upon all the time. Every environment humans have inhabited for the last quarter million years has relied on technology and knowledge to survive successfully. Running away from modern “conveniences” means you’re now reliant on more ancient, and basic knowledge of how to stay alive when you have to work for everything. “Rugged individualism” is a fiction. Humans have always relied on each other and the collective knowledge available to live anywhere they’ve ended up. Those that weren’t good enough at doing that made themselves dead.
You’d think they’d at least take a book you could refer to again and again as needed, rather than rely on remembering a few videos. A book is always there; if you have no power, you can’t watch a video. Self reliance can only get you so far if you know fuck all.
I stand corrected. They did have books.
My favorite off-the-grid story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph
So, basically, eating from our trash is a better deal than staying off-grid.
Tragedy could have struck here a number of ways: the family members apparently died fo lack of nourishment and extreme cold. Denver, Colorado had a population in 2021 of 711,463 and is at an altitude of 1,608 metres above sea level.. The summit of the highest mountain in Australia (Mt Kosciuszko), whose summit is at 2,228 m, is only 620 m higher than downtown Denver. Colorado has.some of the best skiing in America precisely because its snow is so cold as to be routinely equal to the best powder snow in Australia. A few years back I went to nearby Steamboat Springs and had a whale of a time skiing there.
But mountain weather conditions are notoriously unpredictable, and those who seek a life of adventure and off grid are well advised to take a survival course from someone expert in that subject. If you’re lucky you just freeze to deatrh. I would guess that those not so lucky could get eaten by a grizzly bear escaped from a zoo. (There are none left in the wild in Colorado.)
Omar, there are definitely some in wildlife refuges. We encountered a mother and child grizzly bear while at a lodge in…oops, can’t remember. I don’t think it was Gunnison; can’t remember which town. Anyway, there are definitely grizzly bears in Colorado, though I don’t know how wild they are.
Domestic animals are ill equipped to live in the wild (such as it is) for any length of time.