Welcome!

As I write this introduction to Our Life in the Wild, I am sitting in my favorite chair next to our wood stove in our living room in our off-grid house in the woods. It's mid-November, 38 degrees outside and 70 degrees in the house. It was a beautiful sunny day today and all is good in our world. My wife and I are just beginning our third winter here. That makes us relative newbies to off-grid living although I lived off-grid for a couple of years back in the mid 90's. We have learned a lot and are still learning.

For us, living off-grid means not being connected to most public utilities. We are not completely disconnected from the world, though. We have satellite internet so we are connected to the communication grid in that way. We have cell phones but they don't work when we are at home because we live too far away from a cell tower. Our electricity comes from solar panels. Our water heater, cook stove, and refrigerators run on propane as does our backup generator. Most of our food comes from the supermarket although we are making our vegetable garden bigger each year.

We live in the mountains of central Arizona at an elevation of 5100 feet. The summer highs get into the 90's and the winter lows get into the single digits sometimes. We probably average 15 inches of precipitation per year with most of it falling in July and August. We get snow in the winter but it usually melts off pretty quickly. Our property backs up to a seasonal creek. We are surrounded by Arizona black walnut, junipers, pinon pines, cottonwoods, box elder, velvet ash, and Gambel oaks. The nearest town is an hour away and 18 miles of the journey is on dirt roads.

I have always been sort of a handyman kind of guy and I am interested in how things work. I spent years working in the construction industry as a decorative steel designer and fabricator. You can see some of what I have made at http://zenzibar.com/cosmicsteel . I get into the technical details of things so some of the posts here will be how-to-do-it instructions or technical background on how some of the systems work. Other posts will be about our adventures living in the wild.

If you are considering moving to a remote homestead, building an off-grid house, starting a community out in the wild, or are already live this way, maybe some of what gets posted here will be useful to you or even amusing. We sure find it entertaining!