When Off the Grid Goes Off the Rails

The people leaving modern life behind

As daily necessities like food, housing, and health care become prohibitively expensive, many people are starting to consider different lifestyle choices. Wanting to live “off the grid” is an increasingly popular dream, but pursuing the lifestyle can be extremely dangerous.

Sisters Christine and Rebecca Vance (and the latter’s 14-year-old son) most likely had very good reasons for heading into the Colorado wilderness to live “off the grid.” However, the tragic ending to their story was revealed recently when the remains of their bodies were found by a hiker in the Rocky Mountains. It’s thought that they died from either starvation or exposure to the elements during the winter last year.

In an interview given to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Rebecca Vance’s stepsister, Trevala Jara, told a journalist that Rebecca wanted to make the radical lifestyle change because she “was fearful of a lot of things with the way she thought the world was going.” Jara also revealed that she and her spouse had offered the group the use of a remote piece of property that contained an RV, a generator, and access to a nearby store, but the Vance sisters refused the offer.

Although definitions vary, “living off the grid,” according to the Cambridge online dictionary, means to live in a place that’s “not connected to any of the main utilities–electricity, water, etc.” In a broader cultural sense, the definition given by the Urban Dictionary might hit closer to the lifestyle sought by people who want to live more separate from society: to live “unrecorded, untraceable through normal means.”

It’s difficult to estimate how many people are currently living off the grid, and, more specifically, how many people are doing so by choice. The World Economic Forum has suggested that 1.1 billion people worldwide lack any electricity supply, but that number does’t include any breakdown of individuals who are actively seeking not to tap into any municipal power grid.

Information about how many individuals have chosen to power their homes with solar panels might provide a better estimate of those seeking to disconnect from public utilities: the U.S. Energy Information Administration suggests that, in 2019, 3.2% of single-family, detached homes had solar panels installed, and enough residential solar power was generated that year to power about 1.9 million homes.

For some individuals, however, the choice to live off grid isn’t about solar power, or even energy alone. It’s more about self-sufficiency and insulating themselves from harmful societal trends, high costs of living, and even pandemics and other natural disasters.

Although many people who are choosing an off-grid lifestyle are careful to note that they’re not “crazy preppers, or anything like that,” there can be no denying that the growing popularity of prepping tendencies is driving a quickly growing “global survival tools” market.

“Survival tools” is a broad category, but the best-known examples of such tools include knives, multi-use tools, water filtration tools and systems, camping and outdoor gear, and even bigger-ticket items like tiny houses, solar-panel systems, and portable power generators.

This industry is also supported by the popularity of “against the elements” challenges as shown in the popular television program “Alone.” On “Alone,” which is produced by the History Channel, multiple contestants compete to see who can put “their nature skills to the test and attempt to live in the wilderness for up to a year.”

In addition to winning bragging rights for being the survivor of such a challenge, winners of each season also win $500,000. What most viewers don’t realize? The contestants participate in a training boot camp where hired “survival experts” judge their fitness to be alone and teach them a variety of needed skills; the show also employs its own medical team to monitor the contestants.

By all accounts, the Vance sisters and Rebecca Vance’s son headed off to live in the outdoors without similar preparation, and they paid the ultimate price. This sort of tragedy doesn’t have to become the norm as more and more people, driven especially by increasingly scary climate change headlines, seek to learn more survival skills and to understand how the energy and food they need to live is created and grown.

What budding off-the-gridders need to realize is that even after you’ve had the fun of buying the survival tools, you need to know how to use them and you have to prepare for experiences that are not (as they are in reality television) being supervised for safety. The more thought and preparation you devote to planning your new life, the better chance you have of living truly off the grid without going off the rails.