Way out in the middle of the badlands of TX.  Some dude gives up the city life and heads for TX and a tin shack with a greenhouse.
My only concern would be water in this area.  Yes, it can be found there.  You just better have a good well, and have a backup plan if the well goes bad or dry.
link

I would love to shoot out there and practice long distance, but that's about it.

It's a desert and as such you will spend your time dealing with water issues. I'd probably pass.

That guy had a lot of neat contraptions he engineered. Smart man.

I couldn't handle the heat.

My friend has a shitload of land way out in west texas.  Land is cheap, water is scarce and heat is plentiful but it's fun to go deer hunting and to fart around on.  

I really wouldn't want to try and make a life out there though.  It's hard enough trying to keep everything maintained as a weekend escape/ hunting lodge.

That dude does have a pretty neat set-up though.

I wonder how he makes money to pay those property taxes, phone and internet bill, gas in the truck and groceries.

Drop ship sales on ebay???

We own 700+ acres 90 miles west of Del rio. It's setup nice with house, water and other improvements.
We use it mostly for hunting in the winter. It makes for a good BOL should we have a true SHTF scenario.
Summers out there are brutal. Hot and dry. It's rough country. Intense storms come through occasionally. It can get very windy across the open plain.

Everything out there will stick, sting or try to eat you. BIG rattlesnakes, scorpions, coyotes, cougars, bobcats, etc...etc...

Medical and supplies are a LONG way away. Cell phone coms are sketchy at best. Be prepared to fend for yourself.
Help may be a long time coming, if at all. You learn to be careful, and not do stupid shit to get yourself hurt.

We go out into the bush in pairs. Going out alone can be deadly. If you go down for any reason, it's tough (maybe impossible) to find you.
Plus you are at the mercy of whatever may find you first. It could very well be something that sees you as it's next meal.

You have to take everything you might need with you. You can't just run down to the corner store for provisions, because there isn't one. (Fuel, food, etc..etc..)

It's a very different way of life than MOST of us are accustom to. The solitude is kinda cool, but can be scary too. You'll know what it is to be truely alone.

On the up-side, there is LOTS of meat wandering around. If you can shoot, you need not go hungry..

It's nice to vist, but I don't think I'd care much for living out there full time.

YMMV...

We live in the desert (southern NM) but in a location blessed with permanent water (spring fed), good soil (a riparian area developed by the spring over a eons), a LONG was from any major city (we travel 30 miles to a small town for shopping), good hunting and best of all, good neighbors (no more that 40 full time folks here and the ability to close the only road coming into here ............ a great place to live not to mention, ISOLATED .  
These places do exist, one just has to do research, look around and make a decision.

How are the taxes on spreads like the preceding.

That guy needs to watch then do Geoff Lawton's "Greening the desert"!!

Pension?  Retirement investments?  Savings? Cost of living is probably a lot lower there.

My wife and I sold our rural mountainside home and acreage in the Northern Rockies and retired to South Texas 10 years ago.  For the first 5 years we lived in our 35' 5th wheel RV in an up-scale gated RV park with swimming pools, giant hot tub, tennis courts, restaurant, dance hall, game rooms, etc.  Cost was $2500 RV lot rent per year plus electric.  Hospitals, WalMart, Lowes, and just about every restaurant and store known in the USA were within 6-12 miles.  Mexico was 30 minutes drive.

But after 5 years even our 35' RV got too small, and since houses are less expensive here we decided to have a 3/2 retirement home built a few miles away, cost was $110k including the lot = brick exterior, all tile floors, 10' and 12' ceilings, AC, covered patio, garage, privacy fence, etc. (but not including appliances).  Now most stores and restaurants are +/- 1 mile and hospitals 5 miles.  Paid cash, and our property taxes are about $2200 per year.

Bottom line:  If you own an RV or have the cash to buy a house you can live pretty good down here for +/- $2500 per year (prop. taxes or RV lot rent) + food & medical + utilities.  That being the case, I can't understand why anyone in their right mind would want to live in an isolated tiny shack way out in the desert where it's 100++ degrees for 6 months of the year?  And if it's so unpopulated where this guy is, why all the security cameras?

 .

This looks more like his dream of being a hermit than being sustainable in a practical way.  The constant concern of water and not being able to grow shit  would make that a bad place to be after a few months post SHTF.  

Really surprised he has landline phone service, though....

In my earlier post about southern NM living, we run a small ranch/farm operation.  At least in NM, for agriculture endeavors, property tax (even for large parcels) are about nil not to mention ANYTHING we purchase for the 'operation' is tax deducible (think IRS Form F for farming/ranching operations).  A few cows, chickens, garden (farming after all) and voila! the magic of self sustainment (just about).

Sounds neat, but I like the green lands too much to live out there.  Maybe would be a thing to try, but not to stay.

Shit they tax the crap out of me in Lincoln county. I had to slow down on my dream cause if I build it they tax it!
But I love rural NM 72 miles to town.

The dream is one thing, the reality may be another!  When 33-34 I dreamed of dropping out of my high stress police job and moving to the Northern Rockies, buying some remote mountain property, building a small log home with axe and chainsaw. and spending the rest of my life hunting, fishing, dirt biking, snowmobiling, etc.  Well, my wife decided she would like to do that too,  but wanted to keep her government job as "backup". Thank God she did.  She transferred to a great work place in the mountains and we did everything we had dreamed of, and much more, and lived pretty well thanks to her income. I had a few bucks saved up back then and thought it would last "forever".  Ha!  That was back when a nice PU cost about 5k.  But we lived our dream and lived it in style. and still are living it  in retirement in TX, so no regrets about all the money I could have made had I stayed in the big city combat zone!

My advice: Go ahead and live your dream while young, but bear in mind that reality bites if you don't have all your bases covered financially.

One more thing.  Don't build a shack like the guy in the video.  And don't buy worthless property either.  We bought a really nice piece of the mountains, creek running by, no close neighbors, deer, elk, bear and cats on our property all the time.  Built a nice mountain chalet (I acted as my own contractor) and sold it 20-some years later for a very nice profit.  Enough profit in fact, to fund our Texas retirement.  If I had bought junk property and built a shack it would have been worthless when sold and we would be living poor now.

I personally know 2 different families that did something similar several years back.  After starting off well, they are both in near poverty conditions now, subsisting on beans, rice and chicken eggs and maybe some veggies they barter with the neighbors for.  They wont plan things out and have never bothered putting in much effort to grow food.  They have animals but mostly as pets or "investments", which turn out to be mostly pets.  They initially moved to the area they are in with the thought of living off the grid, but didnt plan things out enough.  They still have property taxes.  Stuff around the "farm" is going to break sooner or later - that means money.  Income is still needed for many things.  Yes, you have to still be "plugged in to the system" and deal with "the man", but unless your able to generate your own income, dont complain about not having things when the income stops (or you stop it to be closer to nature).  Also be prepared for family squabbles.  The women will need/want things that take money.  When the money dries up, the bickering can lead to family troubles and finger pointing.

Interesting video.

Not the way I would have done things, but it's neat. I'm not familiar with that part of Texas, but does anyone know if they experience caliche/hardpan out there? That setting just screams Spanish hacienda to me. Rammed earth construction and stucco would be a lot cheaper and have more thermal mass than those shipping containers too.

Good point.  Sure seems like a better idea than a Tin shack and a small one at that. I do a little target practice out that way from time to time, but not out as far as he is.  Its the real-deal badlands out there.  Id be interested to know how hard it is to find the water table.

Tagging to watch when I get home.

it looks like a scene from  "fallout 3".    more of a i shop at the " city dump" feel to it, than " lowes home improvement"


im not knocking his ingenuity.... hes got some neat ideas... i just think it could have been a lot better plan, a lot better built, in a more hospitible area...... with you know.. like... water..... maybe a tree or two.  lots of cheap empty america land out there... with water, and grass on it..... some even has trees.   and still have done it dirt cheap.

it would just drive me nuts feeling like im living on a desert moon, where water is more expensive than whisky.

I know the history on this guy since I have been following his blog for 4 years or more.

He sold property in NY State and arrived in Terlingua with > $100k cash in his pocket.  



With substantial cash reserves,  he is able to get along quite well. He is an Amazon PRIME customer and UPS and FedEx make regular deliveries.
He is definitely not self sustaining and most of his projects are more along the lines of fun and interesting.  Few of them are implemented because of dire need.  


I bought 20 acres in the same area 5 years ago.  It was cheap and remote and we got as far as clearing a portion of the land and installing a septic system.  Over the years we spent many weeks on the property in an RV but eventually abandoned the endeavor.

Why?

It is a land that attracts ne-er do wells, recalcitrants and those wishing to hide from society for the wrong reasons.   Not the kind of folks I would wish as neighbors if ROL deteriorates. BTW, the presence of Law Enforcement was largely non-existent.  Brewster county is the largest county in the United States and there were seldom more than 2 deputies on duty. Response time was measured in hours.

Water is a HUGE problem.  Annual rainfall is 10" or less and a drilled well is very expensive and a total crapshoot.  Much of the well water is so heavy with minerals it is undrinkable.

The soil is poor and not very arable.  Multiple attempts at a garden always resulted in abject and massive failure.

The border there has always been very porous due to the extremely rough terrain.  We saw the undesirable traffic increase across that border area many times over in our years there.  It will never be defensible.

The heat from May to September is indescribable.

With all that taken into consideration, we sold our property a year ago at a profit to some other dreamer.  The problems  with living there full time were insurmountable and the money would be MUCH better invested elsewhere.

Thanks @STX45 for the realistic experience with the area, I was thinking this location was out near Odessa and that way, not down near the border.  Scr3w that.
Indeed sounds like not my first choice for a place to live, especially with the unsavory types locating there.

Exactly this for everything from Terlingua to Presidio. Farther is is better, Marfa, Alpine, etc..

In the video he said about $300 a year.

One poster mentioned Alpine/Marfa which was also a no go for me.  Land values are grossly inflated because it has turned into Austin-in-the-Desert.  I love the area up north around Ft Davis because the climate is measurably cooler due to higher elevation.  Again. inflated land values because of vacation retreats established there decades ago.

If a person was serious about the escapism/desert hermit thing,  I would look toward Sanderson or Del Rio.

But be advised......

Buddy of mine has a basic hunting cabin around Sanderson.  After years of vandalism and theft from illegal border crossers; he now just leaves the cabin unlocked.

Not my cup of tea for sure.

Thats the guy from "The Field Lab" blog. He blogs about his setup and the things he does. http://thefieldlab.blogspot.com/ (Warning: contains religious content)

He just suffered an ATV accident a month or so back, and had to be lifeflighted outta there. Classic survivalist scenario of being in the middle of nowhere by yourself when something Really Bad happens. Good read.

The guy appears happy and had peace of mind.

I'd rather live like that than owning lots of possessions and miserable worrying about how to keep the whole show afloat.

I spend time, effort, and money to get through SHTF situations.
This guy spends time, effort, and money to put himself right in the middle of one, lol.
Still, he looks happy with what he's doing.
If he's happy, I'm happy for him.