Hello and welcome to the video tour of our new cabin! While we never named our current place, we’ve decided with a new cabin comes a new name. So welcome to High Tide Homestead, named so because of the beautiful Cook Inlet views. I can’t wait to watch some amazing winter storms roll in! Continue reading “Welcome to High Tide Homestead!”
Category: Moving
The Beginning Of The End
2021 marks the beginning of the end for our family on this little slice of off grid Alaska. 5 years on just over 5 acres living in under 500 square feet. We’ve felled trees, built a cabin and carved out a garden. I’ve loved every minute of living out here, so why leave? Continue reading “The Beginning Of The End”
How To Prep For Driving The ALCAN
Kyle is finally back in Alaska, hooray!
This is the second time in 12 months that Kyle has made the ALCAN (Alaska-Canada highway) drive, and we thought we’d put together a little checklist for anyone else who is planning the drive through Canada to reach Alaska. Last March Kyle drove entirely on the ALCAN, while this time he took a different route for a part of the trip along the Stewart-Cassiar highway. This shaved about 3 hours from his drive, though it was a bit more dangerous for driving. Just check out this rolled and abandoned semi he saw! I wonder if someone will come back for it in summer?
Our original plan was to have us all drive together in Spring, but since it’s still fully winter Kyle took Ronan and did the trip himself. We didn’t really want to make a million potty stops for pregnant me and the toddler. With just the dog, he was able to make the trip in about 4 days, with a total of 47 hours driving. That’s a bit longer than the actual ALCAN because it starts at Mile 0 in Dawson’s Creek, CA and ends in Delta Junction, AK. Since Kyle was coming from Washington, there was extra drive time and mileage involved. This was not a leisure trip, but a get from Point A to Point B trip, so there were a lot of long stretches of driving. Even with all the music he listened to, he was also able to get through 2 1/2 Harry Potter books (Amazon) on audio tape! Continue reading “How To Prep For Driving The ALCAN”
Rookie Mistakes We Made As Beginning Homesteaders
I’ll be the first to admit that when we first started our homesteading journey, we made a lot of rookie mistakes. We spent too much on things we didn’t need. Then we turned around and didn’t buy things we really should have. We skipped around when adding animals, buildings, and tools. That is, until we learned to prioritize better. We have learned a lot of lessons the hard way. Starting a homestead from scratch, and building all our own infrastructure, is much harder than I had ever imagined it could be. Hopefully, writing this all down will help you avoid a few of the mistakes we made!
Our biggest rookie mistake was not planning anything.
Sure, we had ideas for what we wanted to do, and we wrote things down, but we never really had a set plan. There was no “house goes here, chickens go here, garden goes here” kind of plan. Not until we had already put the chickens too close to the house. So as we expanded, we just threw things where it was convenient right then, rather than were we knew we wanted them permanently. If we had planned better, we could have saved ourselves from a lot of the other mistakes. A homestead planning binder is necessary to keep everything organized.
Another mistake we made was jumping in to new things without preparing.
We’d get an idea and go for it. More chickens? Heck yeah. Pigs? Let’s do it! Greenhouse and garden? Check! And then the inevitable fail. We wanted everything to work and be productive right away. Kyle was so disappointed to find out our chickens wouldn’t lay until the spring after we purchased them. At least we were able to push our pig order back to this summer, and have learned enough to hold off on beehives (Amazon) and other animals until next year.
We didn’t understand the weather in our new area well, either.
Personally, coming from a desert area, I didn’t truly understand what living in a rainforest meant until we were hit by our first rainy season here. A little drowned garden and a lot of mud later, know I know how wet it can be! It also helps to know where the low spots collect so we can avoid building there. We also thought we were prepared for long winters, but they are much longer and darker than I could have imagined!
Also, we made the mistake of not budgeting from the beginning.
We have spent so much money on materials for our homestead, when we should have just invested in a sawmill from the beginning. Small purchases can add up really quickly. We should have figured out sooner that just because something is new doesn’t make it better. At least we have a few places we know to go for cheap homestead goods now!
The biggest lesson we’ve learned in starting our homestead from scratch is that it’s okay to go slow.
There is no reason to push to the point of injury to get everything done in one day. Pacing yourself in the endless work (it is endless) of beginning a homestead is extremely important. There should always be a realistic timeline for goals to be completed. This will save so much frustration down the line.
All things aside, we are still learning on our homestead journey. I’m sure there will be many more mistakes and lessons for us in the future!
Six Reasons Why We Homestead In Alaska
I’ve been getting the question of why homestead in Alaska a lot recently.
I thought I’d lay out some thoughts behind why we decided to homestead here over anywhere else. As I mentioned in my very first post, part of our decision to move to Alaska came from Alaskan off-grid reality TV. Kyle and I both knew that those programs showed an overly romanticized version of homesteading in Alaska. But so many people living our dream here made us hopeful that we could make it too. We did a lot of research before buying our little piece of land, and there were just way too many pros in moving to Alaska for us to try to homestead in Washington.
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