Cheap Land Colorado: What going off the grid really looks like
I never thought I would see the SLV in the New Yorker!<p>A friend and I purchased 5 acres in the SLV around 2008 from a guy on Craigslist for 5K. We had no serious intentions at the time. But I was laid off from aerospace in 2009 after the crash, and so I moved out there for a summer, living in a conversion Astro van (before #vanlife, and definitely still van-down-by-the-river and not cool), and started to build a cabin. I didn&#x27;t finish it that summer, but I eventually moved out to Colorado the next year to do so.<p>My experience in the SLV can&#x27;t really be summed up in a comment - you could write a book :D - but I think this picture captures the beauty of the place: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;hlvnsofo4leiseo&#x2F;img_0012.jpg?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;hlvnsofo4leiseo&#x2F;img_0012.jpg?dl=0</a><p>I lived there for about 8 months straight in my longest stretch. It was the kind of difficult I wanted. I (and every one else living in the mountains) had major issues with theft, though. There were multiple break-ins, and the last time I visited, just a flat-out smashing of windows and stripping of siding. I never finished the cabin and abandoned the project after I moved from Colorado. It was perhaps one of the few times I utilized the sunk cost fallacy and didn&#x27;t dig deeper :)<p>When I left the SLV, the folks I knew living in RVs were being pushed out for land use violations (or at least that&#x27;s how I remember it): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ec8M2bZNEac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ec8M2bZNEac</a> . Most folks I knew moved out in RVs&#x2F;vans first and then attempted to build after they were there (this includes me as well!). To my knowledge, RV living is &quot;illegal&quot; past a certain number of days on most residential properties in the US, but I do not know what prompted the code enforcement (if anything).