For the 4th of July, i decided to head up where a good friend of mine Jeremy Byrd, resides comfortably up on a mountain just out side of Willits CA. Jeremy and i took our first year of RDNA together, and his family is about to start practicing permaculture in Ecuador.
The mountain he lives on is a part of a herbal medicine school on a property called Motherland run by a really great woman named Donna. she has a beautiful mixed veggie, flower, herbs, and perennials, and is just mostly boarded by BLM land on the other side of the mountain, and the southern most start of the Yolla Bolly wilderness is right at her back door. the valley preceding with the mountain road we drove up seemed to have a solid little community very well connected and all aiming to be very much off grid.
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| Jeremy's 12x12 with attached deck, sunken bath tub, outdoor shower, and outhouse. |
the tiny lofted house Jeremy was staying at had a sunken-in-the-deck tub, an outdoor shower, and an enclosed outhouse. the place was pretty roomy, had a built in passive cold storage box, a pretty sweet mini fridge, a gas heater, on demand hot water, an electric cook top and big passive solar windows to keep the well built, and very well insulated little 12ftx12ftx12ft house.
his electric is entirely off of a larger off grid system, with large solar panels up on the side of the hill where the veggie garden is, feeding down to a workshop that stores the batteries and runs power down to Jermey's little 12x12. the system in the winter only has to be juiced up for a couple of hours throughout the whole winter just to restore the water based battery system that is replicated throughout the property, including the system over by the little house we stayed the night in.
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| The one and only Jeremy living the days. |
Running the generator is maybe a few gallons of gas, and in my opinion is a good back up and one could store a pretty sweet stash of gas for the extra kick. There is a guy down the road, Jeremy says, that runs a Takahashi shop with some pretty serious equipment entirely off his solar array system, and the rest of his homestead. the neibors dream apparently is to be able to eventually create a mini grid and run lines down the valley road and help hook into the rest of the mountain on maybe 5-10 privately owned homesteads. pretty cool. as you can see in the picture of the outside of his house, he runs in at peak winter once a month or so to town to fill the two small propane tanks you see in the background. very impressive and promising to see a simple design working so well. all of the water also comes from a well that was drilled at the TOP of the mountain.
else where on the trip we took a hot drive up through round valley and up into the eel river forks that come from the Yolla Bolly wilderness. we finally found the perfect part of the river not muddied from the freak storms we had the night before, and swam amongst salmon fingerlings very much alone, peaceful, and happy to have finally got in the water. here are some photos from that journey.
also are the photos of the small trailer converted into tiny home with its own solar rig and the same set up as Jeremy.
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| Old Rail line on the eel. |
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| our final swim spot |
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| our small trailer quite exposed to the wilderness and sunrise. |
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| the attached deck and further back a covered outdoor shower, and out house. |
