Disaster Family Who Died Trying to Live 'Off the Grid' Told Loved Ones About Their Plan: 'We Tried to Stop Them' - Before leaving, they "watched some YouTube videos" about "how to live off the grid," a family member said

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Photo:
RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images

A family member of two sisters and a teen whose bodies were discovered "fairly mummified" in a remote Colorado campsite earlier this month said their deaths should serve as a warning: living in the wilderness without proper experience can be deadly.

On Tuesday, the Gunnison County Coroner's Office identified the individuals as Rebecca Vance, 42, Christine Vance, 41, as well as Rebecca’s 14-year-old son, according to a statement obtained by PEOPLE.

Trevala Jara, Rebecca and Christine's stepsister, told The Washington Post that the decision to "live off the grid" was made as Rebecca's fears about the world intensified.

"She didn’t like the way the world was going, and she thought it would be better if her and her son and Christine were alone, away from everybody," Jara, 39, told the newspaper. "She didn’t want the influences of the world to get to them. She really thought she was protecting her family."

Although Christine wasn't always planning on going, Jara told The New York Times she decided to come along "because she thought that if she was with them, they had a better chance of surviving."

“We tried to stop them. But they wouldn’t listen," she said while speaking with The Washington Post.

Not knowing where they planned on going, Jara told The Los Angeles Times that she asked Christine to send postcards to let her know they were safe, but the postcards never came.

Gunnison County Coroner Michael Barnes told The Colorado Sun that he believed that possibly malnutrition and "exposure to the elements" through a harsh winter last year contributed to their deaths, though current analyses on their cause of death are still pending.

The autopsy reports are still incomplete, and the office is awaiting a toxicology report, per The Los Angeles Times. Barnes also expressed concern about carbon monoxide poisoning, citing evidence that the family attempted to stay warm by burning materials, including vegetation in soup cans, inside their tent.

"At this point it appears that these three individuals began long term camping at the location near Gold Creek Campground in (approximately) mid-late July last Summer 2022 and attempted to stay through the winter," he told The Colorado Sun and CNN. He did not say when he believed they possibly could have died.

A hiker discovered one of the "heavily decomposed" bodies about 1,000 feet from a site near the Gold Creek Campground around 4:57 p.m. on June 9, according to the sheriff’s office. The bodies were discovered in a dark patch of timber, Gunnison County Sheriff Adam Murdie told The Colorado Sun.

The Gunnison County Sheriff’s Office went on to note that investigators “located the campsite and discovered two additional heavily decomposed deceased individuals within the campsite.”

Speaking with The New York Times, Jara said that Rebecca had "good intentions," but she was plagued with fears, which worsened during the pandemic.

"The fear overwhelmed her, most definitely," Jara told The Washington Post. "I did feel a shift in her."

Before they left, Jara told The Washington Post that the family "watched some YouTube videos" about "how to live off the grid" but had "no experience."

“YouTube and the internet is not enough,” Jara added while speaking with The Los Angeles Times.

She went on to tell the newspaper that she and her husband even tried to persuade them to use their RV and generator in the mountains as a test run. The idea appealed to Christine but not to Rebecca, who was certain they could "live on their own," Jara told the newspaper.

"[Rebecca] really thought she was saving her son and Christine by living by themselves and being off the grid," Jara added. "I really did not think it was going to get this far."

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[Betonhaus]

I guess I was just assuming they weren't so retarded that they wouldn't even take note of where the nearest town was.

that's awfully optimistic of you

 

[Ghostse]

How did nobody at all ask any questions about where they went and why did Jara not even contact the police with concerns at any point? Like if they went on their own, OK, but they took a child with them!

I'm going cautiously give Jara this one.
If your sister says "I'm going to fuck off an live in the woods with no outside contact".... I mean you aren't going to expect a call.

Surviving off grid in the woods is not actually as hard as these retards make it seem

You're wrong. Its very hard...
UNLESS you are using the full weight of modern techonology to enable you to fuck off from it.

Planting orchards, pre-clearing fields for rotation, drilling a well & digging an outhouse/root seller. Building a shelter with insultation and modern materials, or even just using a saw mill to cut logs for cabin. But this shit takes time and lot of money if you want it done quickly - you can plant your own orchard from seed or even using saplings but it'll be 5-10 until they are yeilding any sort of significant crop. You can shave that time by transplanting more mature trees, but that'll cost you.

this shit, Especially the digging & large scale construction shit is nearly impossible to do solo - even "soloists" like Boone usually try to gloss over "Oh and I got 15 of my neighbors to come give me hand, plus this settler caravan offered to stop and help if they could rest their animals and I'd play trail guide for the next dozen miles or two". Even mountain men like Jim Bridger would either encounter other trailer explorers to trade with (not a thing you can do now) and still had to come into town on occasion to buy replacement shit - and that was with him living a very light mobile lifestyle.
Mostly it was families (or very often groups of families who would rotate and work on each other's homesteads until everyone was situated)

Colorado wilderness is actually very off-the-grid friendly. But you can't just grab your survival guide and fuck off into the forest.
The winters are cold, but the thin air and lack of humidiy means you are mostly losing heat via radiation - as long as you have your skin covered you are often fine. The main issue with winter is you have to be prepared for a snow storm to strand you for a week to a month - that means having food and heat in reserve. And if you are trying to from-zero off the grid as a lot of retards do, that's very, very, VERY hard to do. You need to show up prepared - and prepared means you need a secure permanent or semi-permanent shelter with access to water and fuel.

You also need to hunt/trap/fish. In the rocky mountain pine forests you will be hard-pressed to grow or scrounge sufficient vegetable matter to sustain yourself. This also means you can't just sit in your cabin and gaze at your navel or whatever Gridders think they'll be doing all day. From spring to fall you need to constantly go on the move to find, bring down, and haul back game. Its very easy to process what you hunt into jerky that will have a long storage time, but you do need to bring in sufficient quantities.
You can scrounge roots and berries, but the dry climate means there is a season, it is rather short, and mostly you're going to be going full keto unless you are going into town twice a year for a 50lb sack of flour & a bushel of cornmeal.

Appalachia or adjacent is easier for a prepared soloist because in addition to hunting, you can grow fruit trees. For a soloist, an orchard is nearly a must. Especially without a plow animal you won't be able to clear enough land, an orchard will produce food year after year with little labor from you. You need to know to prune the tree, but even that's probably optional. The hardest part will be preserving your haul.
The other issue is that there is airpressure and humidity, which means the winters will need more preparedness for the weather.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

I'm going cautiously give Jara this one.
If your sister says "I'm going to fuck off an live in the woods with no outside contact".... I mean you aren't going to expect a call.

Good point, odd they told her specifically but maybe no other relatives were alive or in contact. Sounds like she hadn't even really spoken to either them in a while, wasn't close enough to be that concerned or interested, or maybe this isn't the first time she had psychotic episodes and disappeared for a while.

If they were this nuts over COVID she probably hadn't even seen them in person in a couple years. That much isolation alone is enough to make someone severely mentally disturbed. Some people went so nuts they totally cut off contact with family members on top of it.

 

[Sithis]

You're wrong. Its very hard...
UNLESS you are using the full weight of modern techonology to enable you to fuck off from it.

Dude, it really isn't. It's so simple that our ancestors thousands of years ago figured it out quite well. It takes effort and time but when you're out in bumfucknowhere you have a lot of that. And living off grid doesn't mean you have to literally build your shelter from the pine needles and branches, nor does it mean you never interact with other people. The big 3 are water food warmth/shelter, as you take care of those you begin to build and expand, but those 3 must be part of daily routine.
Of course you can still just die off of dysentery or gum infections or some shit quite easily because committing this much to off the grid lifestyle also means foregoing doctors and things like that.
But nothing about this is hard to figure out, it just requires someone not be a retard and actually plan instead of act on the whims of the heart (or schizophrenia as in this case)

 

[Betonhaus]

Though unless you manage to inherit or obtain a cottage that is in decent condition and has a stove and outhouse and the main things you need, you're still going to have to put everything together and get the stuff you can't make on your own. Plus you need to learn to hunt trap and farm.

 

[Ghostse]

Dude, it really isn't. It's so simple that our ancestors thousands of years ago figured it out quite well. It takes effort and time but when you're out in bumfucknowhere you have a lot of that. And living off grid doesn't mean you have to literally build your shelter from the pine needles and branches, nor does it mean you never interact with other people. The big 3 are water food warmth/shelter, as you take care of those you begin to build and expand, but those 3 must be part of daily routine.
Of course you can still just die off of dysentery or gum infections or some shit quite easily because committing this much to off the grid lifestyle also means foregoing doctors and things like that.
But nothing about this is hard to figure out, it just requires someone not be a retard and actually plan instead of act on the whims of the heart (or schizophrenia as in this case)

People didn't do it solo. They did it in groups, and they had support networks that just don't exist anymore. there is no longer traders and trappers wandering the woods willing to trade or help out in exchange for a bed.
It is very, very, very hard to solo again unless you are getting regular top-ups from civilization. You need to have people to rely on when something goes wrong. Because it WILL go wrong.

Because its not just food. Its not just sufficient quantities of food. It is sufficient quantities of the right food with no more than a 3-week break. Because food STORAGE is where you will fuck up every time. It is stupid hard to grow, process, and then preserve enough food to keep you going for year. IT doesn't matter if you're growing and harvesting apples that have a year's worth of calories if those apples are rotten and inedible in 6 months when its winter.

About the only place solo this is even remotely realistic, and again I stress again without regular supply infusions from the local general store (because when you are just bulk-ordering CalorieMate life gets a lot more simple) is the south pacific because winter essentially doesn't exist and you can fish 24/365. But all that still goes tits up the first major storm.


I will tell you my favorite story about the difficulty of food preservation
In Iceland they have a food called Hakarl. It is a national delicacy and very much an acquired taste.
This is fermented Greenland shark.
Greenland shark, as partly a defense mechanism partly a part of a calorie-efficient metabolism, is full of uric acid. That is: Piss.
This shark is so full of uric acid when you fish it out of the water, you are instantly hit with the reek of week-old piss.
It is so full of piss that if you eat fresh Greenland shark, you will die.
The Icelandic people figured out if you buried a greenland shark in the sand for about six months, it will rot and while rotting, the uric acid will break down into ammonia (aka floor cleaner) to be safe enough to eat.
Because it full of piss and ammonia, it stores very well.

The reason this delicacy was discovered was because Iceland had depleted their trees and the temporary warming period ended, meaning it was too cold to grow much food and the supplies from the east stopped coming as the viking world collapsed.
It is very likely this discovery was made because a greenland shark had washed asshore, been buried for several months and then exposed again by a storm, and people saw seagulls picking at the rotting corpse, also ate it, didn't die, and then set to replicating the conditions that made piss-shark non-lethal.

So I want you to imagine how hungry you'd have to be chase off gulls from a rotting shark that, when freshly caught reeks of piss, and now smells of piss and floor cleaner, and eat it. You get hungry enough to haul piss-sharks back to shore, bury them, and figure out you need bury the for 6 months to get rid of most of the piss, then cut it into strips to airdry to get rid of most of the floor-cleaner.

Now imagine this happens regularly enough that you start to actually enjoy the taste of rotting, piss-and-floor cleaner shark.
Because that happened to Icelandic people, those niggers were about as off the grid as you can get when that was going down.

OR, tl;dr if its so easy, go do it and prove me wrong.

Though unless you manage to inherit or obtain a cottage that is in decent condition and has a stove and outhouse and the main things you need, you're still going to have to put everything together and get the stuff you can't make on your own. Plus you need to learn to hunt trap and farm.

Even if you get a well-built cottage with the well drilled, the outhouse & root cellar dug, harvestable food sources already established ... its still a fuck ton of work to maintain it.

 

[MadStan]

Damn. Not even enough of them left for predators to have a meal. How absolutely inconsiderate of them.

 

[Sithis]

It is very, very, very hard to solo again unless you are getting regular top-ups from civilization. You need to have people to rely on when something goes wrong. Because it WILL go wrong.

About the only place solo this is even remotely realistic, and again I stress again without regular supply infusions from the local general store (because when you are just bulk-ordering CalorieMate life gets a lot more simple) is the south pacific because winter essentially doesn't exist and you can fish 24/365. But all that still goes tits up the first major storm.

Nigga, google what the Appalachian trail is and then come back and tell me how difficult it is to live in bumfucknowhere and still meet randoms in the woods to trade shit to for food

 

[Ghostse]

Nigga, google what the Appalachian trail is and then come back and tell me how difficult it is to live in bumfucknowhere and still meet randoms in the woods to trade shit to for food

Tell me you're a retard without actually showing a picture of your mongoloid face/third chromosome.

 

[Sithis]

Tell me you're a retard without actually showing posting a picture of your mongoloid face.

You keep acting like living out innawoods is some huge impossible thing, probably because you are the type of pseudointellectual retard who in reality would die off in the woods because you'd be so focused on trying to find the specific type of berry your hobby store survival guide taught you was edible you'd completely forget any other means of foraging.

People do this shit every day by choice. You act like this is all some mystical craft that can only be learned by a level 100 expert in woodsmanship, but living off grid doesn't mean you have to move out 1000 fucking miles to the top of a mountain and never encounter another human, it means you learn to be resourceful enough to survive out on your own. You can live off grid and still stay close enough to civilization that if shit goes wrong you can at least get a ride out. You can go rough it without having to manually build an irrigation system from trees and the dirt. You can build a shelter without cutting down log by log and leaving nails. These people already took some modern amenities with them so its not like they were trying to go 100% caveman. Do you think everyone today currently either lives on the grid, in a town/residence etc or populated area with electricity, and everyone who doesn't is a wilderness expert? How sheltered are you?

 

[Ghostse]

Q: With the internet providing easy answers, and the wealth of 'how not to fuck it up it' guides and literature, how the fuck are there actually retards killing themselves by trying to go off the grid, and failing by being woefully and completely unprepared? How do stupid people this completely up their own ass actually exist while still being able to breathe?
A:

Surviving off grid in the woods is not actually as hard as these retards make it seem, but location location location. You have to go somewhere that doesn't get extreme weather one way or the other. The Appalachians are much better for roughing it than the western mountain ranges for this reason, you get a lush environment with comparatively fewer/smaller predators, more abundant wildlife and lots more shelter from weather. You have to make sure there is an abundance of small animals that you can catch and eat year round, and you have to have a source of clean water. Oh and don't do retarded shit like burn fires in enclosed spaces without ventilation.

You keep acting like living out innawoods is some huge impossible thing, probably because you are the type of pseudointellectual retard who in reality would die off in the woods because you'd be so focused on trying to find the specific type of berry your hobby store survival guide taught you was edible you'd completely forget any other means of foraging.

People do this shit every day by choice. You act like this is all some mystical craft that can only be learned by a level 100 expert in woodsmanship, but living off grid doesn't mean you have to move out 1000 fucking miles to the top of a mountain and never encounter another human, it means you learn to be resourceful enough to survive out on your own. You can live off grid and still stay close enough to civilization that if shit goes wrong you can at least get a ride out. You can go rough it without having to manually build an irrigation system from trees and the dirt. You can build a shelter without cutting down log by log and leaving nails. These people already took some modern amenities with them so its not like they were trying to go 100% caveman. Do you think everyone today currently either lives on the grid, in a town/residence etc or populated area with electricity, and everyone who doesn't is a wilderness expert? How sheltered are you?

"One time mom gave me money and I took the bus to the store to buy tendies so I'm basically a survivalist".

No where am I say all the strawman shit you are putting on me. Even if you live in a bugpod, you can still reduce your reliance on globohomo and that is something everyone should do more of. But you aren't off the grid, you're just less on it. No one is begrudging Jim Bridger his twice trip to town to trade skins for beans and bullets, but that's not expectaction a lot of "off the grid" types have. They think they can do what these retards tried do, which was load a backpack, take some tree guide, fuck off into the rockies and live without needing to interact with society at large ever again. And they predictably die and we get a bunch of "saving retards from themselves" rules and regulations ruining shit for the rest of us.

You want to go have a two week LARP that's great, as long as you're prepared physically, mentally, and logisticly. Disconnect from the electric jew, go to where you can't hear traffic noise. Go do it. But that is a temporary break, that's not living off the grid, especially not as experienced by the people in said article. They wanted to go party like it was 1799.

 

[SBG]

Dude, it really isn't. It's so simple that our ancestors thousands of years ago figured it out quite well. It takes effort and time but when you're out in bumfucknowhere you have a lot of that. And living off grid doesn't mean you have to literally build your shelter from the pine needles and branches, nor does it mean you never interact with other people. The big 3 are water food warmth/shelter, as you take care of those you begin to build and expand, but those 3 must be part of daily routine.
Of course you can still just die off of dysentery or gum infections or some shit quite easily because committing this much to off the grid lifestyle also means foregoing doctors and things like that.
But nothing about this is hard to figure out, it just requires someone not be a retard and actually plan instead of act on the whims of the heart (or schizophrenia as in this case)

Watched a history show once that commented on people using shit as part of their building materials for their homes in Europe in the past. Taking a dump to help seal up a home to be warm for winter would likely not occur to me if left to my own devices.

Or there's the thing about using shit collected from the streets of London to help with making leather.

May eventually have figured out some of this stuff, but honestly it'd be a hard learning curve for a lot of dudes.

 

[AnOminous]

Appalachia or adjacent is easier for a prepared soloist because in addition to hunting, you can grow fruit trees. For a soloist, an orchard is nearly a must. Especially without a plow animal you won't be able to clear enough land, an orchard will produce food year after year with little labor from you. You need to know to prune the tree, but even that's probably optional. The hardest part will be preserving your haul.
The other issue is that there is airpressure and humidity, which means the winters will need more preparedness for the weather.

What kind of apocalyptic scenario are you thinking of, though? If it's some zombie apocalypse level shit, having an orchard is a dream. You'd need to be able to protect it. Farms are similar. Without guns, and a lot of them, you wouldn't be able to keep your farms and orchards.

 

[Ghostse]

What kind of apocalyptic scenario are you thinking of, though? If it's some zombie apocalypse level shit, having an orchard is a dream. You'd need to be able to protect it. Farms are similar. Without guns, and a lot of them, you wouldn't be able to keep your farms and orchards.

Doesn't need to be an apocalyptic scenario. Just one where you are wanting to homestead without needing to interact much, if at all, with the outside world. Basically just doing your Mountain Man once or twice-a-year trip to town for shit you cannot readily replicate as a one or two person operation. I.e. clothes, anything metal/glass, etc.

Also no one is saying don't have a gun. I don't know where the fuck you're getting that idea. If you're in bear country (All of north america) you're a complete idiot if you don't have something large enough to stop an angry bear ideally before it chews off half your face..

 

[Sithis]

"One time mom gave me money and I took the bus to the store to buy tendies so I'm basically a survivalist".

No where am I say all the strawman shit you are putting on me. Even if you live in a bugpod, you can still reduce your reliance on globohomo and that is something everyone should do more of. But you aren't off the grid, you're just less on it. No one is begrudging Jim Bridger his twice trip to town to trade skins for beans and bullets, but that's not expectaction a lot of "off the grid" types have. They think they can do what these retards tried do, which was load a backpack, take some tree guide, fuck off into the rockies and live without needing to interact with society at large ever again. And they predictably die and we get a bunch of "saving retards from themselves" rules and regulations ruining shit for the rest of us.

So again, it is not that surviving off grid is in itself so horrifically difficult to figure out, it's that these people did it in a retarded way.

You are making living off grid seem like something it's not according to what, by your own words, other people who are retarded expect it to be. Even the frontiersmen understood they needed to have some contact, with the natives if not with their fellow white men. Even the natives of the land before them understood the same thing, that's why native Americans had trade routes that stretched the whole country before Europeans even got here.

But even if you don't have that there are still places where you are more likely to survive more easily than where these retards went, that aren't thousands of miles away in the Pacific. They'd have had a much easier time finding food and a lot less likely to freeze to death if they were in, say, northern Georgia than in Colorado.

Watched a history show once that commented on people using shit as part of their building materials for their homes in Europe in the past. Taking a dump to help seal up a home to be warm for winter would likely not occur to me if left to my own devices.

Or there's the thing about using shit collected from the streets of London to help with making leather.

May eventually have figured out some of this stuff, but honestly it'd be a hard learning curve for a lot of dudes.

I don't think the shit part was necessary I think that was just because they were European

 

[Fëanor Curufinwë]

I wonder how many more peopleemaciated mummies are out in Murika's wildernesses bc they believed that the jewbox was telling the truth that the world was ending and they had to get out of dodge to save themselves. Fucking journoscum need to realize that their horsespew has consequences, even though yeah they're paid by the minute.

The pandemic coverage really did a number on people with already fragile mental health. I was reading about this guy who killed his wife because he thought the world was ending, and he clearly had paranoid delusions already before Covid. I know someone who had a complete breakdown and I don't wanna go into detail but they will deal with the repercussions for the rest of their life. I think we will hear a lot of other stories like this in the coming years.

 

[Marc]

Thread TL ; DR: Maybe consider why the area you're camping in is uninhabited.

 

[Mordecai "3 Finger" Brown]

I'm a bong in rural NZ, and the number of people I've seen heading into the bush with less gear than I take to the fucking supermarket makes me wish we had bears.

Mind blown that NZ has forests but no bears.

 

[Ghostse]

So again, it is not that surviving off grid is in itself so horrifically difficult to figure out, it's that these people did it in a retarded way.

From what I can tell you are a semi- functionally retard who thinks weekend camping trip somehow reflects long-term living, or that replacing the battery in the remote instead of buying a new TV makes you some sort of rugged survivalist.
But I'll try one more time because Jesus said we should try to be kind to the mentally defficient.

Living off the grid, where you need no or minimal support from the grid, that is the logistic network of outside society, is different from becoming more self-sufficient.
With the number of how-tos, the getting knowledge isn't hard. What is hard is both the mental part of understanding how to apply that know, and then also the physical part of "Holy fuck this 5 gallon bucket is actually really fucking heavy".

Both of these are usually lacking. The people who think digging a well or an outhouse is no big deal have usually never dug anything (unaided) deeper than a foot. There are loads to haul, things to scrub, things to stack, food to process, firewood to chop. All this shit that modern life makes trivial becomes quite difficult now because YOU have to do it. And when you are solo or in a small group, you have to do everything.

If you show up at a virgin homestead, alone, you are never going to get that shit ready. You can make progress and make it less shit, but unless you have your food situation already squared away (again, air-dropping a shipping container full of CalorieMate to the middle of you camp solves a lot of issues) you will be trying to feed yourself not build anything more advanced than a lean-to. You can build a cabin solo, but you're going to be making lots of trips to town to gas up the chainsaw.

You can take away a lot of this work by spending the money (or buying a place that already has it done) to prep your site ahead of going off the grid, because at that point you just have to maintain it. This is still a metric fuckton of work. Its not necessarily mentally taxing, but my nigga, try doing laundry without a washing machine one time. Try doing it without running water.
Have a crew come build the cabin (or deliver a pre-fab). If you don't have a well dug (or an existing prepared spring) You will be spending a lot of not only time, but also energy, hauling water (Which is where a lot of long-term camping re-res run into issues. 'Let's move camp closer to the river' and then the spring thaw floods them out. this is where that "applying knowledge" part comes into play")

None of this shit is impossible to relearn even if you don't have a guide - humans figured it out once. But do keep in mind the number of people who died while these mysteries were unraveled.

Look at the retards in the article. They had access to knowledge, but didn't even bring a fucking tent to Colorado.

 

[bliblblblbbllb]

It's hard to know if this was a case of Darwin Award winners or some sort of sickness with how little details there are.

I totally forget who, but there was some crazy lady documented on the forums who totally had paranoid delusions that she had a mold allergy. As in, even a single spore of mold would cause her to just stop breathing and die. You know, the mold that's naturally found on, like, a tree outside. And in dirt. And in your bathroom. Not just visible mold. Anything that naturally has any microscopic life on it. Killing her!!!!!

Where to go to escape MOLD MENACE? Why the desert of course!
So she became a "van lifer" in the middle of a desert, eating vegan or some wacky quack anti-mold diet, I don't know. And I really don't remember, but I think the general consensus was she was now confusing her near-constant heat illness with further MOLD POISONING. Also I think she did tons of LCD or MDMA.

---

You guys really need to watch Homestead Rescue. The guy who comes to "save the homestead" is honestly a bit of a lolcow-ish figure himself too, although it's hard to tell what's for the camera of course.

Please enjoy these two people of color who have just a few chickens living in their weird little shack.
They bought 30 chickens and had no shelter for them.
When they all died to hawks, they simply bought more chickens. As those got eaten by hawks, they just put 'em in their shack.

It's been a long time since I saw this episode but I believe they did not even own the land they were doing this shit on, it was rented.
From what I gleaned off the comments, they ended up building them a mobile home that their truck could pull, and a tow-away chicken coop.

As proof of the homestead rescuer himself being a dumbass, enjoy this video of him asking his (adult) son to retrieve a chainsaw stuck in a felled tree: You pull on the rope I tied to the chainsaw, while I pull the tree so it falls down! Run away really fast!