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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[Sithis]

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.

That's because you are the type of person who thinks they know more than they do but is actually an idiot and dies embarrassingly in the forest because of it.

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.

No, that is only because you are being autistic in your definition and defining off the grid using terminology you cobbled from other retards. At its essence being off grid means you don't rely on public utilities, you don't have an address or a current paper trail, and you are not easily tracked and found or a part of society. By classic definition much of the homeless population in the US is off grid. It's self assured cunts like you who have turned it into some mythological representation of man's venture into the unknown or some other romanticized bullshit about frontiersmanship, thus leading people to believe if they wanna live off grid they have to go live like the wilderness family and never lay eyes on another human.

"Muh orchards muh food supply muh water makes it impossibly hard!" Have you ever actually been in the mountains, or any mountains that didn't come off a bear grylls episode? I promise you it isn't all hellscape full of rocky mountainous terrain. There are areas in the middle of nowhere all through the southeast where there are easily identifiable edible plants, little severe weather, limited predators and abundant food. You do have to have some basic knowledge and avoid snakes, and have to be able to actually tie a snare trap or have something to hunt with (crossbows are great) but it's not like all innawoods is some barren desert where you'd have to scrape by every day to find a source of food. Shit, you pick your spot right, and you'd be amazed how much food will come to you, blinking stupidly as it tries to eat your planted corn.

 

[SBG]

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.

Saw some reddit posts earlier crying about how people's therapists and doctors now sounded like anti-vaxxers for saying to take the mask off and that they needed treatment for their paranoia.

Which made me think of how nuts these people must feel that all the experts did a 180 on whether to be worried or not. The horror stories of "COVID scars your lungs for life!" turned out to be fantasies, but it's not like Fauci has come out saying to not worry anymore as none of the TV experts wants to admit they were exaggerating things.

These people are probably all over the place, living as shut ins or trying to become homesteaders, but won't be noticed for years since they're taking themselves out of society. It's just more noticeable with people that can't work from home or can't get government checks to help live on.

 

[Vesperus]

That's because you are the type of person who thinks they know more than they do but is actually an idiot and dies embarrassingly in the forest because of it.

Both you and @Ghostse are both right, but you're also both too retarded to realize you're coming at it from different directions. If you were were born and raised in a city, you really do need to work out that digging is work, and marmalade pans are heavy, and potatoes don't grow on trees. Likewise, he seems to think this is arcane knowledge from the before times.

Yes, there's plenty of stuff in a forest to eat but if you airdropped a bunch of typical New Yorkers into an Oregon summer, 95% of them would be dead within a week (ooh, tasty red berries!)

That's why I'd suggest everyone do what they can if they get the opportunity. Pickle some onions. Grow some herbs at home. Keep a chicken. If you fancy a laugh, try making a fire without matches or a lighter.

(Also, Google rosehips)

Self sufficiency and survival skills are opposite sides of the coin. But they are opposite sides of the same coin, and it's a coin 90% of people haven't even looked at.

 

[Comandante Marcos]

These people are probably all over the place, living as shut ins or trying to become homesteaders, but won't be noticed for years since they're taking themselves out of society. It's just more noticeable with people that can't work from home or can't get government checks to help live on.

There are people who were already self-isolated before the plague hit bc they were either abandoned by their families for being batshit retards or simply due to delusional disorders (skitzo sometimes, but not everybody with delusions fits the DSM definition of schizophrenia) and then they have nothing to do for months on end except watch the jewbox and absorb the bullshit and then they head into the wild and nobody notices they're gone.

Some faux-homesteaders have tugboats to fall back on, so they can pop into the nearest town every couple weeks for supplies while telling themselves that they're TRUE and HONEST off gridders. Most of them will eventually go back to the cities as the covid freakout recedes.

The thing is, the elites can keep a lot of the results of their horseshit hidden bc of a common belief that if you talk about suicide people will be inspired to neck themselves. How many people had complete mental breakdowns due to the covid crazy? How many disappeared into the wild? We will never fucking know. Hunters will prob be finding skeletons of people who believed that covid was literally The Stand and that they had to flee into the wild to save themselves for the next few decades.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Anyway, I'd like to see how many people die from trying to live in "Tiny Homes" that they built themselves for $250K.

People live in trailers on the street and survive just fine, don't they? I don't see why they'd die in a tiny home, though maybe that's why I'd die if I was in one.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

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.

Piss-sharks

I'm guessing lutefisk and surstromming have similar origins as hakarl, things got pretty bad in Scandinavia once the Medieval Warm Period ended.

Yes, there's plenty of stuff in a forest to eat but if you airdropped a bunch of typical New Yorkers into an Oregon summer, 95% of them would be dead within a week (ooh, tasty red berries!)

Kind of makes you wonder how desperate people must have been to eat pokeweed and how many died before trial and error figured out how to make it edible.

There's a reason why hunter-gatherers and others who live an off-grid lifestyle have such a strong sense of community, which is a big thing people forget if they plan to go off by themselves. If you're by yourself in the wilderness with no way to contact others, and suffer a fall with a broken leg, you're dead barring a real miracle.

Just unwise to go alone, both psychologically and physically IMO.

 

[Ghostse]

I'm guessing lutefisk and surstromming have similar origins as hakarl, things got pretty bad in Scandinavia once the Medieval Warm Period ended.

Surstromming is just a Scandinavian take on fermented fish for preservation; its more apt to say that surstromming and hakarl (and lutefisk to a lesser degree) share a common origin not that either one necessary influenced the other as Northern Europe has a long history of this sort of preservation that would predate Iceland's viking colonization. yes that means someone didn't just start eating rotting shark out of pure starvation as they would have had had experience figuring out if fish is rotted just enough, since in a time before refrigeration and canning fermentation was how things were preserved when you couldn't dry it out or count on things staying dry. But it makes the story less entertaining to add that context.

Lutefisk was a unique evolution due to the addition of lye. There are a couple of theories about how lye got involved - it may have been accidental due to low-quality fish being boiled and birch woodash getting into the pots, or it may have been intentional; either a trader trying to up the shelf-life of the fish by adding lye, or one trying to pass trash fish off as something that would fetch a higher price.

Piss-sharks

I think it was an inuit legends taht say that the first Greenland Shark was some goddess' piss-spoon that she dropped into the ocean and it came to life.

 

[Meat Target]

Muh orchards muh food supply muh water makes it impossibly hard!" Have you ever actually been in the mountains, or any mountains that didn't come off a bear grylls episode? I promise you it isn't all hellscape full of rocky mountainous terrain. There are areas in the middle of nowhere all through the southeast where there are easily identifiable edible plants, little severe weather, limited predators and abundant food. You do have to have some basic knowledge and avoid snakes, and have to be able to actually tie a snare trap or have something to hunt with (crossbows are great) but it's not like all innawoods is some barren desert where you'd have to scrape by every day to find a source of food. Shit, you pick your spot right, and you'd be amazed how much food will come to you, blinking stupidly as it tries to eat your planted corn.

arcane knowledge from the before times.

I just got back from camping in a national park, so here's what I noticed FWIW:

Y'know that Geico slogan, "so easy a caveman could do it"? Well, that applies to basic survival skills. You wouldn't be here without it.

You don't have to be a SERE teacher to figure it out, it's not that hard. Much of the knowledge you need to survive can be obtained by getting your nose out of your phone, observing your surroundings, and rubbing two brain cells together.

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

If people don't know, Gunnison county is one of the coldest place in the United States because cold air settles in the valleys during the winter months

The Green River Valley in Wyoming consistently has the lowest overnight temps in the lower 48. Cold air comes down out of the mountains and gets trapped by a ridge west of Rock Springs. North/South mountain valleys are the second worst place to winter camp after proper cold sinks.

I mean not to sound unsympathetic but wouldn't you get in your car and go back to civilization just long enough to get food at some point before sitting there and starving to death?

The campsite is at 9400' and is closed 6 months a year, minimum. There was no driving out once the snow set in.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

The Green River Valley in Wyoming consistently has the lowest overnight temps in the lower 48. Cold air comes down out of the mountains and gets trapped by a ridge west of Rock Springs. North/South mountain valleys are the second worst place to winter camp after proper cold sinks.

Yeah. You should never camp in a place here there are no trees:

 

[Male Idiot]

Why not join the amish? Sure it is a cult but they got cows, chickens, and can help you set up a wooden hut.

Beats freezing and berry scavenging.

 

[Blasterman]

Living in nature is comfy. Especially if it's an off-grid shack. On the other hand you're going to need something to keep your place powered during the night and harsh winters, a quality heating method and good tap water and waste water treatment for truly "sustainable" living, plus there's the expertise you just need to know at all times for conditions like these.

 

[Vesperus]

Y'know that Geico slogan, "so easy a caveman could do it"? Well, that applies to basic survival skills. You wouldn't be here without it.

This website is full of men who cut their own dicks off. I think you're being pretty unfair to caveman, comparing them to people like that...

 

[mold]

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.

I'm really nervous about this because it's going to happen again. I think "already fragile mental health" is a mistake too, I think we have to understand that that's basically everybody in the west and we're all vulnerable. If the covid propaganda didn't get you and make you crazy, something else could.

I live someplace where people like this woman are really, really common. Like there are *whole towns* that were filled up with people thinking they were going to have to survive nuclear war.

 

[AnOminous]

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..

I'm saying exactly the opposite. You can definitely do this stuff now with a civilization that exists. But if we're talking about an absolute collapse of civilization, you don't need A gun. You need a LOT of them. Something like a farm and an orchard would attract the vilest kind of scum to attack you.

The horror stories of "COVID scars your lungs for life!" turned out to be fantasies, but it's not like Fauci has come out saying to not worry anymore as none of the TV experts wants to admit they were exaggerating things.

Except it does for some people. For most people it's a bad cold.

I'm guessing lutefisk and surstromming have similar origins as hakarl, things got pretty bad in Scandinavia once the Medieval Warm Period ended.

I actually kind of like lutefisk. I want to try hakarl at some point, although everyone I've known who tried it says it is the vilest thing they've ever eaten. I just want to know exactly how vile it is. Or maybe discover that I actually like it.

 

[Sithis]

I'm saying exactly the opposite. You can definitely do this stuff now with a civilization that exists. But if we're talking about an absolute collapse of civilization, you don't need A gun. You need a LOT of them. Something like a farm and an orchard would attract the vilest kind of scum to attack you.

I remember reading an account from someone who was in Venezuela during its economic collapse in the 2010s, they said people were threatening their life over a mango tree they had in their back yard.

Your point is the reason humanity since the earliest days has leaned toward cooperative living, because there will be people whose mode of survival is to plunder what others have. Thanks to mass forced migration, any collapse scenario in a "first world nation" is going to involve millions of foreigners who are already here and are already familiar with mad max lifestyle, so anyone being realistic about wanting to bug out would want to go with more than their sister and a child, and should take a lot of guns and ammo.

 

[AnOminous]

I remember reading an account from someone who was in Venezuela during its economic collapse in the 2010s, they said people were threatening their life over a mango tree they had in their back yard.

And that is the kind of shit that will happen everywhere.

 

[George Lucas]

Here’s an example of someone successfully living in nature:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke

 

[AnOminous]

Here’s an example of someone successfully living in nature:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke

Guys like this are epic.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

There's bodycam footage available of the site and bodies now but I only saw a censored version on a Youtube video and can't find the original source:

https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/ZKUYhAKervg

There was a really good article published this month that gives a lot more background into them. They were half Slavic half Korean (not spic like people were thinking), two sisters who lived together their entire lives except for twice for less than a yr both times. One sister felt guilty when their mom died of cancer without having a grandchild so she got pregnant by a random man who had two young kids and didn't put him on the birth certificate but used his mom for free childcare (she owns a daycare).
She named her son "Talon". He was supposedly smart and really good at math, she homeschooled him and he loved Xbox and computers. The mom "Becky" became more and more paranoid and eventually convinced her sister Christina that they are putting robots in people and other conspiracy crap. Becky believed the world was ending soon and people trying to reason with her didn't seem to sway her.
She was bragging about getting new boots and her stepbrother asked her what happens if she's in the wild and her boots gets a hole and she said "hopefully she'd figure out how to make new ones off the land". Literally never even went camping before, let alone knew how to hunt, skin an animal and sew it into boots.
Just a clusterfuck, tragic her innocent child starved to death and suffered so much He seemed like an indoorsy type. At least this mixed race genetic refuse is cleansed from the earth though. The paternal grandmother seemed like she was close to Talon. The fat schizo mom lied that she was going to her dad's house that she never mentioned and "they didn't have good internet", I guess that's why no one had heard from them.

https://www.strangeoutdoors.com/mysterious-stories-blog/vance-deaths

https://archive.ph/yn7fU