Off Grid with Horses
Venture high into the Colorado Rockies where Russell and Alex introduce their extraordinary lives with horses at 9,300 feet above sea level. Far from mainstream society, their 28-acre homestead borders National Forest and represents a deliberate choice to live closer to nature and further from modern distractions.<br><br>The hosts reveal their personal motivations for embracing this challenging lifestyle. Alex explains how being away from the energetic noise of civilization helps her feel more grounded and at peace, while Russell describes the profound experience of being accepted as part of the natural landscape—where deer graze undisturbed just feet away and sunsets across the mountain valley remain unspoiled by human development.
What does "off-grid" truly mean? Unlike those who simply choose not to connect to available utilities, Russell and Alex live six miles from the nearest power line, relying instead on solar panels and specialized systems for electricity and water. Yet they're not complete hermits either, making occasional hour-long trips to town for supplies and maintaining connection to the outside world through Starlink internet and spotty cell service.
The podcast offers an intimate look at the daily realities of caring for nine horses in this remote setting. From dawn feeding routines to innovative solutions for bear-proofing garbage cans, listeners gain insight into both the practical challenges and unexpected joys of their mountain lifestyle. Wildlife features prominently in their stories, including heart-stopping bear encounters that showcase both the beauty and unpredictability of living among wild creatures.<br><br>Join us for authentic conversations about this extraordinary way of life that 350,000 Americans have embraced, including 30,000 with horses. Whether you're curious about solar power, mountain weather patterns, or what it's really like to share your space with 400-pound bears, Off-Grid with Horses offers an unfiltered window into a life where "the air is thin but the breathing is easy, and life is hard, but the living is good."
Have questions or topic suggestions? Email info@offgridwithhorses.com or visit our YouTube channel to see visual glimpses of our mountain ranch life.
Off Grid with Horses
Why We Traded Utility Bills for Bear Encounters and Mountain Sunsets
Hello and welcome to another edition of Off.
Speaker 1:Grid with Horses. I'm Russell and I'm Alex. Russell and I are going to share two life adventures of our lives with horses on our Colorado mountain ranch.
Speaker 2:We live way off grid, at 9,300 feet above sea level, high in the Colorado Rockies.
Speaker 2:Where the air is thin but the breathing is easy, and life is hard, but the living is good, hello, and in this episode of Off-Grid with Horses, we're going to give you an overview of what it's like to be living off grid with horses, what it's like to be at 9,300 feet, and just what the attraction is. Around 10,000 people have moved off grid in 2024, which is a 10% increase from the previous year, so a total of 350,000 people live off grid, and out of those 350,000 people, about 30,000 have horses. I don't know how many people live at 9,300 feet in the climate that we do, so ours may be a little bit different. So I'm here, russell, and with Alex.
Speaker 1:I'm here with Russell too. I am Alex.
Speaker 2:So, alex, why in the world would you want to live off-grid?
Speaker 1:By and large. The reason I like to be off-grid is I've found over the years I'm a little bit of an energetic person and I've discovered being away from people and engines and machinery at least the abundance of which you find in regular society, I feel much less static, I feel more like I'm at peace and I'm more grounded and I don't feel interrupted by other people's energies. That's why I'd like to be off grid and I'm 100% willing to work as hard as I have to to be able to be off grid and be able to spend my time with the horses and the domestic and wild animals we have out here. What about you, russell?
Speaker 2:Well, for me, I enjoy being a part of nature, and when we are up here, we are literally a part of our environment in a way that's different than what most people experience. It's different than simply going on a hike or even backpacking, where you're camping with nature and with the animals. When we're up here, off-grid because we are way off-grid we're six miles from the nearest utility, we're back into the national forest, so it's very much a part of being with nature. Yesterday, when I was taking care of our horses, we had a herd of deer come down and that herd of deer was about 20 or 30 feet from me. I walked out because I had to walk out of the paddocks to do what I needed to do and there was a mother with a fawn, and the mother looked up at me and just went back to eating. She didn't care that I was there. I was just accepted as somebody that lives here as well as she does, and so I like that.
Speaker 2:I like being a part of nature. I like being away from people as well. When we're up here, there's many times that you can't see anybody. You can't see any signs of human life. We are extremely secluded and I like that I like looking out on our deck at the sun that's setting on the mountains across the valley, and just enjoying that and the peacefulness. There's no roads around us, there's no highway. The only signs of human life that we see are occasional airplanes, and it's just nice being away from civilization. So how did you get up here, alex? Well?
Speaker 1:in about 2019, this wonderful human being and I founded a rescue. Um, it was supposed to. It just started out as a horse rescue, and then it began to become more than that a place that served both people and animals.
Speaker 2:And this wonderful human being is me.
Speaker 1:Yes, Okay, and we founded this 10th Mountain Equine, our 501c3, founded in Colorado December 24th on 2019. And since then we have grown and blossomed and it started in Eagle County. It started in Eagle County and all signs of all kinds of different things ended up taking us up here, and up here exists because of you. Why don't?
Speaker 2:you tell us a little bit about that. Well, my family purchased this land back in 1972, and my grandparents and my parents bought the land and they began looking for land that was more secluded, because, as a family, we would love to camp, and when we would go to a campground, we just got tired of having so many people around us that, even though we were in the mountains and in nature, there were motorcycles and there were cars and there were people running around and there was music and all this stuff. And so, as a family, we decided that we wanted to try and find a place that was ours and was more secluded, and we found this place. My grandparents, my parents, did. They found this place.
Speaker 2:This is an old homestead back from the 1800s, early 1900s. It last operated until we began reoperating it, but last operated in about the 30s, and they found this and they purchased it. We spent vacations up here, weekends up here, vacations up here, weekends up here, and then in 2022, when I semi-retired, then I relocated up here, moved up here, and then Alex came up here about half a month, half a year, six months, nine months, I can't really recall later and brought the horses. So we have how many horses, alex, do we have now?
Speaker 1:Well, we have nine on site at the moment and we are about to be adding a tenth to our herd.
Speaker 2:And describe what a day is like. What's your average day like up here with the horses? What's your average day?
Speaker 1:like up here with the horses. Oh, an average day up here starts around 5 am. I get up and I feed the cats, who are angrily awaiting their food, and then I get water so that I can add water to the grains that I prepared the night before or the day before. And then I head out and I go and put masks on the horses that have sensitive eyes so that their eyes can be protected during the day, and then I go out and I take care of their feeding grains.
Speaker 1:The ponies are the only horses that we have that don't have full-time hay accessible, and so I give them some hay to start out the beginning of their day and then go over and add waters to the horses that we need. Everybody gets some grains in the morning, except the ponies. They just get their hay, and many of the horses don't actually need the grain, but since some of them get it, then all of them have to have some, so nobody feels like a bad horse. And then that gets me to about 7 am, and quite a bit of other things happen throughout the day. But that's the bare beginning. We have dogs that we tend to and water that we have to tend to. We have electricity that we have to manage somehow to get into the property. And actually this brings me to a question that I had for you. I'd love to have you share with everybody, or maybe we can share together, some of the different things that people may mean when they say I'm off-grid.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a good question, because when people say that they're off grid and I sometimes will look at a YouTube video and they'll say that they're off grid and when I look at the YouTube video I see a power line in the background and what they mean by being off grid for them is that they just haven't turned on their electricity. So they are quote unquote off the grid because they just haven't turned on their electricity. So they are quote, unquote off the grid because they just haven't gotten on the grid, they just haven't turned it on. To some people, off-grid is the other extreme, meaning that they are completely off-grid. They don't get groceries, they don't get propane, they do absolutely nothing and they live completely off the grid. Propane they do absolutely nothing and they live completely off the grid.
Speaker 2:We're a little bit in the middle. I'd say we're probably closer to the extreme of being off grid because we don't have a power line to turn onto. There is not an option that way. It's six miles away and extremely expensive to bring it in and it's just not going to happen. But we do use propane for heat, we do use grocery stores and gasoline and so forth. So we go into town. For us, going into town is about an hour drive and there's some stores that are a little closer, about 30 minutes from here. But going into town is about an hour drive and we'll get groceries at the grocery store and stuff like that. So we're not completely hermits, but we are hermits, self-sustaining for the most part.
Speaker 2:We have solar panels that produce electricity for us. We have a generator that we also use as a backup generator, so if the batteries get low, the generator turns on, and living with solar panels and solar electricity when you're truly off grid is a challenge. Sometimes I say that solar energy is not quite ready for prime time because there are issues with it. There are problems now, and then the batteries have problems now and then our well is a deep well 380 feet and we have a very specialized pump that in future episodes I'd like to go through and discuss with you how our pump works, because it's different than what most pumps do, operates off at 12 volts and we pump into a cistern. Then we have another pump which supplies the house.
Speaker 2:So it's off-grid for us means not connected to a utility. It doesn't mean that we're complete hermits and live in caves, but we do not have a public service company that we can call and say hey, our power's out, I'll come. We do have intranet because we have Starlink, so we connect through the satellites for intranet, which is an improvement over the past few years. Before that we didn't have internet. We kind of get cell reception not completely depends where you're standing, which is also an improvement. A few years ago there was zero cell reception up here, so that's improved. They put up new towers around and so forth so we can get some cell reception again, depending upon where you're standing at the time. So that's what off-grid means to me. Doesn't mean that you're a hermit, but it does mean that you are not reliant upon public service.
Speaker 1:Well, there you have it, and, as we all know, there are definitely all kinds of different thoughts that come up when people say different things, and so that kind of lets you know where we are and where we're thinking in relation to being off-grid.
Speaker 2:So we're way up here, say. We're at 9,300 feet, our property has National Forest on two sides and we're in a very small subdivision. We have 28 acres and our 28 acres is way up in the back of the subdivision. You can't really see anybody around us, but there are some people down in the valley. About a half mile away would be our closest neighbor. So, alex, we're, we're way up here. Do you ever have any experiences with any of the wildlife up here?
Speaker 1:oh, that's right, yes, we have lots of experiences with wildlife up here. Oh, that's right. Yes, we have lots of experiences with wildlife up here. I am probably, I probably have more experiences than the average person with wildlife. Also, I've lived all over and have always been kind of on the edges of everything and I've always come to know deer and bear and coyotes.
Speaker 2:So what's your favorite bear story?
Speaker 1:Well, I'd have to say, although we've created a whole bunch more fun bear stories since I've lived up here, one of my all-time favorites is known by our friends as don't boop the bear, so let me share that with you right now. Some years ago I was living out in Eagle Colorado and I was handling managing an 86-acre ranch and we had large irrigation systems diameter across the field and cover a whole bunch of area at fire hose pressure levels, you know cause. That's what it takes to be able to cover a field. And so I had gotten home from doing something, I had a skirt and sandals on and I was out in the field we had. There was the house, and then there was the shelter the small shelter for this one paddock and then the fencing for that paddock and then there was the large shelter for that paddock, and then that paddock had some water troughs and eventually opened up into the big green meadow, which is what I was watering at the time. And so I was out there in my little skirt and my sandals and watching where the irrigation water was coming to. I wanted to make sure it was coming far enough, but not too far that it bothered the horses.
Speaker 1:And so there I was watching it and one of the horses goes running from the big paddock up towards the house and I goes running from the big paddock up towards the house and I watched the horse go and went back to looking at the irrigation water and then another horse went running and that moment I knew there was a bear. I looked a little farther over and I just froze because there was a bear about 30 feet away from me, walking from the woods into the area that was completely trodden down from horses living in it and a nice, nice little big bear. It was a young bear, probably only 150, maybe 200 pounds, and it walked in and the rest of the horses, except for one, ran off over to the shelter closest to the house. And I was very still. I decided I will be a deer and just blend in with my scenery. So I watched the bear go around and the bear went over and it sniffed one of the grain pans of the horses and then it walked over and only one horse hadn't walked, hadn't run away from the shelter and that was one of my very dear horses and she was very sick at the time and she was just standing there inside the shelter, unbothered by the fact that the bear came there, was just standing there inside the shelter, unbothered by the fact that the bear came there, and the bear walked over. And the bear stood up on its back legs and put its paw up right where Santi was on the other side of the wall, and just stood there for a moment and then just walked away. And the bear walked around and he wasn't super tall. So when he walked behind the water trough that I was standing near, I spun around so that I could be facing him instead of having my neck cranked around sideways and likely to fall over.
Speaker 1:And then the bear walked out from the other side of the water trough and he got about six feet away from me and then he realized I was there and it gave him a start oh my gosh, there's something there.
Speaker 1:And he looked at me and then he ran off into the woods and I was like and then his head popped up and then he came back and he walked around me and I didn't move and he walked a little closer around me so it was like maybe like eight feet away from me the whole way around and I kind of watched him with my head and then watched him come around the other side.
Speaker 1:Then he trotted back to the woods again, but he didn't get all the way to the woods, he just paused there. And then I did what any smart American woman would do I put out my hand and the bear paused for a moment and he walked over to me and he came over and he sniffed my hand and at that moment the only thing that I could think was God, alex, don't boop the bear, don't boop the bear, don't boop the bear, cause his nose was right there next to my finger. Anyway, I'm still here. So, as you can tell, I didn't boop the bear and he just turned around from sniffing my finger. He didn't walk around the backside of me this time, he just turned and he walked away into the woods. And that is my favorite story of bears, although, boy, we do sure have a whole collection of them anymore.
Speaker 2:And up here we have a bear. He's a little bit bigger than that. Actually he's a lot bigger than that. He's still a black bear. He's not a grizzly or anything, but he weighs, we estimate, around 400, 450 pounds. He's an adult male, or at least we think he's a male. He's big. Have you had experiences with our big bear here?
Speaker 1:I have. He is a lovely critter. I'm very happy that he seems very timid around people, because just yelling at him gets him to go away. I think the closest I've been to him actually was I came out one day and I'd heard the dogs barking at something a little bit earlier and I was like, oh no, it's probably the bear, and I didn't get up. And so I got up around 5, and I got up and I looked out the window and there the bear was sitting there with our bear proof garbage can, that steel rimmed with all the latches that he had just ripped the steel off of one corner of, and he just was sitting there. And he just was sitting there with the garbage bin in his lap, reaching in with his left front paw and pulling out one piece of garbage at a time and trying it out, tasting it and setting it aside and eating. Then he'd pull out another piece of garbage and try it out.
Speaker 1:And I was nowhere near as calm as I sound like I am now in retelling this story. I was very upset. So I grabbed the closest thing to me, an orange, and I ran outside screaming at him to get away. And I took the orange and I hucked it at him, screaming at him to get away. And I took the orange and I hucked it at him and he was gone before I could even get it thrown, and running up to far enough away that I couldn't reach him anymore. And I kept screaming and he finally wandered off. Because I can holler with the best of them, truth be told, and so that's one of our bear stories.
Speaker 2:And we have some bear stories on video. We don't have Don't Boop the Bear on video. I wish we did, but there was not a camera around at that time, and so we do have, though, some videos of our big black bear here. If you go onto youtube and you punch in off-grid with horses it's not all one word for for the youtube, just off-grid with horses you'll find our youtube channel, and on our youtube channel we have some videos of bears and of cows and of other things that including Including large mule butts.
Speaker 2:And we have a large mule butt. Yes, we have a very large mule that lives here. His name is Bear, used to be called Teddy, but we thought Teddy wasn't the right name for him because he's big, and so we have large mule butt on the video as well. So what else happens up here, alex, that you'd like to tell people? Just as an overview of what it's like to live up in the wilderness, off-grid, 9,300 feet with horses?
Speaker 1:Well, it is dreamy. We've had people come up and say that this is paradise and I can't argue. However, it does require a lot of work, and sure we can take extra energy from the ground because we've got all these wonderful, wonderful stones and crystals in the ground. We have milky quartz and rose quartz and micas and pyrites and a number of other things to mention as well. But it's really hard is an enormous understatement. Living and working up here is so fulfilling, so gratifying, but it's the hardest thing I've ever done, and I've done a lot Hard physically, yes, very, very hard physically. I worked in South America for a while creating a tour route for a tour company and we were literally out 10 hours a day on our horses with machetes, cutting paths into the woods and finding old ruins, and it was wonderful, but it was very hard work and even that doesn't hold a candle to what we do here.
Speaker 2:What's the weather like here?
Speaker 1:Actually, from what I understand, it's very much like the Himalayans. We get down in the winters to sometimes as low as like negative 15, negative 20. Our summers will get into the low 80s. We don't have nearly as much snow as where I moved from. I used to be in Eagle County and honestly I don't even know how much snow we got there like 30 feet, like 100 feet a season, I don't know. But up here it averages about 6 feet and I think it would have killed me if I had come directly to this. But having been through the atrocities I've lived through already in snow depth reference, it really is a wonderful light load compared to what it was.
Speaker 2:One thing I've noticed up here is that although our total accumulation may be four feet, five feet, whatever, but it melts and blows away. So even in the middle of winter, in January, in our front area there'll be snow, but it won't be huge, it won't be terribly deep, and that makes it a lot easier for the horses because they're not always trudging through snow and their paddocks. They pad it down and it melts off, evaporates out. So we get snow, but it's not like you would think, at 9,300 feet, that we would just be buried in it. But that's really not the way it is. We get a couple of big snowstorms a year where it'll snow a foot or two feet, maybe three feet, but then it usually melts away fairly quickly. Alex has a very interesting knack of when she has to go away. If she's going to an event back in Eagle County, where she's from, or some event someplace else, that's when it snows. It's just been very uncanny that this past year when she leaves, that's when we have a blizzard, and the last time that she left for a couple of days we got 15 inches. It was only supposed to snow four inches and we got 15.
Speaker 2:Our area here is weird for weather because in many respects we're in a little banana belt. It'll be snowing and cold and horrible all around us and we'll have next to nothing, or they will have next to nothing and be warm and it will be horrible here and snowing here. So it's an interesting weather climate here. It is not like the Bahamas or anything as far as being warm, but the summers are delightful, the summer's low 80s and it's just gorgeous up here and it's just gorgeous up here.
Speaker 2:One other thing that we do up here we have to be very creative when we have the bear issue. We had the bear breaking into the quote-unquote bear-proof trash can, and so what we did is we took one of our fence chargers, because we have fence chargers for the horses. So we took one of our fence chargers because we have fence chargers for the horses. So we took one of our fence chargers, which produces a very small shock, and we connected it to the trash can and connected it to the steel, so that when the bear touched the steel, he got a slight shock which he didn't appreciate. What did he do then?
Speaker 1:Trashed our stuff.
Speaker 2:He got very, very upset, got slightly angry and he started tearing apart boxes and crates and anything he could see, because he was really, really mad that he got shocked. But it worked, it did. All right, so anything else you'd like to add, just as an overview on what it's like to be up here?
Speaker 1:I'm sure I can find something to make up. You know, honestly, the first thing that I said, that our folks had said, is that it's paradise. Really, honestly, I can't imagine hey, maybe by the beach with all this, but that'd have to be a really really deep ocean. So I think that everything up here is just miraculous. I can't imagine being anywhere else, and I like having people come up here to share the time with us.
Speaker 2:All right. How can people contact you, Alex?
Speaker 1:You can reach out to me at Alex at 10meorg. You can reach me at Alex and that's A-L-E-C-Z at offgridwithhorsescom.
Speaker 2:All right, and you can also reach us in general at info at offgridwithhorses, and if you have any comments on what you would like to see or hear in these episodes, please don't hesitate to send us an email. We really want to hear from you. We live a very unique, different kind of life and we would like to share that with you, and so if there are things that you would like to know how we do certain things, why we do certain things, what it's like up here, things that we may not even think about, that are interesting to you please send us an email. Again, it's info at offgridwithhorsescom, and we will respond and we will try to include your suggestions into our episodes. Also, you can look us up on the YouTube, which I've already mentioned. It's Off Grid With Horses on the YouTube and we post YouTube videos from time to time. We don't do that every week, but when something comes up, we try to post that on the YouTube video so that you can see what's going on. All right, so when's our episode of off grid with horses?
Speaker 1:Number one episode yes, we've made it.