How a Family Has Lived Off-Grid In The Wilderness For 32 Years

Suburban boy transplanted to the Wilderness setting up to Mill this log what kind of bills do you have didn't cost a dime we found water so this is the addition that I'm building on this is our Central green house so what we got here is your standard 45g drum rock copper here I'm going to show you how these guys have lived off grid in the Canadian wilderness for up to 32 years up in the farthest Northerly reaches of British Columbia just below the Yukon border is a family that has been living off grid in the Canadian Bush for decades traveling from Urban Ontario Steven badwar had romanticized ideals of living Carefree in the Wilds eventually after moving onto a piece of property with only a few dilapidated structures succumbing to the elements the reality sit in no running water no electricity no central heating no refrigerator no nearby stores not much of anything really just an empty Shack falling into disrepair with an ouse an old sauna with a sod roof and a crumbling chicken cou but he adapted how did he do this and managed to get married and begin Raising a Son in the process this is a story of tenacity Ingenuity and survival this is David and this is Steven and they're going to tell you some of the things they've done out here living in the Canadian Bush for quite some time this is the original cabin for 14 ft by 177 made by a group of back to the Landers who were here in the 1980s they lived here for about six or seven years and they built this and then we built the addition off the end there tell us about what you've built here over the years well my good friend Dave and I built quite a number of things uh we built a 72t Greenhouse a 50ft greenhouse a 40 foot Workshop a whole bunch of little smaller buildings and uh we've renovated the sauna the one with a sod roof and put a new roof on that and then this cabin behind us these logs here are all standing dead Spruce and then we Mill them with Alaska chainsaw Mill uh one by one so they've got a flat Edge on three sides or a can on three sides so they're stacked up here kind of like Lego with a plywood spline in between so the wind can't flow through and then we put chinking made out of uh sand and sawdust and swagnum moss and Alkali yeah we have an old cabin over there and then the addition is twice the size of the old cabin the gravel floor this one's got a plywood floor you lived in this for seven years yeah this one for seven years that one over there for about 25 one room cabin 25 years this one here is 30 by 18 approximately so double the size of the old one and how long did it take you guys to build these about three years we worked on it slowly bit by bit because I had a day job so come home and I worked at night David worked most days on alone for most of three years so it took us a while but we eventually got it and it's all local like as I said didn't cost a dime apart from the gas to pull all these logs in by sco and then the Milling of course lots of gas and oil for the chainsaw Mill and then few nails and screws to put her up so what about the windows well these are all recycled a friend took them out of another old building and gave them to us and trade for something I don't know what uh but Windows you can often find Misfit Windows broken windows or one where there's a pain missing or something like that so it's possible to find Windows for for cheap well that's good so finding Windows is not necessarily a pain right yeah it's a little cluttered but it's cozy you're a vegetarian when you first got here I was a vegetarian for 7even years and when I first arrived here in the north uh I was hungry I lived in a teepe for my first uh three years so my first winter lots of snow cold working outside cutting firewood with a Bowa didn't have anything didn't even have a truck that winter so we were hungry and uh one day native man comes to my Tepe here eat this big fat juicy moose roast we jumped in like you wouldn't believe and ate the whole thing and I've been hunting and fishing and eating wild meat ever since so I hunt Black Bear Mountain Goat and moose my principal species and then gross and rabbit and squirrel and you were surviving mainly on rice and beans rice and beans and tooting like a like a cowboy cuz you we couldn't eat enough rice and beans to keep warm like you need to eat a lot like double to Triple what you would eat if you were a vegetarian in the city double to Triple the amount of rice and beans so much so I was working at a sawmill and uh my boss said Stephen I don't want you eating rice and beans anymore when you're on the job site cuz just too much flatl cuz we I ate so much rice and beans so that's one of the reasons why I started eating moose meat cuz and a native woman a native Elder told me Stephen you need black bear meat and I didn't like the idea of killing a black bear CU to me they were pristine animal that you respect but if you kill it respectfully and eat it respectfully with prayer and thought and intention that's okay for me so I'm that's my primary species I kill about two black bears every three years so not every year but every second year or every year get a black bear and that's my principal species because there's lots of them and hardly anybody hunts black bear anymore and the meat is fat and the fat is marbl throughout the meat so the native Elder who took me under her Wing the first few years I was here she told me Stephen if you're going to live in a teepe you need black bear meat that's working man's meat that's bushman's meat and so it's still my principal species and most people from Europe when I say I eat black bear they go you can eat black bear was like yes it's a carnivore it's an omnivore to be accurate as we are we are omnivores so a lot of people hesitate when it comes to eating uh carnivores but you can eat a carn or it's not biblical it's not scriptural but biologically we can consume it and we can eat it and it can give us sustenance so I eat black bear that's the only carnivore I eat or or omnivore I eat it's thick and it's rich and it and it's fatty and when you eat it you don't need as much as you as moose meat or Caribou or anything else CU it's so rich and it gives you it gives you energy but moreover it gives you fat which keeps you warm in the winter so if you're living outside and working outside when you eat that meat you're warmer and you're more active and you're more healthy how does the taste compare to say Caribou or moose deeper and richer so not gy closer to I don't eat pork anymore for reasons of my own uh but I would I would say closer to Pork in the respect that pork is also an omn ior pig is an omnivore they can eat anything including a human they will do that um if a farmer dies in a paddock for example um so similar to Pork and that it's dense and and fatty and that the fat is marbled throughout the meat same grain structure as well and a bear has a simple digestive system similar to a pig as well so that's in flavor and texture and in fat content similar to Pig it has depth of flavor flavor depth of flavor you can really taste the depth in there it's not sharp like Caribou or sharp like goat or not flat like moose meat I I consider moose meat to be poor man's meat like I keep kill one moose maybe every 10 years because that's not my favorite meat gives you a lot of sustenance because you get you know 800 lb or 500 600 lb of meat depending on the size of the Moose but to me moose meat is Bland and dry black bear's my favorite so tell us what's going on here Dave okay I'm setting up to Mill this log and get some Rafters out of it using alasam style Mill which will sit across these two with the chain tow going underneath and setting it to cut the lines as I've marked on the end of the log and right now we're needing to get it balanced and straight and to high this okay and then that's right on right there you want to screw her in yeah here's how it fits in to that apparatus so it fits on just like this and it saws on Down the Line [Music] tell me about the facilities okay well that's where we're going right now this is the trail to the ouse or the water closet I it's called in the United Kingdom or the L or the L or the Biffy or the John or the Dunning down under yeah goes on and on so this is a regular Backwoods Canadian out housee made out of old Salvage Lumber and slab wood uh we built it in the bush you can see we got into glacial till or gravel so it was easy digging loose Rock um bu built it maybe 3 ft down a hole about 2 and 1/2 ft by 2 and 1/2 ft and then you I keep these things on and that way you can every 3 or 4 years you can just lift your whole ouse up and move it you just need four people and then on the inside the operative thing is 2 in of Styrofoam SM you can't live in the bush without it um I don't know what people did before we had styrofoam SM but uh my my blessings on Dow Corning or whoever it is who makes it because it's warm soon as you touch it minus 40 fahit or Celsius you touch that 5 seconds later it feels warm so without that it would be an ordeal going into the out housee in the middle of the winter other important thing you need to keep this vital stuff TP toilet paper inside old tobacco can coffee tin so the squirrels and mice don't get it because they will chew it up they'll find it in 48 hours and it's gone so always got to be in there also keeps the rain out too more moisture now you were telling me when you first moved here you were eating like three to four pounds of rice and beans every day yes so and that's to stay warm because calories equal energy correct energy equals body heat body heat however whatever goes in must come out so you must have Unleashed some rather sizable loads yes it is true um yeah if you're living in the bush and eating volumes of rice and beans yeah be prepared that uh you might have to make frequent trips or large trips to the Biffy In the Backwoods so where are we heading we're off to get water all right when you need to get water you got to go find it we found water look at that didn't have to look too hard all right Glacier fed water two glaciers that feed this [Applause] Lake one of the best drinking water on Earth I'm blessed to have two sources of water the lake which is crystal clear and clean and this one which is an underground stream which comes from the mountains stream that s up in the surface couple kilometers couple miles up the hill it goes into the substrata and becomes an underground stream this site here is actually a sacred site to the native people of this land so so I'm going to give a little tobacco offering to give thanks to Creator to God for all the blessings that we have the water the air soil and the fire right now to thank creator for water all the clean pure drinking water that gives us life gives the animals and the plants life Keeps Us hydrated and keeps us healthy and happy you how does the taste differ from the lake it tastes a little more like a little more earthy has more depth of flavor the lake is neutral Glacier fried it's almost like distilled water it's very Bland but neutral so good for coffee and tea this one here a lot of people like this stream here they come from Miles and Miles Away to drink this water one because it has a depth of flavor and a good earthy taste but also because the native people believe some of the elders believe that this water has healing properties and one Elder actually says that it actually curbs your appetite for alcohol so for those people that struggle with alcohol this is a good place to come so Stephen what kind of bills do you have well gas is probably the biggest one gas is we always say gas is our rent because when you live in the bush you live a long way from town so for example yesterday we went to White Horse Yukon to get building supplies and groceries so that's like 175 miles or something like that so that's just to get groceries and to go for dinner anyway so bills gas and then Building Supplies so plywood I can't make plywood I can make 2x4s but I can't make plywood so these things here were what 40 bucks a sheet so I spent $2,000 yesterday in building supp suppes so that answer your question well what about what about internet do you pay for internet of course we do yeah Elon Musk doesn't give that for free so we don't use his system we but uh another system satellite system and it works I don't know what we pay my wife pays the bills but it's like I don't know 50 bucks a month or something like that Canadian so it's worth it so so the bills would be some food gas internet anything else tools tools and equipment you know look at that roof patch Vapor Barrier you know epoxy resin rolled Roofing right behind you here here so yeah I mean those are $114 each Canadian right there seven of them so yeah to build a cabin in the bush sure you can you can Mill like we Mill all our lumber for the rafters and the walls and that takes you you know months and months and months back breaking work so every now and then it's nice to buy something that's ready to go all you got to do is nail it down tell us about uh you got some solar panels here one tiny little one and I have two batteries in here these two are deep cycle batteries connected in parallel so negative negative and positive to positive so gives me a deeper Bank to store the power and then I have a little inverter here turn her on and I turn on that little puppy there and then there's my internet and should have lights do we have lights yeah we have lights uh little LED light takes I don't know 6 Watts or something so not much but mem and then router right here so we get about 100 ft 125 ft coverage so we can be out at the cook shock and have internet and then here's our uh little office got our laptops plugged in and all our devices my castle this is my little covid project here my son and I stayed at home for 2 and 1/2 years and did our due diligence and uh so every Saturday night we had Castle night so this is what I built from basically scrap wood and lumber and little bits of metal and wood and leather and so my son and I would have battles every every Saturday night between his castle and my castle and we just roll dye or dice to figure out the the action uh five or six was a killing shot and if you're in defense then uh uh three four or a five with a killing shot and uh yeah we battled with our animals and our soldiers and our beasts and our mythical beings and I paid a total of about 75 cents for everything here just for the uh the gardens here had to get some actual felt everything else is scrap beer caps and old bits of leg furniture and you know Furniture legs and lots of fun stuff sounds like a fun way to pass time during Co it was was very bonding for father and son that's pretty much it it's pretty simple pretty straightforward um 12vt battery um and these are just general ones you can buy at Canadian Tire or any automotive store you don't necessarily have to go to a solar supplier I've had very good luck with deep cycle batteries these are Marine deep cycle you can get them at a a marine store or automotive store and just get a deep cycle with lots of amperage it's pretty simple don't let them free keep them charged up that's the main thing and then yeah don't let your your your batteries get too low and if they do you got to turn them off and guess what you're you've got candle light you know until the next day and charge up your batteries again so again it's about discipline using the power when you need it so in December here when we only have a few hours of daylight you know we don't get much solar gain so then you have to limit your time with lights or online or whatever or you got to run a generator which is not a First Choice do you have a generator here I do I have a small generator so it might run that for an hour and a day and then you can use a blender or some other tool so you line up all the things you need to do when the power's on charge everything up all your batteries all your headlamps all your portable devices you know got my TW walt drill here that I power up here you know so just got to line everything up and then charge them up at the same time you got to maximize your efficiency it's all about maximizing efficiency and this is your entire power supply and this is the entire power supply yeah that's all it all it is and then I can also just put 12vt lights on and that way I don't need to use the inverter I can just connect them directly wire to wire straight to the battery like the old tail lights and reverse lights out of trucks I just use those and put them in a simple fixture and off you [Music] go normally this goes much more smoothly and he was going to cut it into Rafters however this was not to be KNN o too many nuts in this log and it's just taken way too long he's been here all day hasn't even gotten halfway through the first cut so he's going to hang it up and that's going to be the end of end of it for this day right four tanks of gas 6 hours of cutting and and how many hours of sharpening oh yeah that's included but yeah insane yeah things don't always go how you like them B Plan B it will be and this is my flooring system which I think is the best thing ever it's the best thing on Earth because you you don't need to pay for it you don't need to wash it you don't need to clean it you don't need to polish it you don't need to repair it you need to do nothing you can come in here with your bare feet and walk on it and gives you your own private reflexology session you can come in here with your big winter boots on with snow on them you can walk on the floor the snow falls off and it melts in a couple minutes and it's gone you can walk on here in stocking feet or socked feet and your feet don't get stuff because these are Lake Pebbles they're rounded they're Washed by the glacier and streams and the lake so they're nice and round and there's no sharp edges uh to me it makes total sense um things don't rot on it because because it allows air to breathe so you don't have that's just fluff that's not mold but things don't mold because I've got I don't know probably four inches of this here and all I do if I want to have a spring cleaning is I go down to the lake shore which is just down the hill and just go down there with my truck and get four or six more buckets of uh fresh rock on the spring I bring it in and I throw it down and I rake it out flat and it looks like I have a brand new floor because it's got that polished look to it because it's fresh from outside whereas this stuff gets a little bit dull after you've been walking on it for a couple years this is the perfect low maintenance floor zero not low zero zero maintenance no vacuuming no sweeping no nothing nothing beautiful beautiful and sustainable ecological and free also get the grounding and it's so important that we as humans walk Barefoot on our Earth because then we get the magnetic grounding between us and the Earth and we were designed to be that way we Creator made us such that we can walk around in our bare feet so yeah if you need to have shoes on for a while wear your shoes shoes for while you need to have them on but any opportunity take them off and walk Barefoot on the earth cuz you ground out with the Earth all your negative energy will be carried away your stress and your trauma and your grief and all that yucky stuff goes back into the Earth and is taken away and the positive stuff comes back up into you the re-energize like like why do people love going camping they lie flat on the earth and they recharge their batteries when you lie with your back on the Earth nobody can go to a city park and lie back on the earth and think oh this is awful I don't feel good you go wow this is great I'm lying here on the earth and I'm re-energizing the second thing I want to say that we I forgot to mention about having a earn floor um or a gravel floor is that there's no insulation between this cabin and the Earth so yeah this floor is colder in the winter time than a standard wooden floor because you have this much insulation right right and you're keeping the heat in but there is an inverse relationship that happens so I'm still getting heat from the earth I'm getting more heat than a standard house with this much insulation because you're negating the heat of the earth you're not allowing the heat of the earth to come in because the heat of the earth is plus4 De C so it's just above freezing so um the the Earth is actually giving me 4° of heat it's not warm it's cool if you're walking around in bare feet but you're getting that benefit so here's where it comes into play you leave your cabin for two days and you're gone you come back to this cabin and you walk in it might beus 20° CSUS outside but you walk in here and it's like -4° C so it's still cold it's still frozen but it's only minus four and you walk in it's like did somebody light a fire you come up to the fire and it's cold you're getting plus four coming up from the earth naturally for free there's the benefit tell us about bathing how do you take care of that out here sauna or as known in Europe as a SAA uh so ke living in the bush if you don't have hot and run cold running water is having a sauna um Europeans have known that especially the northern Europeans for many centuries um get it nice stoking hot and you sweat so you're actually cleansing yourself from the inside out cuz you're sweating out all the impurities and toxins your skin is actually your biggest eliminatory organ in your body bigger than your digestive system so if you're sweating toxins out it's the fastest easiest way to get yourself healthy and clean and then after you do the sauna then do you run down pool in the winter time you can roll in the snow but in the summer if you have a pool or a tub of water that's the best thing to do because then you get the hot coal effect which is good for your circulatory system and your heart and all that good stuff yeah because you do have a warm spring on the property right you do have a warm springs we're we're blessed with our own little warm springs but if you don't have one a mountain creek will do or a little lake or a pond or even a a drum with a bunch of water in it many ways to do it all right so cutting some wood to get the sauna started exactly that's the name of the game so how often do you use the sauna then minimum once a week it's a once a week thing back in the old days in North America there was always the Sunday bath um because back I'm talking old days 1920s and stuff what's that before running water and everything um you only have to bucket all your water in from wherever from the well or from the sistern or from the creek so people had to share baths back in those days but this one's a naughty old balsom fur someine fur all right so we're going to have a our weekly bath yes so we're going to get some water from here this is the uh warm spr Springs but any Mountain Creek or Creek in the bush will do uh the idea is to bring in water into your sauna and then heat it up on top of your stove so that you have warm water which you can use to shower and by shower I don't mean shower like showerhead just fcking it over your head with a decanter of some sort I have a little brass one on a wooden handle which I prefer some people just use a yogurt container or a plastic ice cream tub but thing is bring your water in a couple hours before you're Sal it heat it up before it get toasty hot so what we got here is your standard 45 gallon drum and it's got a kit called a SATs soz which you can get in the US probably can get it here in Canada too um and you just cut it out cut a square out and then uh put this little door on and then you've got yourself a a cheap wood stove or wood heater and the good thing about him is you can get a 33 inch piece in there a long piece you know that long so less cutting and then you can Stak them up and it can last eight hours so you can get a nice long burn and it burns like a locomotive listen to it and we only lit this fire like 4 and a half minutes ago and she's already pumping out the BTUs but thermal units the Heat and we've got the water on top create the Steam for the sauna yeah and then I have a system here in this sauna so this one here is for your herb water so people like in these parts we use Balsam uh fur boughs or Cedar if you can get Cedar so this is for the medicine water which gives an aroma to the sauna and AIDS in upper respiratory cleansing and healing if you have colds or things like that sort of throats so this is the medicine pot and these two here are hot water pots so uh I make sure that those ones are full and then uh you use those for your bathing pot so you don't want to use a plastic tub I have a brass one on a wooden stick and then I'll just take it out of there when it's hot not too hot not too cold and pour it over my head and that's my shower it's that simple this sauna was here when I got here 32 years ago so the sauna is over 45 years old um I've only replaced the roof maybe 15 or 20 years ago some friends of mine came here and we did that in a weekend the sod does two things number one it's actually relatively waterproof because if you ever watch dry Earth uh or parched Earth when the rain comes it runs off right because it it's too dry it won't soak in so same thing with a sod roof it if it's too dry it'll roll off off and then even if it's saturated it reaches a saturation point and then the moisture rolls off so either way it's relatively impervious to water the only problem is you'll have moisture inherent in the lower reaches of the soil so you do have to put a membrane on that's somewhat resilient like cedar or something like that here we put on some rubber membrane just a thin rubber membrane so that the the roof itself wouldn't rot the second thing that's about a s roof apart from it being free and locally available is the fact that you do get some uh r value out of it it's very little I think it's only an uh R1 per 6 in I think it's quite low so you don't get as much insulatory value as you do get thermal mass and which is different than insulation insulation stops the heat from leaving thermal Mass holds the heat in because like metal right or brick a fire brick holds the heat because it has mass and the heat is absorbed in the mass of the metal or the brick same thing with saw it'll hold some heat in same thing with a log cabin big thick logs thicker the logs the more thermal Mass you have so that's the principle that played here so when this hot sauna heats up and you get that sod hot which takes two to four hours it throws heat back in So when you're in the sauna in the first two hours of going in there the Heat's coming from the stove if you go in like I do I'll go in 6 hours from now I let all the other young people go in first when it's when it's colder or hot but not super hot I Like It stoken Hot so hot the sap is melting Out of the Woods the knot of the woods and then the heat is coming at you from all sides because it's getting reflected or radiated back at you from the roof in the sidewalks that's how to have a really hot sauna that's the way the fins and the Russians do it they heat it up all day and they go in at the end of the day that's the trick welcome to my chicken CP I was uh the proud owner of nine beautiful hens until last week CU we were downsizing here on the homestead and uh we had them since day olds and they were a project for my son who's homeschooled so he raised them right from day old and we gave them away to a friend CU we're downsizing here on the homestead uh but they were wonderful birds that you could love and hold and stroke and of course they produce beautiful eggs beautiful organic eggs and you have rabbits as well I do have rabbits right out here and the rabbits their primary purpose apart from giving lots of love is manure he knows he's on camera he knows he's on camera this is George and Fred uh of Harry Potter Fame yeah so they are beautiful creatures who are very loving and pure and trusting um and they're always grateful I've raised all sorts of livestock from cattle to horses to pigs to goats to turkeys to Ducks you name it and my favorite of course is rabbits because they are always appreciative of everything you feed and everything you give them they always like love more so than food actually they want love you can bring them a plate of food and they want love before they eat their food so we have them because they are second only to bat guano for the value of the manure and most people don't realize that that's you know better than chicken better than horse better than sheep um and of course it's dry I mean you can pick it up with your big their hands um any time of the year summer and winter you can pick it up it's dry and I mean they're eating a good diet we feed them mostly weeds from the garden we feed them a bit of grain barley and oats and stuff but it's mostly green stuff so whenever I'm feeding them from the garden I feed them kale every day and I feed them Lamb's quarters and chickweed and Water Crest and they even like peppermint and catnip catnip is one of their favorite things things like who would have known and you don't know till you try and we had the school kids out here for a tour the other day and one kid says can I feed them peppermint I went I don't think they'll eat it the boy fed it to the rabbits and they loved it so I didn't even know that and I've been raising rabbits for 15 years and you know they added benefit the rabbits had minty fresh breath they did minty fresh breath that's why we have the rabbits is for the manure for the garden otherwise the garden doesn't grow especially in the north you need manure it's critical in the north north of 60° north latitude you have to have animals if you really want to get an effective um compost the manure can be put on fresh or raw onto the Garden or you can compost it and it really helps to um activate your compost with enzymes and bacteria and make a nice hot compost which is really important to eradicate weed seeds and to get a full compost so that's that's why we have rabbits and we'll have up to 30 in the peak of the summer when when they're breeding and right now we just have our five main breeding stock left and we keep them over Winter and then breed again in the spring this is how rabbits say I love you are they for meat the answer is no therefore for they poo but yes we do eat them because that's a byproduct but it's secondary so if we have 30 bunnies in the summer they producing poo all summer and then in the fall we have to kill them and eat them so what I do is I do what I'm doing now I walk up to the bunny and I love it up and I tell it that I love it and I appreciate it and that I pray for it I pray for its soul and its spirit and then I take out my 22 and I kill it and then I eat it and it provid vies life for me and my family and I'm sad to kill it it hurts me to kill it but that's life in the bush if you want to live you either have to kill a carrot or you have to kill a rabbit and so I grow a garden I eat carrots you're killing the carrot if you eat the root you're killing the carrot and I'm killing the rabbit which is an animal which is a sentient being put on Earth by God to live in existence and so I love the animals up and then do what I do to carry on tell me about home heating cast iron wood stoves or wood heaters is the best way to go in my opinion um wood is accessible almost everywhere on our planet um you can Harvest it yourself and you can store it easily cast iron uh heats up slowly but once it's hot it throws its heat really really well because it conducts heat and radiates it out this one's a blaze K made in Canada this is actually an expensive stove you're looking at $3,000 Canadian for this um it's a high efficiency stove low output in my opinion even though people say it's a high output I call it a low output because it Blow Burns slowly and efficiently but doesn't put out as much heat it's some of the older models built in the 70s and 80s which put out a lot of heat but they also burn up wood four times as fast as this one this one's super efficient so it's got a small Firebox you can only get little 16in pieces in there and we only cut them 12 in long because we don't like to have to fuss with fitting them in there but you just Stoke her up like that and put your newspaper in and make a bundle and stack it up crisscross and pretty soon you get a nice nice fire going now do you have any backup sources of heat or do you just yeah two more wood stoves so backup Woods I I always believe in every building you should have two wood stoves or one heater and one stove like a stove I'll show you a stove right here right now it's out of service because we've got the the burner plates elsewhere but this is a classic wood stove from 1952 it was actually designed as a coal burning stove so you can burn coal or or wood in here or a combination thereof this is my baby I bought it for 125 year $125 Canadian 32 years ago and it's got me through 32 Winters it throws heat but it burns wood like a demon because it's not airtight but you you got to pot on for your dishes you got to pot for rinse water you got a pot for coffee you got a pot for tea and you got a frying pan on there cooking dinner and you got tons of room so to me I mean I've got three of these cook stoves on this Homestead one in each one in our cook Shack one in our main cabin and one in this cabin and it's the way to go I couldn't live without a cook stove it's the number one thing it's the number one thing NE next to my own heart you have your heart that keeps your body warm you have your cooked stove that keeps you warm so between the two of these even though that's five times more efficient than this one if I had to make a choice I'd rather cut more firewood and use this one cuz here you have all your water for bathing cuz you bathe in your cabin in the winter time unless you're lucky enough to have a sauna or a shower house you know youve got your oven we can bake anything in this oven bread you know pastries all kinds of stuff like my wife loves to bake and she's an excellent Baker and then there's your Ash door where the ash comes at got empty that out once a week and then you keep your Ash cuz your Ash is good cuz you may need it for traction for your truck or your vehicle if you get stuck you can also throw it on your garden to melt the snow in the winter time or in the springtime so that you can garden a week or two earlier and then also you can throw it on your compost heat or your garden if you need to lower your pH and make it more alkaline so lots of uses several hundred yards down from Steven's place is Dave's Place so this is a addition that I'm building on here it's uh 16 by 32 ft inside and with the overhangs and it's so bigger than that this will give a lot more space with all the rafters I've hand milled with with the uh chainsaw and yeah it's coming we're looking forward to putting the plywood on the roof here this week tell me about these Rafters oh yeah when you make you know Mill your own Rafters with a chainsaw sometimes you don't have as many 12 in as you want so you have to come be creative and make some 10 and a halfs and add another inch and a half on top of that to get a 12 in so that's what this is then I'll put some reinforcement in that too and it'll be solid put some plywood up against it today we got to put up the remaining Afters not this one the and we're doing this the other one I got over there at my for the extension that's being built here we put the ladder right up putting on the Rafters to the new addition neighbors help neighbors here see how you get along in the bush I'll C how do you want me to back me up okay so David you can let it go now I'll patch it then I'll walk up actually you guys could just pull it like two feet more yeah pull it two feet more the other way and then give me slacks down to me now down to me yeah okay I got it okay coming forward to my ladder okay resting on my ladder going up okay here we come inch by inch and now you guys can give it a little little pull yeah and she comes s up in just okay I'm going to come up one more okay good got it okay great this is the cook [Music] Shack [Music] the stream of the Warm Springs is your dishwasher here lunchtime might mean something good like soup and maybe even cinnamon rolls being made one3 today we have a lunch of salmon and potatoes harvesting the midday feeding for the bunnies so the good thing about bunnies is they eat pretty much anything green so here we have cooch grass or twitch grass or crack grass which is relatively high in protein and they love it they'll eat all kinds of grass weeds Broad Leaf dandelion that's her favorite very healthy or healthful so the good thing about rabbits is that they can turn things that are otherwise weeds or long grass that you want to get away from get away with for fire safety it can become a hazard having all this long grass around you get rid of feed to your rabbit he's a little bit camera shy right Zen go boy not my boy here you go sweetie he's marking his territory something new has come in this bucket is new and so he's marking his scent glands on it he says okay if it's on my territory it's going to be mine so that's why he's more interested in that than uh the grass but if I remove this eat your grass then eat your grass okay Dad I'll eat my grass he got me old grass I wanted fresh young grass this stuff is from June and July there's wild rabbits here too like this Snowshoe [Music] hair keeps checking me [Music] out down the way from the other structures is Dave's cabin this was one of the original structures on the property Y and it was a chicken Coupe and then it got converted into a horse barn and then Dave said about fixing this place up into making it his house tell us a bit about that Dave well I I came down and visited stepen and Alysa many times we're good friends and uh I built an ouse I built uh the main structure for Greenhouse um I like building it's a hobby for me and so after doing that they said you know we'd like to have this building down here the storage last year's restoring canoes and stuff turned into a residence for woofers uh woofer being a world wide organization of organic farmers uh so people come up here and helped Stephen and they'd have a place to stay and some food and uh gave help on the homestead so I said sure H so I uh all that was there was logs like you see here uh and uh an opening for a window with chicken wire on it and um so then I said about uh framing it and uh on the outside and cutting bigger openings and putting all the windows in here and a stove and set it up for somebody to live here and then afterwards after I'd set it up they said it's kind of an afterthought well why don't you come down here why don't you live here and I thought well that's a good idea I like it down here so I uh I did a few more things for myself and uh came down and lived down here and been living here for uh 15 17 years somewhere about what's this Trail H this is Trot ski Trail if you got the trots this is the trail you take The View there it's Mount MTO in the background or the clinet name is Keon and that mountain you can see it's actually covered right now with a cloud cover and that cloud cover has always been an indicator to the First Nation people of weather and that means rain and Stormy Weather when the when the mountain has a cloud over it and then name Keon is the name for hemlock because there are hemlock trees growing there and there aren't Hemlock anywhere else except getting to the coast it's a coastal tree so quite unusual to have a Hemlock growing there and that's leaves one speculating about the history of the mountain this is the out housee and I call it poo with a view and that's where you would be seated looking out at your view elephant seals The Challenge and this is Eli that made those I helped them with the base but that's Eli's work there this is a photograph of Dave and Eli working together on a sculpture this is a sculpture that Eli created and tell us about that Eli me and um de work on it and um we've called C these um elephant seals out of rock and we um use them still going to um GLW these rocks and this um stuff on but except we didn't grew this stuff but we we made it to look like waves I think and um here says challenging old B and here it say Eli bad or Uncle David April to 20201 and um and I think the young guy challenging the old guy Elin SE are the largest felds in the world I think and you car carved this yourself me and D okay and and what is the stone what kind of stone soap stone I think soap stone that's a really great carving the trunk that's why they're called elephant seals cuz they they have kind of a trunk and it can actually get quite long on this is Eli's latest sculpture tell us about that one this guy is um gold panon and um and this is his hat and we have a guy with a pickaxe here picking up the wall and we got a waterfall here and um you got to keep taking more and more out of the walk out and it'll get smaller and smaller until we finished it he's going to be facing this way and he'll be panning right in by the water pool here and the this guy was as Eli said he's got a pickaxe and he's picking at the wall Dave here is a soulman he cooked us some some soul fish for dinner tonight how do you do laundry well dirty old socks galvanized Wash Tub washboard soap all you got to do is find yourself a little Creek preferably a nice warm one like this [Applause] one throw your socks right underwear in [Applause] there get your soap going rub them together the idea with a washboard is it provides a little bit of friction and cleans it up just rubber up and down get the lather going good and hard and you can work away for a few minutes on that and this is how you do all your clothes right no it's how I do some of them used to used to do a lot of clothes what do you do with the other clothes take them to the [Applause] laundromat like most other people it's cheaper and easier and faster but this is hand to you if you're not going to town for a couple weeks and you can still do your laundry anyways I squeeze out a littleit the water and over to the ringer don't drop your socks just got to tighten your ringer down a bit and then put your socks through don't get your fingers caught in your ringer it hurts and then you tighten it again for the second pass you get more water coming out tighten it a third time put them through there you go socks are ready to hang up on the line and dry in the wind in the sun my wife Alysa is an amazing bushwoman she tends to all the gardens and two green houses she can split wood she splits all the wood around here she can bake anything right from scratch uh in our wood cook stove all our meals are homemade right from first principles from The Gardens and the green houses she harvests berries cans freezes preserves and and uh yeah she can shoot a rifle straight and she can skin a goat and she homeschools her son in a canvas waled Eli is homeschooling right now he's got the headphones on he's talking to one of his teachers oh can oh yeah from the fileld oh yeah I've been into the fil yes I will be um learning history from from the show after after we um do some home home schooling from you today at some be yeah what is this structure here Steven the workshop most important part of every Homestead or Farm or Ranch you need your Workshop to be able to fix stuff it's an old building that I pulled off another site and brought them out here log by log numbered all the logs and then rebuilt it here this is a photograph of a grizzly bear chopping on that moose antler this is right beside my cabin and I took the pictures from my roof and those are grizzly bears those are Grizzlies yeah and they do come through the property on occasion oh yeah once you've tasted the Wilderness you'll never more go back out here man is not a part from nature man is a part of nature once one realizes this that person also accepts the risk that humans can become part of the food chain one also comes to realize that every day is a gift out here life is rugged raw and real but there are rewards to living like this that are not easily measured breathing pure air and drinking water Straight From The Fountains of the Earth for those who choose this lifestyle there are benefits to the mind and soul nature weeds out the weak or half-hearted but For Those who commit there are benefits that go far beyond saving money what road will you choose in life when Steven came here 32 years ago he idealized and quite possibly romanticized the idea of living in the bush but it wasn't long before reality struck and he adapted more out of necessity than out of desire he went from being a vegetarian wielding a bow saw to a carnivore wielding a chainsaw Bush living is hard and many of you out there may romanticize the idea of living this way as well but it's always a lot of work there's always a chore to be done or a task to be completed while it's not quite raw survival you do have a house it's not for everybody I hope you enjoyed this video and got some insight into living in the wilderness up here in the Canadian Bush not far from the Yukon border don't forget to give me a like on the video share and subscribe until next time this is Rock uper I'll see [Applause] you