8 ms·

I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was up th

I used to live in Saguache County as a kid. We left in 2000 but this article does not surprise me. it is hard to adequately get across how desolate it was up there but i'll try. We had 40 acres of land and were considered city slickers because 40 acres was enough for 1-2 cows. We were friends with people with 25k acres. The ground was sand. 10 foot down was sand. You could water plants 3 times a day and they would still run out of water. (My mom fixed this with lots of silca gel for her garden.) We lived on a county road and the postal service would not deliver mail closer that 2 miles away. We never did put up a mailbox and instead just had a PO box in Moffat which was about 8 miles of gravel roads away. Annual rainfall is less than the Sahara dessert and temps would hit -40F in the winter. Some days would see 70F difference between day and night. Walmart was 40 miles away (Alamosa in one direction and Salida in the other.) In parts there are no trees for miles. We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away. Our phone system used an antenna that looked like the old tv arials and was solar with a battery on it. (96/97 era.) We had that for about a year before the phone company decided they needed the system more in alaska and would lay phone line for free rather than charging us $6k to run the lines half a mile. Then they waited a year to come get out system. The battery on it would routinely run out in the middle of a call.

manmal 9y ago
Wow that sounds hard. Have you ever considered founding a utilities company yourself and lay those lines for you and your neighbors? I have no idea how easy or hard that would have been.
- jacobush 9y ago
  He was a kid when he lived there...
- sgt101 9y ago
  You need access to capital to do that, and if you have access to capital you probably aren't in a place that considers 2 cows as wealthy.
  - niij 9y ago
    In this context, I don't believe "city slickers" implies wealth. In a rural community, having large amounts of land is wealth, because it can be used to support more livestock.
  - Ensorceled 9y ago
    They were "city slickers" because they only had two cows (or, more likely, only had enough land for two) where as everybody else had many, many more. City slicker isn't an insult that means "rich" by the way, it means from the city and hence not willing do a hard day's work, dresses too nice and is not trustworthy.
    - birdman3131 9y ago
      For us it was not really an insult. It was poking fun at us but it was not meant in a bad way. Not to say it could not be meant as one though.
      - Ensorceled 9y ago
        I know what you mean, my family calls me a city slicker and that's how they intend it as well. I hope ...
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Utilities are really expensive in a place like that. It is fairly easy to run a utility when you average 100 feet between each customer, and when you can have one hub station that covers a 1-mile radius and serves 5,000 people. It's really hard when the line from one house to the next costs a year's subscription fees, and one hub covers 50 people. This is why fiber is currently only common in the cities right now. Costs haven't come down enough for it to get to suburban locations, much less rural.
jwilk 9y ago
Translation for metric system users: 40 acres ≈ 16 ha 25K acres ≈ 100 km² 10 foot ≈ 3 m mile ≈ 1.6 km −40 °F = −40 °C 70 °F difference ≈ 39 °C difference
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kees99 9y ago
  > −40 °F = −40 °C This one is my favourite metric<->imperial conversion.
TheCondor 9y ago
That's a pretty legit "off the grid" type situation. Is there some backstory to how the family got there? I was in Lake City a year ago, we were doing an off road adventure and it was amazing how isolated the place is. Beautiful too. Big counties space wise, tiny populations, extremely rugged terrain. Then the flip side, I'd guess a fair number of folks there don't really want to be "connected" I mean everyone does if it's free or really cheap but a large number of the residents there aren't going to pay $100 a month for communication.
- birdman3131 9y ago
  Not a ton of interesting backstory but some. We moved up there in 96. My parents drove truck so where we lived did not really matter. My mom was from Arkansas and my dad had a lot of family in Colorado and wanted to be closer. We moved up there sometime in September. We had just came from a month of 100+f days in Arkansas. When it hit freezing the first week up there my parents got a bit of a wake up call. We lived there till 2000 when my mom got pregnant with my youngest brother and she had to go to lower altitudes because her body was creating too many red blood cells. We paid $12k for ~40 acres and a mobile home. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 should show where we lived. If you follow the road back to where it meets T road that is where the closest you could place a mailbox. Feel free to ask any more questions and I'll try to answer them.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Perhaps a dumb question, but why not plant a bunch of trees?
    - TheCondor 9y ago
      It's over 7000' in elevation, they grow a bit more slowly at that elevation. Depending on the mountains near by it may be a "9 months of winter" kind of situation
      - wavefunction 9y ago
paulcole 9y ago
>We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away. Were these wind breaks? My grandmother has a farm in South Dakota and I believe she got help from the government to cover the cost of planting (decades ago).
- protomyth 9y ago
  Yep, most farm land had rather large wind breaks because of various government programs to help deal with soil erosion. It was one of the things that struck me as a kid in North Dakota that you would see all these trees in a line or none at all.
- birdman3131 9y ago
  Not sure but probably. Trees only seemed to be around houses. This was our place. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652
bane 9y ago
I've been out in those parts before. It's very hard to explain the reality of it to people who've never experienced it. My wife came with, she's from South Korea and I told her not to expect her phone or yelp or anything to work there. She didn't believe me and fortunately we had done a little bit of planning ahead of time otherwise we wouldn't have even been able to find a place to eat! But the notion of being so remote that your mobile phone service won't work was hard for her to understand, "we're in America, why wouldn't it work?" I think if people consider it more like a remote part of Central Asia it might form an easier image of what it's like there. Still, it's also a stunningly beautiful part of the U.S.

manmal 9y ago

Wow that sounds hard. Have you ever considered founding a utilities company yourself and lay those lines for you and your neighbors? I have no idea how easy or hard that would have been.

jacobush 9y ago
He was a kid when he lived there...
sgt101 9y ago
You need access to capital to do that, and if you have access to capital you probably aren't in a place that considers 2 cows as wealthy.
- niij 9y ago
  In this context, I don't believe "city slickers" implies wealth. In a rural community, having large amounts of land is wealth, because it can be used to support more livestock.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  They were "city slickers" because they only had two cows (or, more likely, only had enough land for two) where as everybody else had many, many more. City slicker isn't an insult that means "rich" by the way, it means from the city and hence not willing do a hard day's work, dresses too nice and is not trustworthy.
  - birdman3131 9y ago
    For us it was not really an insult. It was poking fun at us but it was not meant in a bad way. Not to say it could not be meant as one though.
    - Ensorceled 9y ago
      I know what you mean, my family calls me a city slicker and that's how they intend it as well. I hope ...
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Utilities are really expensive in a place like that. It is fairly easy to run a utility when you average 100 feet between each customer, and when you can have one hub station that covers a 1-mile radius and serves 5,000 people. It's really hard when the line from one house to the next costs a year's subscription fees, and one hub covers 50 people. This is why fiber is currently only common in the cities right now. Costs haven't come down enough for it to get to suburban locations, much less rural.

jwilk 9y ago

Translation for metric system users: 40 acres ≈ 16 ha 25K acres ≈ 100 km² 10 foot ≈ 3 m mile ≈ 1.6 km −40 °F = −40 °C 70 °F difference ≈ 39 °C difference

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kees99 9y ago
> −40 °F = −40 °C This one is my favourite metric<->imperial conversion.

TheCondor 9y ago

That's a pretty legit "off the grid" type situation. Is there some backstory to how the family got there? I was in Lake City a year ago, we were doing an off road adventure and it was amazing how isolated the place is. Beautiful too. Big counties space wise, tiny populations, extremely rugged terrain. Then the flip side, I'd guess a fair number of folks there don't really want to be "connected" I mean everyone does if it's free or really cheap but a large number of the residents there aren't going to pay $100 a month for communication.

birdman3131 9y ago
Not a ton of interesting backstory but some. We moved up there in 96. My parents drove truck so where we lived did not really matter. My mom was from Arkansas and my dad had a lot of family in Colorado and wanted to be closer. We moved up there sometime in September. We had just came from a month of 100+f days in Arkansas. When it hit freezing the first week up there my parents got a bit of a wake up call. We lived there till 2000 when my mom got pregnant with my youngest brother and she had to go to lower altitudes because her body was creating too many red blood cells. We paid $12k for ~40 acres and a mobile home. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 should show where we lived. If you follow the road back to where it meets T road that is where the closest you could place a mailbox. Feel free to ask any more questions and I'll try to answer them.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Perhaps a dumb question, but why not plant a bunch of trees?
  - TheCondor 9y ago
    It's over 7000' in elevation, they grow a bit more slowly at that elevation. Depending on the mountains near by it may be a "9 months of winter" kind of situation
    - wavefunction 9y ago

paulcole 9y ago

>We had ~30 trees by our house. The next ones were at another house 1/4 mile away and I believe the next were 2 miles away. Were these wind breaks? My grandmother has a farm in South Dakota and I believe she got help from the government to cover the cost of planting (decades ago).

protomyth 9y ago
Yep, most farm land had rather large wind breaks because of various government programs to help deal with soil erosion. It was one of the things that struck me as a kid in North Dakota that you would see all these trees in a line or none at all.
birdman3131 9y ago
Not sure but probably. Trees only seemed to be around houses. This was our place. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652 https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652

bane 9y ago

I've been out in those parts before. It's very hard to explain the reality of it to people who've never experienced it. My wife came with, she's from South Korea and I told her not to expect her phone or yelp or anything to work there. She didn't believe me and fortunately we had done a little bit of planning ahead of time otherwise we wouldn't have even been able to find a place to eat! But the notion of being so remote that your mobile phone service won't work was hard for her to understand, "we're in America, why wouldn't it work?" I think if people consider it more like a remote part of Central Asia it might form an easier image of what it's like there. Still, it's also a stunningly beautiful part of the U.S.