Hacker News Reader

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.

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

> −40 °F = −40 °C

This one is my favourite metric<->imperial conversion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I know what you mean, my family calls me a city slicker and that's how they intend it as well.

I hope ...

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.

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.

He was a kid when he lived there...

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.

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 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.

That makes sense, it's inexpensive. Depending on where the rest of the family lives, it is closer but it's probably 4 hours to the front range, possibly a lot more in the winter. Was this before school age for you? I've heard interesting stories about some of the mountain schools, Saguache might even bus kids to a neighboring county, I don't know. did you live there for fairly long stretches or did you travel with your folks? Any stories about "the locals?" I assume it's mountain ranch country so the neighbors probably have a good dose of "I don't want anyone messing with me" mixed with the neighborly that ranchers tend to be and they'd help each other out.

I live in the Boulder/Denver area. Last summer we stayed in Cimmeron for half a week and then went to Lake City on our way home. I want to say the paved roads were about 100miles and 2 hours between the two, there was also a 50mile unpaved road that took about 10-12 hours and it was amazing. No cell coverage that I can recall, there were a few times where it hits you, if I broke my 4Runner, we are stuck here probably for days and it could be a real situation. If you love the outdoors and you look at it as an adventure, the place could be a fun place to have a cabin. If you live there all the time and want to be "normal" i can't imagine how it would be. Colorado is fascinating, the front range is like many small urban areas in the country, an hour away and it's like a different country in ways.

I was homeschooled so no stories about the school.

There were times where we lived there while my dad drove truck and other times my parents drove as a team and took us kids on the truck. When we were on the truck we usually we spent about 3 weeks on the road and a couple days at home. Managed to see all of the lower 48 except Maine by the time i was 12.

Perhaps a dumb question, but why not plant a bunch of trees?

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

Plus central Colorado is high-alpine desert so there's not a lot of precipitation to naturally encourage rapid tree growth.

>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).

Not sure but probably. Trees only seemed to be around houses. This was our place. https://goo.gl/maps/gN9UVEgNV652

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.