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Want to live a truly “remote” lifestyle? By “remote,” we don’t mean working wherever there’s Wi-Fi — we mean living off the grid. 

With the pandemic far from over, there’s no better time to isolate yourself. But a self-reliant lifestyle isn’t possible everywhere in America. 

To help you find your remote slice of heaven, LawnStarter ranked 2022’s Best States to Live Off the Grid.

We compared all 50 states across 21 key factors — from off-grid legality and average per-acre cost of farmland to climate and crime rate.

See the five best (and five worst) states for remote living below, followed by highlights and lowlights from our analysis.

 

Highlights and Lowlights:

• Great Plains, Great for Getting Away: Flyover states, it turns out, are indeed an ideal place to land and live off the grid. Nine of our top 10 are fully or partly in the Great Plains region of the U.S. Texas claims the No. 1 spot, while Missouri finishes in 10th place.
  
  All of these states ranked in the top 20 of the Feasibility and Infrastructure categories — except for Missouri, which slips to No. 21 in the latter. 
  
  Self-sufficiency is critical to an off-grid lifestyle, and our ranking of the Best States to Start a Farm or Ranch shows there’s no better place to grow your own crops than in the Great Plains.

• Alaska, the ‘Silence Is Golden’ State: Not into small talk? America’s northernmost state will happily indulge your anti-social tendencies.
  
  Alaska might not be the most off-grid lifestyle-friendly state at No. 42 overall, but it’s the least densely populated and the least connected by phone. Even Henry David Thoreau would have felt lonely here.
  
  You’d have to be very intentional about running into another human in The Last Frontier — that’s what makes Alaska such a magnet for ex-convicts.

• Claustrophobia Coast: Bright lights plus big cities equals a very small chance of truly unplugging. 
  
  East Coast states — particularly in New England and the Mid-Atlantic — make up half of our bottom 10, owing to their collectively poor performance in Feasibility and Safety. They include Massachusetts at No. 44, New Hampshire at No. 45, New York at No. 47, and Pennsylvania at No. 48. New Jersey finishes dead last.
  
  This should come as no surprise, considering these states are also among the 10 most densely populated states. That means close encounters with the human kind are more likely — not ideal for those seeking isolation.

The full ranking and analysis can be found here: https://www.lawnstarter.com/blog/studies/best-and-worst-states-for-living-off-the-grid/ 

• 2021’s Best States to Start a Farm or Ranch
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• 2021’s Best Cities for Outdoor Jobs
• 2021’s Most Sustainable Cities
• 2021’s States That Lost the Most Tree Cover
• 2021’s Best Cities for Hiking
• 2021’s Best Cities for Living Without a Car

 

By MARCIA DUNN
AP Aerospace Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) _ Attention asteroid aficionados: NASA is set to launch a series of spacecraft to visit and even bash some of the solar system’s most enticing space rocks.

The robotic trailblazer named Lucy is up first, blasting off this weekend on a 12-year cruise to swarms of asteroids out near Jupiter _ unexplored time capsules from the dawn of the solar system. And yes, there will be diamonds in the sky with Lucy, on one of its science instruments, as well as lyrics from other Beatles’ songs.

NASA is targeting the predawn hours of Saturday for liftoff.

Barely a month later, an impactor spacecraft named Dart will give chase to a double-asteroid closer to home. The mission will end with Dart ramming the main asteroid’s moonlet to change its orbit, a test that could one day save Earth from an incoming rock.

Next summer, a spacecraft will launch to a rare metal world _ an nickel and iron asteroid that might be the exposed core of a once-upon-a-time planet. A pair of smaller companion craft _ the size of suitcases _ will peel away to another set of double asteroids.

And in 2023, a space capsule will parachute into the Utah desert with NASA’s first samples of an asteroid, collected last year by the excavating robot Osiris-Rex. The samples are from Bennu, a rubble and boulder-strewn rock that could endanger Earth a couple centuries from now.

“Each one of those asteroids we’re visiting tells our story … the story of us, the story of the solar system,” said NASA’s chief of science missions, Thomas Zurbuchen.

There’s nothing better for understanding how our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, said Lucy’s principal scientist, Hal Levison of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “They’re the fossils of planet formation.”

China and Russia are teaming up for an asteroid mission later this decade. The United Arab Emirates is also planning an asteroid stop in the coming years.

Advances in tech and design are behind this flurry of asteroid missions, as well as the growing interest in asteroids and the danger they pose to Earth. All it takes is looking at the moon and the impact craters created by asteroids and meteorites to realize the threat, Zurbuchen said.

The asteroid-smacking Dart spacecraft _ set to launch Nov. 24 _ promises to be a dramatic exercise in planetary defense. If all goes well, the high-speed smashup will occur next fall just 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) away, within full view of ground telescopes.

The much longer $981 million Lucy mission _ the first to Jupiter’s so-called Trojan entourage _ is targeting an unprecedented eight asteroids.

Lucy aims to sweep past seven of the countless Trojan asteroids that precede and trail Jupiter in the giant gas planet’s path around the sun. Thousands of these dark reddish or gray rocks have been detected, with many thousands more likely lurking in the two clusters. Trapped in place by the gravitational forces of Jupiter and the sun, the Trojans are believed to be the cosmic leftovers from when the outer planets were forming.

“That’s what makes the Trojans special. If these ideas of ours are right, they formed throughout the outer solar system and are now at one location where we can go and study them,” Levison said.

Before encountering the Trojans, Lucy will zip past a smaller, more ordinary object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists consider this 2025 flyby a dress rehearsal.

Three flybys of Earth will be needed as gravity slingshots in order for Lucy to reach both of Jupiter’s Trojan swarms by the time the mission is set to end in 2033.

The spacecraft will be so far from the sun _ as much as 530 million miles (850 million kilometers) distant _ that massive solar panels are needed to provide enough power. Each of Lucy’s twin circular wings stretches 24 feet (7 meters) across, dwarfing the spacecraft tucked in the middle like the body of a moth.

Lucy intends to pass within 600 miles (965 kilometers) of each targeted asteroid.

“Every one of those flybys needs to be near-perfection,” Zurbuchen said.

The seven Trojans range in size from a 40-mile (64-kilometer) asteroid and its half-mile (1-kilometer) moonlet to a hefty specimen exceeding 62 miles (100 kilometers). That’s the beauty of studying these rocks named after heroes of Greek mythology’s Trojan War and, more recently, modern Olympic athletes. Any differences among them will have occurred during their formation, Levison said, offering clues about their origins.

Unlike so many NASA missions, including the upcoming Dart, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, Lucy is not an acronym. The spacecraft is named after the fossilized remains of an early human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974; the 3.2 million-year-old female got her name from the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

“The Lucy fossil really transformed our understanding of human evolution, and that’s what we want to do is transform our understanding of solar system evolution by looking at all these different objects,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Cathy Olkin, the deputy principal scientist who proposed the spacecraft’s name.

One of its science instruments actually has a disc of lab-grown diamond totaling 6.7 carats.

And there’s another connection to the Fab Four, a plaque attached to the spacecraft includes lines from songs they wrote, along with quotes from other luminaries. From a John Lennon single: We all shine on . . . like the moon and the stars and the sun.

Tyler Swarr, aquatic biologist for CPW, holds up a brown trout from Antero Reservoir on Wednesday, Oct. 6 when officials conducted the brown trout spawn there in South Park (photo by Jason Clay/CPW)

FAIRPLAY, Colo. – Each fall, brown trout spawn in the mountain creeks and rivers across Colorado. It is also when aquatic biologists, hatchery staff, wildlife officers and volunteers for Colorado Parks and Wildlife come together to conduct its annual brown trout spawning operation at North Delaney Butte Lake and Antero Reservoir.

A quota is set to collect the number of eggs necessary to meet the needs for hatchery production, which CPW uses to augment natural reproduction across Colorado’s creeks, rivers and reservoirs.

This year, that quota was 1.1 million brown trout eggs. It took just three working days at those two brood stock bodies of water to meet the quota of fertilized eggs that get sent to CPW’s Mt. Shavano Hatchery in Salida and its Poudre Rearing Hatchery in Larimer County.

The hatcheries will rear the fish to a fingerling size, around three inches, before being stocked out across Colorado in 2022. Those brown trout fingerlings will get stocked back into both Antero Reservoir and North Delaney Butte Lake to ensure a strong brood stock population, but also across many other reservoirs and rivers.

“Some of them will come back and be stocked into Antero and some will go to North Delaney as well, so we can come back in three or four years and still will have fish,” said Tyler Swarr, aquatic biologist leading the brown trout spawning operation at Antero Reservoir. “The rest of them will get stocked out across the state.” 

CPW stocks more than 700,000 brown trout annually to provide exceptional fishing opportunities.

Crews at Antero Reservoir were able to collect and fertilize 227,026 brown trout eggs from 117 females during its lone spawning day on Wednesday, Oct. 6.

At North Delaney Butte Lake in North Park, CPW’s team needed just three days (Oct. 5-7) to gather 888,574 eggs to surpass the quota of 1.1 million fertilized brown trout eggs for the year.

“2021 was another good brown trout spawn year at North Delaney,” said Kyle Battige, aquatic biologist leading the brown trout spawning operation there. “We saw many year classes present, handled over 1,500 brown trout in three days and I’m happy overall with the current condition of the brood lake” 

Brown trout spawn in the wild occurs over the months of October and November. It is temperature dependent.

“River fish spawn a little bit later since it is colder,” Swarr said. “Since reservoirs absorb a lot more solar radiation, they are warmer, so they’ll actually spawn earlier here than they will in rivers.”

In the reservoirs, the silt from the wave action can cover the eggs and prevent them from getting the fresh oxygen they need to grow and hatch. In a river setting, brown trout will lay eggs in the gravel on the river bottom. Those eggs typically get laid in places of upwelling where there is a crest of a riffle and you have a plunge that causes the water to travel through the gravel, slowly turning the eggs and delivering oxygen to them.

“Our spawning operation helps to sustain some of our brown trout fisheries in the state and provides a little bit more fishing diversity for anglers,” Swarr said.

Brown trout are a hard-fighting fish and have beautiful coloration that matches the autumn season. Brown trout are golden brown with vibrant black, red and orange spots.

“The cool thing about them in the state of Colorado is they are resistant to whirling disease since they evolved with that in Europe,” Swarr said. “So, they’ve become kind of the bread and butter of our wild trout fisheries, at least in our northeast region, because really most of the brown trout in the state of Colorado are naturally reproducing wild populations and we don’t have to stock them to the numbers we do with rainbows. Rainbow trout are still impacted heavily by whirling disease.”

You can learn more about whirling disease by visiting our website.