➡ Saskatchewan and British Columbia both offer unique advantages for outdoor activities and living. Saskatchewan is great for hunting and has abundant aquifers, but its water needs treatment and it lacks diverse terrain. British Columbia has plentiful fisheries and forests, but land is expensive and natural disasters are common. The ideal spot in Saskatchewan is the boreal transition zone, offering both forest and grassland resources, but it’s far from urban centers.

➡ The bug situation in Saskatchewan can be quite severe, especially during certain times of the year, but it has improved due to a 15-year drought. Despite common belief, Saskatchewan’s climate isn’t always extremely cold; it’s getting drier and hotter, and the growing season is extending. The most survivable place in the northern hemisphere, according to the author, is a small patch of land in Canada where the boreal forest, grasslands, and Rocky Mountains meet, offering diverse resources and good hunting. However, the author warns against buying all the farmland in this area, as it’s important to maintain balance.

The flatlands versus the mountains and coastal regions. What’s the most ideal place to lay anchor to build your post-collapse homestead? Let’s get to it. Today’s video is going to be a response to my friend Dean over at the Arcopia YouTube channel. Dean recently went on a trip to BC, and for anybody from Saskatchewan, that is always an exhilarating experience. The multi-dimensional topography and biodiversity of British Columbia is starkly contrasted with the relatively flat boring landscape of the prairies. His video was entitled Moving to BC. My trip across Canada put things in perspective for this prairie homesteader, and he outlines why he thinks the prairie provinces are a better place to lay anchor for a homestead than British Columbia.

And he makes some very compelling arguments, ones that I agree with. In fact, he’s made me feel a lot better about my decision to lay anchor here. However, there’s certain things that I’m not entirely in agreement with. Now, for perspective, I’ve been all around British Columbia. From the Rocky Mountains to the interior to the west coast, I’ve been everywhere, and it’s a wonderful place. It really truly is majestic. But there’s a lot of drawbacks that aren’t apparent at first. Now, stay tuned towards the end of this video, because I’m going to give you guys a tip, and I’m very reluctant to do this, because there is one Goldilocks zone in Canada that I think is the best all-around real estate, and there ain’t much of it, and it’s in a place where most people have no idea.

And I’m going to tell you where that is towards the end of this video, so you’re going to want to stick around. Now, one of the biggest selling points that Dean made for the prairies in his video is the lack of government regulation. Now, this is something to really keep in mind when you move to Saskatchewan. There are just large swaths of land, and there’s not a lot of people. So you don’t have the government breathing down your neck at every turn. It’s very laissez-faire. Don’t get me wrong. There’s limits on what you can and can’t do.

But the fact that the land is so cheap out here, for perspective, for one acre of land, on average in Saskatchewan, it’s around $1,500. Compare that to BC, where it’s about $6,500. If you go out to Ontario, it’s approaching $13,000 per acre. Just because the land is cheap doesn’t mean it doesn’t have any value. Now, when you go to British Columbia, because access is so limited, the places that you can actually do stuff are going to be quite limited. Now, in BC, you can buy one acre of land, probably is going to be butting up against a mountain or vast swaths of crown land that extend farther than the eye can see, but there’s not going to be any accessibility there.

The government is going to heavily regulate the space that you occupy. But in Saskatchewan, we have something called grid road. So every section of land is basically partitioned in around a grid road. So there’s basically no limits in terms of accessibility. Now, why that government regulation piece is so important is because if you’re independent-minded like a prepper, you probably want to be left alone. If you want to start digging on your land, or you want to start terraforming, if you want to be doing stuff with the waterworks, a lot of that stuff you’re going to have to contend with in British Columbia.

And because people are so tightly packed in the flat land that is available, that typically means that there has to be a lot of laws and bylaws to regulate all that activity. And understandably, so you have a lot of people in a very condensed small amount of space. So logistics is another issue that you have to contend with. Curtis Stone has an amazing homestead up there on the mountain, but he’s going to have much higher building costs. Okay. Not only for the land itself, but also just moving dirt, getting contractors to come out there.

It’s going to be a lot more expensive because you’re typically going to be in places that are less accessible. Now, another great point that Dean made was with respect to soil. We have a lot of it here. In fact, on my property, the topsoil goes down to two feet in some places, sandy loam topsoil. It’s just black as black can be. Now, if you go to BC, it’s going to be a lot of rock. There’s going to be a lot of sand. There’s going to be some soil and indeed BC has the most lush biodiversity that you’ll probably ever see, not only in Canada, but even in North America in certain respects.

The biodiversity of British Columbia makes Saskatchewan appear monocultural by comparison. If you go into the prairies, maybe you’re going to get some Aspen, you’re going to get some cottonwood, you’re going to have some elm, and a lot of that is probably going to have been planted by a person. It’s mostly grasslands. You go to British Columbia, there is just so many different types of trees. Blackberries grow wild and big, you know, blackberries that you would get in a grocery store. Here, maybe you have some Saskatoon berries. If you’re one of these rewilding, foraging enthusiasts, you could probably go down to the river in Saskatoon and pick out 50 different types of plants.

But that same person would go to British Columbia and pick out a thousand types of plants. Another thing to keep in mind is that with having access to the ocean, you have access to saltwater and therefore you have access to salt. Now, in certain parts of Saskatchewan, there is saltwater that you could ostensibly convert into salt, but it’s not going to be as abundant. And of course, salt is something that is vital to life, which is why at one point it was used as a currency. Now, one other advantage that Dean perhaps has overlooked is rivers.

Rivers are nature’s roadways. Saskatchewan has two major river systems versus British Columbia’s six major river systems and hundreds of smaller glacier fed river systems and creeks that can be leveraged for not only freshwater source, harness energy from that with some sort of turbine system. You can also use it to transport goods. But the land that’s available for the average person at an achievable price point is incredibly limited. If you’re wanting to get a 160 acre swath of that fertile lush land in British Columbia that butts up against the endless mountain range, you’re talking in the millions, possibly tens of millions of dollars.

Whereas out here in Saskatchewan, you can pick up a quarter section of land in the transition zone for maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. There are of course certain drawbacks in the sense that the water table is potentially somewhat contaminated due to all the chemicals that big agriculture is putting into the soils. All of that stuff does make its way into the ecosystem at some point. Now, there are a few critical comments on Dean’s video. One of them was that, Dean, you’re wrong. There’s all kinds of farmland in BC. You just didn’t see any on your trip.

And while there might be a little bit of truth there, it’s also mostly false. Dean is actually right. Saskatchewan has 41% of all of the arable land in Canada. BC is a blip on the radar, barely less than 1%. So as you can see in this graph, five provinces, mostly Saskatchewan and Alberta, comprise like 99% of the arable land. BC is in the other category. Included within that category, you have all of the maritime provinces, the Northwest Territories. Now, 1% of the massive landmass that is Canada is still a lot. And it probably seems like a lot when you’re out there in BC, but it is nothing compared to the virtually endless swaths of flat arable land here in Saskatchewan.

Saskatchewan is the breadbasket of Canada. So from Dean’s perspective, you can understand why he would be under the assumption that BC has no good farmland. And for the most part, he’s right. There’s not a lot of land left for pasture. Sure, you can order feed, but it’s going to come at a higher price. You’re going to have much higher fuel costs because to get all that fuel into the interior regions, it costs a lot of money to move stuff there. In addition to the higher cost of agricultural inputs in British Columbia, if there ever was a disruption in the supply chain, you’re not going to be able to get that grain delivered.

If there’s only one highway going in and out of a place and that highway is washed out like what happened a couple years ago in British Columbia, you’re not going to be able to get the feed for your cattle. Dean makes an excellent point about livestock thriving out here for that simple reason that there’s just endless amounts of stuff for them to eat. You could hunt in British Columbia, but honestly, hunting is even better out here too. Hunting in the transition zone where you have bluffs, where you have Aspen stands, where you have, I mean, that’s the best hunting in the world, which is why a lot of the hunting up here is world-class.

There’s probably no better place on earth to hunt big game or waterfowl than Saskatchewan. The only thing that British Columbia arguably has on Saskatchewan when it comes to protein is going to be fisheries. They have a virtually endless supply of salmon, lobster. Of course, you have saltwater fishing, you have your inland fishing, you have your glacier-fed lakes. The water out there is just immaculate. In most places, you can still drink it right out of the river. Here in Saskatchewan, it’s swampy, it’s marshy. There’s only a couple big river systems that run through the province, and they keep the water table well-fed, but you’re going to have to treat the water, and you’re likely going to have to dig a well.

Now, thankfully, we have endless aquifers here in Saskatchewan, so you can basically drill down anywhere, and you’re going to be able to find a well. If I was to lay anchor in Saskatchewan, I would probably want to do it somewhere in what’s called the transition zone. If you go into southern Saskatchewan, it’s just flat. There’s endless prairie. There’s no very terrain. There’s no elevational changes. There’s an old saying in Saskatchewan, you can watch your dog run away for weeks. As you move northward, you start to get more aspen and popular, and so this is what they call the aspen parkland biome, where there’s little patches of forest that you could ostensibly use for firewood, even though it’s not the best firewood.

Where you ideally want to be is right where the boreal forest meets the grassland, because then you kind of have the best of both worlds. Where BC accelerates is with the abundant forest and lumber. I mean, you can build stuff if you live in British Columbia. You can go out back, get a lumber mill, and you can use that wood to build a house. You can’t really do that here in Saskatchewan unless you’re closer to the boreal forest, but you’re not going to get those nice hardwoods, and I mean, that is invaluable in itself.

The boreal transition zone, you’re going to have access to a lot of firewood. You might even have access to wood that you can use for construction. That would be the sweet spot in Saskatchewan. Now, the only problem with that is that you’re likely going to be away from most urban centers. The closest one you’re going to be around is the Prince Albert region, which is a smaller city. It’s not renowned for its hospitality. In terms of nature in Saskatchewan, it doesn’t get any better than the Prince Albert region. Farms in and around Prince Albert do have the best of both worlds.

As you move towards the boreal transition zone region, you’re going to shorten your growing season. You’re going to be moving from a plant hardiness zone 3 to a plant hardiness zone 2, which is not going to accommodate a lot of fruit trees that you would be able to accommodate in zone 3. So if you can straddle that line where you have your forestry, your fishing, your access to firewood, and then on the other side, you have your grasslands, you have your feed, you have your rich soils. That’s the sweet spot, man.

But there’s an even better spot that I’m going to talk about in just a moment. In terms of the climactic zones, British Columbia is incredibly diverse. So you really can’t cast a broad stroke when talking about it because you have temperate rainforest, you have boreal forest, which is cold as balls, alpine tundra, semi-arid desert in the southern part of the region. And those snakes very much resembles some of the regions in the south. So it’s a very diverse set of biomes. But generally speaking, all of those places are going to be limited in terms of the amount of accessible land that is cost effective.

If you’re in the decamillionaire and above class, in fact, I think you almost need to be in the 100 million net worth and above class to really lock in a sizable chunk of pristine land in British Columbia. Then yeah, I would probably want to go there. However, as preppers, we got to consider population density and resource availability. If you find yourself in a place like that where there’s limited accessibility, that means people only have so many places that they can possibly go to acquire resources, and they’re likely going to stay on the beaten path.

You’re going to have to deal with the human threats in an SHTF situation. Now I know Dean doesn’t consider himself a prepper, even though everything he pretty much does is geared towards the end of being completely off grid and self reliant. But when it comes to security, that’s potentially a problem. Now on the topic of security in British Columbia, if you’re a guy like Curtis Stone, and you put yourself up on a mountain, you have the high ground, there’s only one way in and one way out. Sure, a guy could scale a mountain, but let’s face it, criminals are lazy.

There’s going to be choke points. You don’t have that in the prairies. Okay, you can be hit from every which way. By and large, you can drive anywhere in Saskatchewan, you don’t even need roads. In terms of building choke points and having a defensible position. BC is going to be advantageous. However, you have to contend with forest fires. And if somebody wanted to smoke your ass out, they easily could. We have grass fires here in Saskatchewan, which are much easier to mitigate. You basically build a gravel moat around your property. And for the most part, that’s going to stop a grass fire.

If you’re not prepared, they can be hazardous, but not nearly as hazardous as forest fires. And BC has a lot of that. Just natural disasters in general. I mean, you have forest fires, you have floods, you have earthquakes, potentially, you have landslides, you have avalanches, especially through those very limited corridors throughout the Rocky Mountains. All it takes is one avalanche and those things are shut down for days, possibly weeks on end. In terms of topography, I would say ideally you want to go for a land that has a bit more hills on it, because that’s going to just afford you more options.

Not only from a defensibility point of view, a gray man subterfuge point of view, but just in terms of having that more varied terrain to play with. If you wanted to build yourself a pond, or you wanted to channel water into a certain direction of the property, it’s just going to afford more opportunities like that. You don’t want a bald swath of land. A lot of people think, well, I’m just going to get a bald patch of land and I’m going to plant trees. Well, unless you have a lot of money, it’s going to take those trees a long time to grow.

When Curtis Stone was down, I was telling him that it costs about 500 bucks to get a tree that is seven to 10 years old here, okay, to get that tree planted. It costs the same amount to cut one down in BC. In BC, they’re trying to cut them down here or trying to plant them. Two different worlds entirely. If you do get a plot of land here in Saskatchewan, understand that if you do decide to plant trees, you’re not planting those trees, especially if you’re planting them from seedlings, you’re not planting those trees for you.

You’re planting those trees for the future generations. Now, after 10 years, they’re going to be sizable, but they’re not going to be a forest. If you’re trying to build a legit forest on the prairies, it’s going to take a while. Now, if you have a lot of money, you can go to a tree farm and you can get seven to 10 year old trees and that’s going to give you a little bit of a head start, but it’s still going to take you probably 10 years. Another benefit that Dean only barely touched on in his video is sun availability, but not only that wind availability.

In Saskatchewan, we get the most sun not only in Canada, but in fact in North America. If you have infinite energy and a water source, you can use that energy to make fertile soils. You can use that energy to pump water. You can use it to heat homes. In Saskatchewan, we have endless amounts of sunlight and a lot of wind. If you can find a way to harness the wind, you’ll never run out of electricity in Saskatchewan. You just don’t get that in British Columbia. We’re at the same latitude, but because the mountains don’t impede the sunset, we get maybe an extra half an hour to an hour tacked on every day of direct sunlight.

So if you have a passive solar greenhouse, you can grow pretty much everything that you could out in British Columbia year round. And so what I’m trying to say is you can mitigate the shorter growing season and the colder temperatures that you generally get here by putting more energy into the system. Now, one of the benefits of living in British Columbia, and this is more relevant to the west coast than it is to the interior so much because the bugs can be quite bad in northern BC as well. But the bug situation in Saskatchewan can be horrendous in certain places at certain times of year.

On the west coast, there was a time when you didn’t see a mosquito, you know, and if you seen one, somebody told you about it, you know, it was an event, right? But in recent years, I’ve noticed that there’s more and more mosquitoes there for whatever reason, maybe it has something to do with agriculture, more humans doing human stuff, and mosquitoes are following them. But the bugs can be really, really horrendous in Saskatchewan. Now, because we’ve been in a drought for the last 15 years in Saskatchewan, the insect populations have actually been declining substantially.

So it’s better than it was, but it’s still a lot worse than it is in British Columbia. And you might not think that that’s going to be a problem until you’re out there working the fields at dusk, and you are being devoured and you’ve run out of DEET. And no, the hippy dippy stuff does not work. When you get into the sticks of the northern boreal transition zone and the grasslands up here, nothing is going to protect you against the insects. It’s like they work on shifts. So in the spring, you have a tick problem.

Then it becomes mosquitoes and midges and noceums. Then you get into mid-summer and you’re dealing with horse flies and deer flies. Then towards late summer, you’re dealing with wasps. And then you’re dealing with maple bugs, which are harmless, but they’re really annoying and they can make for some nasty infestations. Basically throughout the entire growing season, you’re contending with insects, but we don’t have any really poisonous insects with the exception of ticks, which carry Lyme disease. Now let’s address the climate issue. There were a lot of misguided comments on Dean’s video that suggested that it’s very cold in Saskatchewan, which it is, it’s very cold.

But a lot of that is exaggerated. From April 1st to I would say mid-November in some cases, you’re getting plus temperatures. In fact, it’s not uncommon that we have a plus 30 day in April. So long gone are the days where it was six to eight months out of the year, it was winter. Now I would say our growing season has actually extended substantially on both ends. You can get plus 20 days in October, you can get plus 20 days in March. The three main months that you’re going to have to deal with cold are December, January, and February.

So yes, for three months out of the year, you’re going to have to have a plan in order to survive, in order to keep yourself warm. For that, you’re going to need either wood, or you can supplement wood with some sort of heat pump with passive solar heating. It’s easily survivable. I would say that in general, in recent years anyways, if you were to add up all the minus 30 and below days, you’re really only getting maybe three weeks, possibly four weeks of below 30 days every year. It’s getting drier, and it’s getting hotter, and the growing season is extending.

In fact, recently where we live, we’ve been bumped up to a plant hardiness zone 3B from 3A as a result of this. And now we even have moose migrating north into the prairies. So as things change, that also opens up more possibilities for your ability to subsist off the land. So now that you’ve all been patient, I’m going to tell you what I think is the Goldilocks zone for preppers in the northern hemisphere. Barring something like nuclear winter, this is going to be the most survivable place that you’re going to find.

There is a point in Canada where the boreal forest, the grasslands, and the Rocky Mountains meet, and it’s a very small patch of land. It spans from like Drayton Valley up to Edson, then to Edmonton. In that triangle, you’re going to have access to the boreal forest, you’re going to have access to the rich biodiverse forests of the Rocky Mountains, and you’re also going to have the benefits of the sandy loam soils of the grasslands and the rolling hills. So you’re going to have your topography, you’re going to have your glacier fed water, you’re also going to have your abundant boreal forest, you’re going to have the benefits of hunting in that transition zone, because this where these three zones meet, that’s going to be some of the best hunting in the world.

Anybody who lives in that region, that is probably one of the most strategically optimal places to locate yourself to ride out prolonged disaster. And in addition to that, you don’t have huge populations. You do have Edmonton, which is growing at a rapid pace and is already approaching 2 million people. But generally speaking, still sparsely populated compared to a lot of places in British Columbia and the Great Lakes, forget about it. I’ve actually done an in-depth series on all of the provinces. I call it After the Collapse. We go from the West Coast, we go through the mountains, we go through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and into the Great Lakes, Megalopolis.

I’m going to post links to that series below. Now the videos were made probably eight years ago, so they might be a little cringy at points, but at the same time, some people say they’re some of the finest works of the channel. So I’d encourage you to go and check those out. Thanks for watching. I hope you got something from this video. And please don’t buy it all the farmland in the Goldilocks, Boreal, Mountainous, Grassland transition zone. Thanks for watching Canadian Prep Pro. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk, and no gimmicks.

Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

See more of Canadian Prepper on their Public Channel and the MPN Canadian Prepper channel.