➡ The author was considering buying a large property with diverse terrain, abundant wildlife, and resources for survival. The property had a lake, two wells, old growth forest, and was located near a small town. Despite its many advantages, the author decided not to buy the property at the last minute due to an unspecified hesitation. The author is unsure if this decision will be regretted in the future.
➡ Nate, a Canadian prepper, considered buying a 560-acre property with low taxes and beautiful forests. However, he decided against it due to concerns about security, as the property was well-known and he feared it could be raided in a crisis. He also worried about Canada’s future regarding civil liberties, and the property’s remote location made it unsuitable for his family’s long-term needs. Despite the property’s appeal, he felt it fell short in terms of security, a crucial aspect for a prepper.

Well, this was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life. So recently we embarked on a new series where I go out to various properties and I assess those properties for their preparedness survivability using what I call the Prepping Property Resilience Rating Scale. That’s a mouthful. So this was the first property that we actually physically went out to. All the previous properties that I’ve assessed have been online using my various assessment tools. And the reason why this was the property that I wanted to go to first, because quite frankly it was the best one I had ever seen.

So today I want to talk about why I went to the extent of putting down a deposit on this property, conditions were about to be removed, and why on the very last minute at 11.59 when I was supposed to sign on the dotted line, I said no. Is it going to be a decision I regret for the rest of my life, or did I make the right decision? Let’s talk about this property. So some background on the property. It’s 560 acres surrounding a lake, which is shallow, but apparently there’s still fish in there. There’s about 1.6 kilometers of coastline, which is a lot.

The price that they were asking for was 1.35 million Canadian, which is around 1 million US dollars, which I think is the price of an average home in California, more or less. The property was mixed terrain, so there was old growth spruce forest, mixed deciduous forest, lots of riparian zones with berry bushes, even some great swamp territory for hunting purposes. About 100 acres or so was pasture land, and then there was some land that was being baled. Now, this property pretty much had everything you wanted. It had a virtually infinite water supply. You had the lake, but you also had two wells on the property.

You had an old growth forest on the property, which is rare in that neck of the woods, and it was in the transition zone of the Aspen Parkland boreal biome. So it’s the warmest that you’re ever going to get conifer trees that you can’t actually use for construction. In fact, the house on the property was constructed using the spruce trees from the property itself. And some of these trees were three foot wide, so you could definitely get some sizable chunks of lumber out of there. There was all kinds of wildlife, everything you could possibly imagine, with the exception of grizzly bears and maybe cougars, because they usually don’t come this far east.

Unless you go into a Saskatoon nightclub on the weekends, if you know what I mean. In terms of the hunting possibilities, they were virtually endless. You had all the waterfowl you could ever imagine. You had fish. You had all kinds of big game from elk to moose to deer, trophy bucks abound. It was all there. You had grazing land for cattle, chickens, you had it all. The cattle fencing there was actually excellent. It was not just a three level arboar fencing, it was four level. And it looked like it was very well done. I’ve seen a lot of really bad fencing jobs where the cows just walk over and they’re wandering around the highway.

This was done very well. And because the cows had been eating and crapping on this soil, the soil was very rich and workable. So food production in this place would have been no problem whatsoever. This was a zone 3A property. We could have easily brought that up to a zone five or six by building a greenhouse or a passive solar greenhouse. The sky’s the limit because of course land there was abundant to build on. From a forest fire point of view, this land was perfect because it was spruce trees mixed in with deciduous forest, which usually is a mitigating factor in forest fires.

It tends to be the spruce trees, which are really fallible. And because it wasn’t directly connected to the main boreal forest, there’s a better chance that fire suppression could be employed if need be. So we had a situation where we had an old growth forest where the risk of forest fire was extremely low. Now in terms of the remoteness and security, it was off a secondary highway. You kind of had to go off a gravel road off of not a major highway, but one that is paved and maintained nonetheless. So it was slightly off the beaten path.

However, it was not that remote because not too far from it is a town called Priestville. This is a town of about a thousand people. It’s an aging town and I presume that the population is declining. The other aspects of the land, there was actually a lot of topography and hills on this land, which is something that is rare for Saskatchewan so to have that riparian climate with the hills and have all that elevational change in the property really lent itself to a lot of possibilities in terms of microclimates and wind resistance, wind protection.

So this was another added benefit and you can usually tell if a place is very windy or not by looking at the trees. If the trees have a slight bend to them, usually that means that it’s a windy climate. And one of the other benefits of being kind of on the fringe of that boreal forest is you’re right outside the periphery of tornado alley. So there’s much less likelihood that you’re going to endure things like hail and plow winds and tornadoes. In terms of the pests, you’re going to have your usual things like raccoons and mice and all that.

These are all things that there’s solutions for. In terms of bugs, the bugs aren’t actually as bad as I thought they would be. I think there’s something about the mixed forests and the conifers that kind of lend themselves to insect mitigation to a certain extent. Now this was located about one hour and 15 minutes or so from a city, although a small city, we’re talking about 20,000 people, about 10 minutes from a town of 1,000 people and about three hours from a major city where they would have serious medical equipment in case of a major medical emergency.

So in terms of accessibility, it was workable. It wasn’t densely populated. It’s far on the periphery of a smaller town. It’s a very tight-knit community of Mennonite, Christian people, very low crime rate, a place where neighbors look out for neighbors sort of thing. In terms of the house itself, the house is beautiful. I mean, it was a big house, 3,000 square feet. It had geothermal heating. The geothermal system itself was far simpler than the one I had. So effectively, that means all you need to run a heat pump is electricity.

The electricity came from the grid. So it was grid tied, which is a good thing. There was no backup diesel or solar or even a natural gas connection. So of course, that would have been something that you could easily have built out there. There’s plenty of land, plenty of places to build solar panels. The water did come back as having bacteria, which is typical, so you’d want to filter it. But the water flow rate was abundant. It was a very fast flowing well or wells, I should say. And there also was a sizable wood stove that I presume would have heated the home fairly sufficiently based on where it was located.

It was a bi-level house, of course. So that means a lot of that heat would go to the upper floors, but there was fans that could be used to push that warm air downwards. The basement wasn’t below grade, but it was low enough that if you wanted to, you could use it as an emergency shelter. And certainly with some modification, you could use it as a potential fallout shelter with the use of dirt and sandbags and things of that nature. I personally would have built up more redundant systems if I had taken the place, but as it stood, it was perfectly workable.

In terms of communication with the outside world, the cell service wasn’t that good there. You could very likely get a cell signal amplifier or you could just get Starlink. There was a 20 by 60 foot pole shed, I believe, that was being primarily used to store firewood. But a lot of the outbuildings were rather old and tattered and probably would have been bulldozed. Nonetheless, you had a place to store your supplies while you built the property out. And so I’m painting this picture for you and you’re probably asking yourself, Nate, why didn’t you lock this in? And the answer is, I don’t know.

Sometimes there’s something telling you that, you know, this ain’t the right thing for me. And I haven’t really put my finger on what it was yet, but there was something preventing me from buying that property and signing on that dotted line. I was very hesitant throughout the process. The realtor there was absolutely amazing. The property owners were absolutely amazing for this opportunity for us to come out and film and do all this stuff. Now, one big exception to this whole property and it was a real sticking point for me was the fact that there’s a conservation easement on the property, which meant that you were very limited with what you could do on this property.

It was forest, you could look at it and you could even harvest a certain amount of wood every year, although it was really oddly worded, like you could only pull out 20 horse-drawn cords or something like that. Anyways, I was able to negotiate actually a removal of certain part of the easement along the coastline so that I could potentially build a cabin or something like that in the future. So all that was done, right? We got that removed and that’s not easy to do if you know how these things work.

Essentially what it meant is that every year or so somebody could potentially come on the property and audit it or they’ll fly a drone over it to make sure that you’re not building any structures. As a prepper, having to have that overhead when you own something but you really don’t own it, it’s a weird feeling, all right? So that was a big sticking point for me but because of the incredibly low taxes, which are 3,000 a year for the entire 560 acres, that’s half of what I pay for one fourth of the land that I’m on right now.

560 acres when it’s wooded, it is virtually endless. You could get lost in these forests. It would take a long time for you to thoroughly explore it in its entirety. Dense, old-growth forests with diverse ecosystem. Every acre is a new adventure. When you went out there in the golden hour and the sun was setting and you seen pelicans flying over, you could hear animals in the distance. You could hear a deer’s rubbing the trees. It was damn near perfect. So the question then becomes, Nate, why didn’t you sign on that dotted line when it came down to midnight? And I don’t really know if I have a great answer for that but it really boils down to security.

If I’m being serious about a grid down prolonged situation, would this be a safe place to be? I would say that there are a lot of operational security considerations for the average person and for myself, being the Canadian prepper, you can basically double or triple that. The question is, do I want people to know where I am? That’s what it boils down to. And the answer to that is a hard no. The problem was, this used to be a bed and breakfast. There was a lot of hunters who had stayed there in the past.

There was a lot of people who knew a lot about the property, if you know what I mean. And I have a sneaking suspicion that because it was so well known, that it would remain well known, at least amongst the people who knew about it, if things ever went to shit. And my operational security would have been compromised at that point. I wouldn’t feel comfortable storing firearms there. I wouldn’t feel comfortable storing really anything of value there. And in terms of laying anchor there, if we’re talking about an SHTF situation, my prepper brain starts going in terms of the myriad ways in which you could be rated on a property like that.

If you’re not thinking about prepping for the big one, then you probably don’t have to worry about any of these things. And that really would have been a 90 out of 100. Now, the question is, are you ever going to be able to find a situation where you have ironclad operational security while the grid is up and while the grid is down? Now, those community members could very well have been an asset. The problem, I think, arises when a prepper goes over and above than a lot of these people who live in rural communities who, yeah, they’re prepping minded, but they’re not stockpiling for the apocalypse, right? They’re not doing all the things that you’re doing.

Another reason that I didn’t end up closing on this property is that I’m honestly seriously worried about the direction Canada is going when it comes to civil liberties. Things like gun confiscation, heavy internet regulation, and limits on free speech. It all really makes me question how much I want to commit to this country or even this province for that matter. I feel like Alberta, having a larger population and a bit more financial clout, has a better shot of pushing back against federal overreach instead of Saskatchewan. It might actually be the last real stronghold for freedom and liberty in this country.

And if that doesn’t work out, well, I guess there’s always the good old US of A. Here I am trying to talk myself out of this. Honestly, this was one of the nicest properties I’ve ever seen. And I don’t know if I’ll ever see a property like that again. The downside was the travel time and the lack of access to amenities. This is where I think age and your family life are really going to factor into a prepping property. You really need to be realistic. Your kids might be young now. You know, you might be a family starting out and you find this great off-grid property and it’s 200 miles from nowhere.

And it’s perfectly fine because you can homeschool your kids for the time being. But eventually, they’re going to grow up. And they grow up pretty fast. And you can teach them a lot, but you can’t teach them everything. And you’re going to want them to learn those skills so that they can navigate the real world. And unfortunately, that place wouldn’t lend itself to that as our permanent place. Anyways, guys, I got to say as a first property, and if this is any measure of how this is going to go, every property I go and visit, I’m going to fall in love with and place an order in and back out at the last minute and have 10 sleepless nights to go along with it.

Then this is going to be a challenging series. I want to thank the realtor who helped us. She was great and she’s offered to take us on more tours of properties within that region. And I look forward to it because there’s a lot of gems up there. Let me know what you guys think about this whole ordeal. Did I make the right decision? It could have been beautiful. But from a prepping point of view, it just came up short where arguably it matters most. Security, security, security. Thanks for watching, guys. Take care. Stay safe.

Canadian Pepper out. 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].

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