➡ CanadianPrepper has found a new property in Manitoba, Canada, that could be a great place to survive an apocalypse. The property is 160 acres, has a lake, and is surrounded by forests, making it a good source of food and firewood. The house on the property needs some work, but it has a wood stove and a small solar array. Despite an easement limiting building and tree cutting, the property’s remote location, access to fresh water, and potential for self-sufficiency make it a promising survival retreat.
➡ The article discusses a remote property located several turns off a major highway, backed by wilderness, and near a lake. The property has a challenging climate and limited soil for growing crops, but it offers privacy, security, and potential for hunting and fishing. The area is not heavily impacted by mining or forestry, ensuring clean waterways. Despite its remoteness and harsh climate, the property could be a good investment or recreational spot, but might not be suitable for full-time living, especially for families with children due to limited internet access and distance from urban centers.

Hi folks, CanadianPrepper here. Today on the channel, we are checking out a new property that I just discovered that I think checks all the boxes for an apocalypse bugout retreat. Now, if you’re not familiar with this series, what we do here is we use a Prepper Property Resilience Rating Scale that I devised, and this allows us to assess the viability of a property in terms of its ability to withstand the rigors of a post-collapse environment. Without further ado, let’s get to it. Okay, so this property here is in the province of Manitoba, the polar bear capital of the world.

Fortunately, this is outside the range of the polar bears. Let’s just see what the polar bear range is. Okay, so this is what it is. They tend to stay around the Hudson Bay region, so we don’t have to worry about them here. Even if we do, we’ll be armed up and ready for the apocalypse, so I think polar bears might be the last of our problems. In fact, they might make a welcome tasty treat. Never eaten polar bear before? I’m sure it’s an endangered species, but hey, in the apocalypse, all bets are off. So you guys might be familiar with the Max Brooks World War Z novel.

In that film, they depict Manitoba as being overrun by ravenous cannibals. I’m hoping that’s not going to be the case, because I think we might have found a gem here. This is a property that has a lake, it’s 160 acres, it’s wooded, and it’s $270,000 Canadian, which essentially amounts to about $200,000 USD American. So when I first see a property for $270,000 Canadian that’s lakefront, I always assume that it’s probably some kind of slough. But in this case, it’s actually a legit lake surrounded by hundreds of lakes, so the maximum depth is about 80 feet. This is a 101 acre lake.

That means that we know that we could potentially have fish in this lake year round. Now it’s not a very big lake, so the fish you’re going to get in there are probably not going to be that big. Nonetheless, we know that fish can overwinter. So even if there weren’t fish in there, you could likely stalk this lake with fish. So this is a view of the lake, and this is a view of the property on Google Earth. You can tell by this satellite shot that the roofing needs work. You can see you’re surrounded by lakes, and this is really in the middle of nowhere, and it straddles the transition zone between the Boreal Forest and the Great Plains.

Let’s just first take a look at some of the images so you can get a sense of what we’re working with here. So you can see it has this very modest, less than 1,000 square foot home on it, and it is along the shoreline, but it’s high enough in prominence that we probably won’t have to worry about flooding. And judging by some of these pictures, we can see that it’s a mixed forest of deciduous and coniferous forest, meaning we’re going to have some good softwood lumber. And it doesn’t look like this region has been logged. In terms of the shoreline, it looks pretty marshy, so there’s no, like, sandy beaches.

Now, on the property, we can see that it’s primarily deciduous trees, which means that they’re not going to be that great for lumber, but they will be able to be used for firewood, which you’re going to need a lot of in order to get through the winters here. And this stuff grows really fast, as previously indicated, the roofing here is going to need work. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to the house. In fact, I would say for a bug out retreat, you don’t want this to look very fancy, because if somebody were to stumble across this property, you would want them to just not want to stick around too long.

You can see inside the house, we do have this nice wood stove slash cook stove. This is kind of the centerpiece of the home, probably the lifeblood of the home when it comes down to it, because it looks like that’s how they heat their water as well. Looks like we have a very small solar array there, which is not going to get you much juice, maybe enough to power your fridge. Look at these views, though. I mean, these views are incredible. I mean, you have this whole lake to yourself. It’s not the biggest lake, but it’s big enough.

And if it’s 80 feet deep, you could even do ice fishing. All windows are self facing, so you’re going to get passive solar heating year round. So far, so good. You even have a garage. Wow, it’s a piece of garage. Actually, those doors on the garage look relatively newer. Those are insulated doors on the garage. All right, so now let’s use some of our tools to assess this property. So first off, what I’d like to see is the historical imagery for the region. Usually, if it’s a more populated area like a city, Google will give you satellite snapshots pretty much every year for the past two or three decades.

For something like this, it looks like we only get five or so snapshots. So this satellite snapshot was taken right in the heart of summer, June 25th. We got July 30th. Let’s see, 2003. Okay, so August. So it looks like we’re not going to be able to get any winter information, but you’ll notice something here. So if we go back to August 12, 2003, we can see that there’s a difference in how full this lake is versus June. So in June, there’s still a lot of winter runoff that’s accumulated. But by August, you can see that the lake dries up a little bit, not that much.

I mean, there’s going to be parts where it’s deep. So we got water covered. We know this property is going to score really high for fresh water. I doubt that there is a well on this property. There’s a septic tank. Oh, there is a well. Okay. Now, if you wanted to, you could consult with the Manitoba Water Well Database, and they would provide you with a variety of different information about this well, when it was dug, what the last assessed flow rate was of said well, and whether there was various sediments in the water and things like that.

We’re not going to do that. I’m surprised that there’s a well on it at all. And so let’s just check out the description here next to Duck Mountain Provincial Forest. So you know that it’s going to be Crownland and Provincial Forest as far as the eye can see. 160 acres of trees and water and lakefront cabins sitting on the shore of beautiful Kennedy Lakes, very private. The unique property is totally off grid. The owners resided full time on the property and use solar panels and batteries. So they survived here throughout the winter. The fridge runs on propane.

An Amish pioneer wood cook stove is a dual purpose for cooking and heating the home. Everything left in the house is included. The property, cabin and items included are being sold as is well for water, septic tank, double attached garage wood floor. Now, here’s where the catch is. There is an easement on this property, which means that you probably can’t do much more building outside a certain boundary. Now, at the end of the day, that’s probably not going to matter that much because in places that are this remote, the government really doesn’t care. You can cut down a few trees here and there.

There probably is some limitations on how much firewood you can pull out, although I’m sure they do have some clause in the easement that allows them to acquire firewood off the property. But it likely boils down to, you know, you can’t be doing any clear cutting and building, you know, a bunch of structures on the property. And I’m not sure if the homeowners themselves put the easement on this property or if it was pre existing. But that’s part of the reason why you’re not paying a lot of money for this property is the easement that usually will bring down the property value by 30% even in terms of the enforcement of the easement.

I mean, they might fly over in a plane every few years to make sure that there’s no major clear cutting going on, but I can’t see them coming out this far on a regular basis. Now, if we look at security of this property, a lot of times people will base the viability of a preparedness property on the crime rate during peacetime. And while you might be able to extrapolate how safe the property would be during wartime, which is basically post SHTF, it’s not always going to translate. For example, you might live in a low crime rate suburban area when times are good and there might be no crime.

But when everybody has nothing to eat, then you know, crime could be much worse. In fact, a lot of these remote communities, if we went back to like a hunter gatherer mode of subsistence, these places might even be safer. I mean, you could look at various aspects of the demography of the region, you could look at things like average income, sometimes the RCMP or various provinces will have a database of criminality. For this though, this is so remote. Like, let’s just take a look at how remote this place is. Here’s our main highway, highway number five, but then we turn off here and then we go on to this highway 591, which also looks paved, at least for the first part of it.

So we have one turn off, I would say in the very least, you want to be a few turns off a major highway. So here we go up to highway 591, which looks like it’s still paved, and then we’re going to be turning off to provincial road 584. So now we’re on gravel, now we’re turning again. And so now we’re on road 158.5, and then we’re going all the way down, and then we’re turning two more times. So this is like five turns off a major highway. I mean, that’s remote. And look at this, you’re backed up against endless wilderness that no roadside attraction seeking yuppie is ever going to be bold enough to venture into.

This is interesting. So if we look just south of this place, we do have a little bit of what looks to be a trail system of sorts. So it looks like this could be like some kind of quad trail, and it looks like there’s these flatfoot lakes. Oftentimes, again, these are guys who go out on their quads on the weekends, they’re not living in the bush, they just want to drive their machines around and, you know, they pussy out and go back into their heated RVs or whatever. Judging by these Kennedy lakes, there’s not a lot of quad trails that come in here.

I don’t even see any. So you basically have this entire lake to yourself. And I don’t even see any houses around here. It looks like there’s something going on up here. This looks like some kind of farm operation. So they’re bailing hay up here to the north, and they got their own Lake Pike Lake. So that’s your neighbor about a mile away. Let’s look at climate. This climate sucks ass. That’s the catch, right? You can see Duck Mountain Park here. This is suck ass territory. This is zone 2A and 2B. You can grow fruit trees in 2A, but they’re gonna be, you know, crab apples, and you can probably grow cherry trees.

There’s certain cherry trees that are engineered here at the University of Saskatchewan to grow at these latitudes. But you’re going to be quite limited in terms of the types of fruit trees. Of course, you could build a greenhouse anywhere. The problem will be getting the soil in there. So this lighter yellow color is luvosolic. And this is going to be kernozemic. So the luvosolic soils to the west of the property, that’s going to be where you can go and get your soil. So let’s say you wanted to build some raised garden beds out of the dimensional lumber that you harvested from the forest.

Well, you wouldn’t want to take the soil from this region here because that’s going to be kernozemic and it’s going to be a higher acidity. It’s not going to be as good to grow, you know, various types of crops. This is smack dab in the middle of that transition zone. So it checks a big box there. Now, this is a mean temperature map. So we know that the climate, as I indicated, was going to suck ass because it is a 2A climate. It’s much colder than the surrounding regions. Again, it’s kind of straddling the line of 2B.

So 2B, 2A, two cheeks of the same ass, we’ll say. Okay, now what about topography? So this is a topography map viewer. So this is where our property is here, where my cursor is. That is where the actual house is on the property. So if you can see on this side here, what it’s going to do is it’s going to show you the lowest elevation and the highest elevation. So within our 160 acres here, we have about 30 meters of variability. So we can see that the house is only a few meters above the shoreline, more than enough to never really have to worry about flooding at all, I would say.

And you can see that there’s a lot of prominence in the surrounding regions, which is good because that means there’s not a lot of swamp and nasty ass muskeg. But this looks really good. I mean, this is another box that’s checked. So so far, the water checks out, the food checks out because we’re in the transition zone. We got fish. So we got a constant supply of protein. We have a deep lake. We have security. We have topography. We have an incredibly low price. There’s no polar bears. The only downside is that it’s kind of in the ass end of the plant hardiness zone.

But that’s a problem that can be mitigated. And quite frankly, if you want the post apocalyptic security that remoteness brings, you’re going to have to make some concessions when it comes to climate. And one more thing, you’ll always want to look at mining and forestry. This is a Canadian minerals and mining map. So we know just by looking at this, that there ain’t really much of significance going on out here in terms of mining. So we know that the waterways are not going to be polluted. There probably is some degree of forestry, but usually with these mixed forests, it’s not worth the logger’s time because they got to cut through all the poplar and aspen to get to the spruce and pine trees so they don’t bother.

So now that we’ve kind of went through the property, would I buy this? I mean, it’s really hard to pass up that price, if I’m being honest. You’re pretty much getting all the boxes checked here with the exception that there’s probably a shitload of bugs out here. But sometimes being close to a deeper body of water like this can sometimes mitigate that. You’ll definitely want to get the details of that easement if you go with this. This is one of those places too, if you wanted like an investment property, if you wanted to build this up to be something, you know, there’s things that you could do to really raise the property value of this place.

This is one of those properties which it’s going to be recreational. I couldn’t see myself living full time in a property like this. Some people could, especially if you had children, you’re going to be limited to Starlink internet access. You’re going to be probably three hours, four hours away from a major urban center. That’s good when it comes to full blown grid down survivability. You’re going to be far from a hospital. If you take care of your physical fitness, you eat well, and you mind your hygiene, then hopefully, you don’t have to worry about that for some time.

You’re going to have good hunting out here. You’re not going to have a big issue with wildfire here because it’s in the transition zone. It’s deep in the boreal forest where the wildfires tend to happen. With those deciduous trees, they tend to have a lot more moisture in them and they don’t burn for so you’re good on forest fires as well. I mean, I’m tempted to make a phone call and not release this video. To be honest, let me know what you guys think about this property in the comments section down below. Don’t forget to like subscribe and share the video if you found this information useful.

Thanks for watching. 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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