Retirement Homestead

This homesteader decided to retire to a remote plot to spend his golden years working the land and making art.

By Mike Camp
Updated on October 18, 2023
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by Mike Camp
The author’s retirement homestead in winter, with a cabin, shop, shed, yurt, and a tipi.

Ten years ago, at age 65, I decided to homestead once again. The advantages to the homesteading life are many. Homesteading is physically challenging, clearing a piece of land and putting up buildings is rewarding, and the privacy and independence of living remotely are invaluable.
Before my decision to retire to a remote plot of land, I’d homesteaded at various points in my life. You used to be able to build a cabin on a mining claim or trap line and live there in peace year-round. Starting in 1975, I spent some years in northern Ontario, where I had three registered trap lines. One trap line was only accessible by a 10-mile ride over a frozen river. I initially had a dog team, but the dogs became too expensive to keep all summer when they weren’t working. After I sold my dog team and bought a 1976 Yamaha snowmobile, travel was a lot quicker, and I didn’t have to feed the machine all summer.

In those days, snowmobiles weighed about 300 pounds and were around 15 horsepower – a big difference from the belching beasts of today. At that time, large prime beavers were going for $100 each, and as a basic new snowmobile was $1,000, I bought my machine with 10 beaver pelts. Today, it would take at least 10 times that amount with the relative cost of furs and snowmobiles.

In the mid-1980s, for a change of scenery, I bought an oceanfront lot on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This lot was 10 miles by boat (no road) from the village of Tofino. Over eight years on this lot, I built an A-frame cabin and did some commercial fishing, small-scale logging, and work as a welder. That was all before the island became a high-end tourist destination and the escalating prices drove some locals away.

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