Celebrating 50 years off grid at The Flat – June 3, 1967 to June 3, 2017 – with no intention of leaving!

I am writing this today as I will be headed to ID/MT on the actual day of our 50th anniversary at The Flat and being off grid.

The top picture is Virgil on Sept. 6, 1966, after our first attempt to find The Flat.

The second is a photo of The Flat taken by John Brookes in the summer of 1967. Note the little shrubby pine on the right front corner of the cabin.

In the third and last picture, taken today, you can see that pine 50 years later. I would like to have taken a shot of The Flat from the exact same vantage point as the 1967 photo, but after a very wet winter, the river is running too high to reach the spot.

Raymond Flat summer of 1967

Cabin Pine June 2, 2017

This morning as I pondered writing this post, I scanned through the Amazon reviews of Impossible Beyond This Point and chuckled as I read a review titled “Wannabe Hippies” where the author wondered if the book was really non fiction. I guess my parents would have had to have known about back-to-the-land hippies in order to be wannabes. In 1966, back-to-the-land hippies had not yet started the migration to what they believed would be a simpler life. Before Virgil and Marcy passed away, they had witnessed the arrival of the first and the departure of nearly the last of the back-to-the-earth generation of young people.

In 50 years, we have seen a lot of changes and many, many acre feet of water has bubbled by in the North Fork during that time.

So here’s to the next 50…

Joel Horn