Outlawland

I’m hiking in a majestic canyon outside Taos, New Mexico on my ex-sister-in-law’s land. A red cliff juts into the blue sky above us like the prow of a ship. Behind us, her canvas-sided yurt cuts a striking figure against the landscape. It’s green with a sand-colored roof and a red chili wreath on the front patio.

“It's cool, sometimes there's bighorn sheep up here. And there's a bald eagle that has a nest up there. So I've seen that bald eagle many times. And sometimes you'll even see blue herons flying over because they're going to the river.”

The Rio Grande cuts a deep canyon just a couple miles away from here. As we bushwack, Janelle Cassidy stops often to reach into the ancient agricultural ditch called an acequia to remove dripping handfuls of branches and leaves so the stream doesn’t back up. We’re lucky. Today it’s flowing.

“ I'm just kind of making sure,” she says, sloshing about in the water. “I had to work on the ditch a lot.”

“You have to keep it cleared out,” I say. 

“Yes. So the last several weekends I was down here by myself. Weed whacking, raking, digging, just to make sure the water flows.”

“Oh, and you've got this lovely blooming tree here.”

“Yeah, it's an apple tree.”

“It needs to be kind of pruned or something?”

“It does.”

Everywhere she looks is another big project. And keeping this acequia flowing is the most important one. Acequias are community owned and shared…by a longstanding tradition going back to the Indigenous and Hispanic peoples who settled this area. Janelle has the benefit – and responsibility – of living at the top of this ditch. But her neighbors have orchards and rely on her to keep the water from backing up. 

“All my closest neighbors are women and they're older women and they've had amazing lives and stories and so I feel safe. And then going to the ditch cleaning day, you meet other people and just the ditch brings everybody together because water is life. And like here in Northern New Mexico, it's so precious and sacred. And if we don't keep these traditions alive and take care of the water, we won't be here and we won't have food, and we won't have family and we won't have all the things, right? Like, it really is the most important thing is to take care of the water.”

Janelle would agree wholeheartedly with Gary and Celeste Havener’s mandate to “abide by the land.” And she would add, you’ve got to abide by the water. Especially in a desert. These days, Janelle is one of those older women living alone and off grid in this canyon. She’s in her early 50’s, a single lady, a practicing therapist in town with three adult children. And she just moved into a yurt without electricity or running water or a septic tank. So abiding by the land and water, it’s hard work for her. There’s no one to share the burden of things… like managing the wildlife. For instance, the rattlesnakes we keep an eye peeled for as we hike.

“And I'm okay with snakes, but I don't want to come across one, you know? Like, I don't have a gun down here. I don't have a gun at all. And I don't know that I want one, but everybody's like, you should probably get a gun. I'm like, I don't know if I'd be more scared having a gun or…”

You might be wondering how Janelle has the courage to be living this life at all? Well, this isn’t her first rodeo. Janelle Cassidy has been living the yurt life on and off her whole adult life. 

Janelle and I sit on her yurt’s patio next to the acequia, among the sounds of water and birds, and she takes me down memory lane. Back in the mid 90’s, Janelle and my brother Joseph were young parents trying to make a home for their boys. They rented a place in Taos when their first, Jojo, was just tiny.

“We rented a little house for like $500. The landlady would be looking in the window at us. We only stayed there for a month. It was right on Camino de la Placitas. But it was kind of creepy because she would be peering through the window and I'd be in there like nursing Jojo. And I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, the landlady’s here again.’ So then we rented another house, which was really tiny, a tiny little studio, and that I think was $500, including utilities.”

Joseph was an aspiring visual artist, working printshop jobs to make ends meet. The two had met on the Rainbow Trail, traveling the country from one communal campout to another. So they had a shared philosophy for creating a better life for their sons and the world.

“I think it really was like, the footprint that we're leaving on the earth and just the amount of resources and things that are used for living, each individual.”

So there was definitely an idealistic Gen Xer vibe. But they also needed to make some pragmatic decisions for Jojo and Sol.

“I think it really was thinking long term, how can we get ahead because we're not gonna be getting ahead working and paying rent and we're gonna keep in the grind unless we have a plan. So the plan seemed to be, like, buy some land, and eventually build an earthship maybe. I can't really remember exactly where the yurt idea came from.”

“I just remember talking to Ken about it, and talking about building a yurt and after that it was kind of, it lit a fire.” That’s my brother Joseph. And Ken, if you’ll remember, that’s my husband. “Made me want to do that.  And you guys switched to the geodesic dome idea. But I kind of got stuck on the yurt thing.” 

Before I come to Taos to talk to Janelle, I get my brother’s side of the story. These days he’s living just down the street from me in Laramie. So is his son Jojo.

“Say your name.” 

“Joseph Edwards.”

“Which one?”

“The 8th.”

“And you?”

“I am Joseph Edwards the 9th. Last of his name.”  

“Colloquially known as Jojo Rafschoon, the Man in the Moon,” jokes Joe the 8th.

“That's right,” says Jojo the 9th.

Ken and I moved into our dome only a few months before Joseph and Janelle moved into their first yurt. We built in Arizona. But they had moved back to Walden, Colorado where my brother and I grew up so they could be closer to grandparents. Walden is mountain country. If they were going to live in a tent, it needed to be tough.

“Maybe just because living in those structures was suitable for cold weather climate and we knew that the amount of snow pack up in, Northern Colorado would be extensive,” says Janelle.

“But you guys like built it.”

“We built it,” says Janelle. 

“Built the yurt from scratch” Joe tells me. “So the khanas, the wall slats, were made from the dance floor of the old Seven Utes Lodge after they tore it down. So we're talking century old Douglas fir virgin timber from, pfft, a century ago.”

“I think we might have used the same wood to do the floor of our dome,” I say.

“Is that right? And then I just set up a rig and started cutting things. And then, we went searching for lodgepole pines to make the rafters. They all had to be the same exact size and dimensions, more or less.” 

“And you were just learning these skills as you did this?” 

“Yeah, exactly.  Hand tools for the most part. I mean, I did obviously use some power tools. But I went and bought a draw knife, which I still own, to be able to strip the bark off of stuff and to carve stuff down a little bit easier. I had a rig for that too, you know, just stripping it all down to, to the bare wood.”

All the while, they were shopping for land. Then they found this incredible acreage on Muddy Pass between Walden and the ski resort town of Steamboat Springs.

“It was two and a half acres about a quarter mile from the Continental Divide. It was like almost 9,000 foot in elevation.”

“ It was very thickly wooded,” Janelle remembers. “At the very back of the property, it had a view of the Medicine Bows.”

“And it was just gorgeous,” says Joe. “It was a valley, and half of it was a hill and the other half was the valley part. It was just really lush green grass and aspen grove.”

Janelle says, “There was a moose that used to come back there.”

“How much did you guys pay for that?” I ask.

“Well, not much,” says Joe. “It was actually not very expensive for the land itself. I think it was like $12,000 bucks or something like that.” 

Jojo was a toddler, Sol was a baby in arms. They moved into their yurt in the summertime when the living was easy.

“Well, first, living there was just, I mean, it was magical. When we first moved into the yurt up there, that first summer was just fantastic. We'd go swimming in Grizzly Creek, and long hikes on our own property where we'd hike up to the end of the thing and then back into the National Forest, which bordered it. Spending time outdoors, bringing friends up there, sitting around the campfire, playing the guitar and singing and stuff.”

In Walden 30 miles away, they opened up a fantastic rasta-themed pizza place called One Love. Best pizza I’ve ever tasted. People still talk  about that pizza in town. But then winter arrived. Jojo is now 30 years old but has vague memories of living in that aspen grove in a yurt.

“ I remember you guys building the deck that the yurt sat on.” 

“Yeah,” says Joe. “We built the yurt first and then we built that deck because it's deep snow out there. So six foot deep snow all winter long kind of thing. So we built a tall deck so that it would be out of the snow.”

“ It was cold, and having these big snow suits that were like, puffy, you can't even like move your arms or anything,” says Jojo. “And yeah, the snow was really deep, and you guys would snowshoe and stuff too.” 

“Snowshoed, and we eventually did get snowmobiles. Skidos”

“Yep, that's right. Which were really fun to ride on.”

But living in a glorified tent with two small kids wasn’t so fun for mom and dad. That first year – I looked it up – Steamboat ski resort reported 37 feet of snow over that winter! So yeah, they started looking for a way to get a real house. 

“We would like look at old abandoned houses and cabins and go, ‘Oh well, no one's living in that. Could we just move it?’” says Janelle.

They both had winter jobs in Steamboat, 30 miles over a treacherous mountain pass. One day, they spotted a two story house.

“We were sitting at the pizza place across the street,” Joe says, “and we saw an orange demolition notice on the front door. We went over there and looked at it and started thinking. And just like, ‘Well, let's see if maybe we can save them some money.’ And we just made an appointment and went and talked to the priest or whatever.  And said, ‘Hey, we'll take it off your hands, save you the destruction costs.’ And, they said, ‘Okay, well, we have to charge you something for it for tax purposes. So we'll charge you one dollar.”

“That's just crazy.” 

“We wrote it for a dollar. It cost $10,000 to move it.” 

“The house got moved,” says Janelle. “It snowed. It got stuck on top of Rabbit Ear's Pass for two weeks and we kind of joked like, ‘Oh, we should just leave it there. It'll make our commute shorter.’  And I remember driving by like, ‘Oh, there's our house.’”

“ It was on the front page of the newspaper,” Joe recalls. “It was on the front page of the Jackson County Star. Because it was a big deal. Because we shut down the road for six hours. 

“It was like a massive house and we had to widen the road and do road work and the neighbors just were like, not happy with us,” Janelle says. “So it was pretty crazy watching it come up that road.”

They put this huge house on its foundation and got to work making it liveable.

“We had solar electricity and our own well, and a septic tank, brand spanking new septic tank with an excellent leach field,” Joe recounts.

Finally, they had the house of their dreams on the land of their dreams. But it was a five bedroom house that still didn’t have running water or electricity. A second winter came along and Janelle was back to melting snow to give her babies baths. They used kerosene lamps and an antique wood cookstove to cook up the boys mac and cheese.

“So it was like, we were basically living in something the size of the yurt downstairs with the wood stove,” Janelle says. “And I just think, we were having to snowshoe or we had snowmobiles, but they broke down. When it would snow, the neighbors wouldn't help us at all. We didn't have a plow, so we had to park all the way at the highway and ski or snowshoe, pulling the kids on sleds up and down. And it was rustic living and I think I didn't have many friends. And I got used to it and learned how to do it, but I did not like it. I just felt very isolated.”

Maybe they would have eventually adjusted to life in their dream house if there hadn’t been this one really major problem. 

“Yeah, our neighbors were evil,” says Joe. 

“Did they call DFS on you guys?” 

“Department of Family Services? Yes. Yes, they did. They called the sheriff.”

Their neighbors accused Joseph and Jantelle of child neglect and the sheriff went out to their house to investigate.

“And the sheriff took the child welfare officer out to our house while we were in town and peeked in the windows and then they came back into town. And sat us down and first the sheriff was like, I'm really sorry about all this. We have to investigate if we get one of these reports. And then the lady was like, your place is so cute and cozy. It's homey. I wish I lived there. I mean, she was just gushing about it.”

“Well, you guys were hippies and we were wild, running around naked all the time,” says Jojo.

“As hippies do!” says Joe. “I had dreadlocks down to my ass.” 

“Now look at you,” I say. “Those were the days.”

“You have no hair,” says Jojo.

Joe leans into the mic. “She's saying that I'm a baldie.” We laugh.

Back with Janelle, she says “I mean, the neighbors were a huge factor, but I think, a lot of it for me, I think I can remember telling Joe like, if we don't leave here, I'm, I'm, I'm getting cabin fever.  And we left on my birthday. So that was December 6th, 2000.”

They packed up their yurt and headed to warmer climes. 

“ And so that was the plan. Like, we'll take the yurt, we'll go down there and live in the yurt on the Mesa and get jobs and then we're not paying rent.”

And so began their life on The Mesa.

So the reason they were able to move there without paying rent was because a Rainbow Family friend who had once traveled the country going to communal campouts let them put their yurt up on her land for free. They met her at a store that sold drug paraphernalia. 

“We actually met a lady that was running a head shop here in Laramie,” says Joe, “and she had moved up from Taos and she had still had a quarter acre of land down there that was being unused out on Two Peaks. And she said, move your yurt down there and have at it. I'm not going to ever go back.”

At first, they were relieved to be back in New Mexico.

“ I remember that winter we moved down there, we set up the yurt, like I think we put plastic on the ground and then rugs on top of it and then the yurt,” says Janelle. “The yurt was just on the ground and we woke up the next day to snow. But it was like a light dusting. It was maybe like an inch, not like four feet of snow. And people were like, ‘Oh yeah, this is like the worst winter we've had in years.’ And I was thinking like, ‘This is nothing, like, this is great. Like I can totally do this.’”

The weather was a huge relief after all the snow back on Muddy Pass. But they soon realized that the Mesa had its own challenges. For one thing, there are two zones out on The Mesa and they’re pretty different

“Three Peaks was a little bit more established, older hippies and, and nicer homes that people had built out of whatever they could build it out of. But Two Peaks was school buses, probably people living out of whatever they could, whether it was like pallet homes or partial-rammed earth, you know? And it was pretty rough.”

Joseph and Janelle moved out to Two Peaks. 

“It was pretty much night time, so we didn't immediately set up the yurt until the next day,” says Joe. “But we did meet our other neighbor, who called himself Tiger. Oh, what another piece of work.”

Later, some of their neighbors would walk into their yurt and steal stuff. But they did make fast friends with their closest neighbors who also had little kids. They tried to settle into life there.

“ There were like the pizza party nights where people were like making food and homemade outdoor ovens and the kids were all just running around free and playing and, so there were things about it that were really beautiful,” says Janelle. “But I think a lot of people that were out there, there was a lot of instability.”

“There was only a couple others on the Mesa that I actually, while we lived out there that first time, got to become kind of friends with,” says Joe. “Do you remember Tom, fat guy, bearded?”

“Yeah, a little bit,” says Jojo. “Yeah. I remember his house.”

“What was his house like?” I ask.

“It was a shack,” says Joe. “But it was a shack with another shack stacked on top of it. With a school bus as part of it.”

“Yeah, I mean that's the building style out there,” says Jojo. “It's just like, what can we use and how do we put it together?”

Jojo was now around five years old. He doesn’t have a lot of happy memories of the Mesa. But there is this one….

“We were at some party, there's bonfires and like, yeah, the shacks around and stuff like that. I remember there not being like a lot of kids there that were my age and somebody came up to me like, ‘Oh, there's a kid and they're playing with trucks and I know that you like trains. Maybe you should go introduce yourself.’ And I think that's how I introduced myself to Jasper. I just walked up and I was like, ‘I heard you like trucks. I like trains. Wanna play?’  And we were best friends from that moment. And still to this day, we're very, very close. One of my best friends.”  

“And it had to have been, like, bonding, that you were both, like, growing up in this crazy place,” I say. 

“Yeah, well, and we didn't know any other way.”

Jojo remembers his childhood as just plain hard. Sure, there wasn’t deep snow, but life wasn’t much easier on the Mesa than it had been in Colorado. 

“Wasn't the way that I would've raised my kids, you know,” he says, laughing. “It was cold, the weather. And on the Mesa there's no forest to protect you or shield you from anything. So there was a hailstorm that like punched a whole bunch of holes in the tent and we were like hiding under beds and stuff like that. I remember that.”

“It was really thick vinyl plastic, but it was also at that point several years old and constantly exposed to the sunlight and everything and yeah, bad hailstorm, big two inch chunks of ice and just punched a hole right through it,” says Joe.

They also had another kind of dangerous neighbor…the wildlife.

“ There's tons of rattlesnakes out there, yeah,” says Joe. “Never did see one, but I heard one once. And then tarantulas and tarantula hawks. Those are impressive. They're a wasp, a type of wasp, and they're a big wasp. They're like an inch and a half, two inches long. Black.”

“And alien looking,” chimes in Jojo.

“And alien looking,” agrees Joe. “And dangerous, deadly looking. Although, I understand they don't sting people at all. When the tarantulas migrate, which they migrate periodically, they don't migrate very far apparently, like half a mile or something, right? But here we go, a bunch of little black gloves crawling along, thousands of them. And the tarantula hawks migrate with them. One day we were outside and we had to run back to the yurt because it just blacked out the sky. I mean just tarantula hawks battering us.”

Joseph and Janelle got jobs in Taos, about 20 miles away. They didn’t live that far off the highway but it felt like a world away.

“The roads weren't maintained, so I’m not really sure how far back we were,” says Janelle. “I would say it wasn't more than a mile or two, but it took forever.”

“ Absolutely hellacious” says Joe. “we called our road the Arroyo, because it was just an Arroyo.”

“We were the only ones living out there that really had a truck that still drove,” recounts Janelle. “So when we went to town to get water or food, we'd have like other people like, can we get a ride? And then the back of it, and if the roads were wet, you would maybe be tilted sideways, just pedal on the metal, driving through the mud, don't stop because you will get stuck and then it'll take days to get the car dug out of the mud. There were some days that you didn't leave the Mesa because the roads, if there's monsoons or whatever, you just, you don't leave.”

“There's no grading out there,” says Joe. “Nobody's grading anything. You can't even get an ambulance out there.”

“No, and the cops won't go out,” says Jojo. “Because it's full of gunwielding Mesa hippies.”

Gunwielding hippies who sometimes happen to be protecting marijuana crops or, worse, meth labs. Not a good combo.

“ I mean, out there it was kind of like outlawland,” Janelle says. “There were no rules, there were no police coming out there.”

“ No, they literally will not drive over the cattle guard,” says Joe. “Yeah, I mean they will but it has to be a pretty extreme circumstance.”

“Like there was like a compound there a few years ago,” says Jojo, “like a cult. I guess the FBI got involved with that.”

“And they, I'm sure, used helicopters,” says Joe.

“They did. They did use helicopters,” says Jojo.

“ I don't know if it's still there, but there used to be a police car, like turned upside down and, you know what I mean, like some graffiti on it or whatever that was just kind of like, don't mess with us,” Janelle recalls.

“When Sheehan died I think it took them three hours to respond,” says Jojo. “Two or three hours to respond to the location.”

Sheehan. He was another of Jojo’s best friends. A few years back, he turned up on the Mesa dead. His family still lives on Two Peaks.

“We think that he was murdered,” Jojo says. “Or at least pressured to kill himself. And this is because of some of the things that came out after the investigation and just how Taos cops deal with crime.  

“And they said it was a suicide, but it was probably a homicide,” says Janelle. “And you know, I think there's people that go murdered and missing out there and it doesn't get talked about it, and it doesn't get discovered. So there were times that it didn't feel safe. 

“And it's a violent death. Like he was shot,” says Jojo. “So, yeah I don't know like just they're scared to go out there because if they respond they might get shot at either by the people they're responding for or neighbors And it's kind of lawless out there, for sure.”

“Lawless, and anti government, and drug fueled frenzy,” says Joe.

“There're people that are out there because they don't fit into other places in society,” Janelle says. “So they could live out there and kind of just have their little piece of the west and not be messed with. And these are people that maybe don't fit into traditional society, like I said, Vietnam vets or outlaws.”

I find Janelle’s description of The Mesa as an outlawland so interesting. Because like lots of places in the West, Taos has this other reputation as this culturally rich art mecca. But there’s a whole world the tourists never see, even when it’s right in front of their eyes. Like the earthship community that offers tours.

“Ironically, you drive out of the Mesa, right across the street, is this Greater World Community, which is like these off grid, technically, houses that are effectively trash,” says Jojo. “Like, they're made out of  tires and glass bottles and stuff like that, and concrete. Really efficient homes, but mansions compared to what's going on in the Mesa. And some of them are mansions.”

“Just poverty, extreme poverty and extreme wealth, just chock a block,” says Joe.

“It's only gotten worse, too, with like the whole Airbnb thing, because people now are, instead of using, like, renting their earthships to locals or whatever, it's an Airbnb that they'll charge like $500, $600,” Jojo says. “So it's even less affordable and drives the prices up for everybody. Which pushes more and more people out to the Mesa.”

“Oh, does it seem like it's growing?” I ask. “The Mesa's growing?”

“Yeah. It's growing so much” he says. 

Joseph and Janelle tried a couple times to move into Taos but just couldn’t afford to live there. It felt like they couldn’t escape the lifestyle that they had once believed in so much. 

“Yeah, it is stressful,” says Janelle. “You're always working to just have basic needs met, water and food and fuel and keep yourself warm enough to keep yourself warm and to have water. It's not easy. It's not easy living. It's stressful.”

But eventually they were forced to leave the Mesa permanently.

“ It gets cold, it gets wet” Jojo says. “I remember Sol getting pneumonia. And I think that prompted you guys to move into town.”

“Yeah, we moved into town at that point because he got definitely sick,” Joe says. “Yeah, we stayed at a hotel for like a week while he was recovering, and then we moved the yurt into town. We rented an apple orchard, and we set up in an apple orchard for a while.”

It wasn’t long after that, that off gridding broke Joseph and Janelle’s marriage too. 

“I wanted to leave so bad,” Joe says. “I wanted to move away, anywhere.  I hated the place. I hated everybody. And so, it kind of made me a hard man for quite a few years. But at the end, I became a bitter man, a pretty hard man.”

But Joseph couldn’t leave because his kids were still in school. So he stayed, going to college part time to become a computer programer. Janelle started picking up the pieces of her life too. She found a boyfriend and had a daughter, Beatrice, and started taking holistic healing courses.

“ And then I remember being like, what am I gonna do with this?” says Janelle. “And I remember waiting tables and waiting on somebody that had a degree. We were having a conversation and he said, ‘Oh, you should go to school for social work. Like they have a better standing, like if there's gonna be a job, a social worker would get it over like a different counseling degree.’ So he kind of influenced me to look into that.”

So Janelle found a social work program at a college over the mountains in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

“So then I had my daughter and so she was probably three or four and I wasn't with her dad.”

“So you’re a single mom.”

“Yeah, with two pre-teen boys and a toddler basically. So yeah, I was waiting tables and commuting over to Highlands to get my social work degree, which took two years.”

Off gridding had given her nerves of steel. Eventually, her hard work and grit paid off. She got a job on the Taos Pueblo reservation.

“ I worked at Butterfly Healing Center on Taos Pueblo, which was a residential treatment center for Native youth. I was there for three years, and then I worked in the jails and commuted to Las Vegas and Tierra Amaria.”

And she kept studying. These days, she has a private practice as a play therapist. Her sons moved away. So did Joseph. He took a computer programming job in Miami and moved far, far away from Taos and its chaos. So you’d think Janelle would have felt a new financial freedom. But Taos still wasn’t welcoming to her. The housing problems didn’t go away. Most of her paycheck went to paying super high rents. She wanted out of the rental rut. During the pandemic, she bought a small adobe house that had been foreclosed on.

“It was a very small old adobe, over a hundred years old. It was on like a quarter acre. It was really small though, so it just had one bedroom and I slept in the living room and it was fine. The location of it was kind of sketch and when COVID hit, my daughter really didn't feel safe there.  There were a few things that happened, like drive-by shootings, not aimed towards us, but somewhere, and luckily we were in a thick adobe house, but I remember hiding in the bathroom with her and like, you can hear bullets ricocheting off of the heater thing outside the vent.”

Meanwhile, people started moving to Taos in droves.

“Places were getting bought up left and right. It was the height of the market. And I thought, you know what, now might be my time. So I sold it.”

“Did you make some money on it?”

“I did. I about maybe doubled what I had bought it for, which is really good because I had it for, I don't know, less than five years.”

“But was it enough that you could turn around and buy a different house?” 

“No, because it's also the height of the market. Part of me was like, ‘Shoot, maybe I should have kept it and rented it,’ you know what I mean? Or like, now I could probably make triple what I got it for.  Like, no, there was nothing you could afford here. Like, not even a trailer on sagebrush. I mean, I think you can't find a place to rent for under $2000 here. Especially if you're looking for a two bedroom. And it didn't used to be that way. It’s just the market changed so drastically. And I would say, especially due to COVID . . .” 

Janelle’s sons had moved away from Taos and her daughter was about to go to college and so Janelle started thinking about what to do next. She considered moving to Hawaii, even took a trip there to look things over. But she realized she’d be too far away from her family. Still she knew she couldn’t keep paying $2000 a month for her rundown apartment.

“And I was like, I better buy something before you can't afford anything here. So I started looking at land because I definitely couldn't afford a house.   Houses were $300,000 plus. So when I think about it long term, being a single person and getting into this debt and the interest rates being 7% or higher, like I don't have money, I don't have savings, I don't have family that's giving me money, you know what I mean? Like it's all me. So I was like, ‘What can I do?’ So I started looking at land and I thought, ‘Well, if I want land, I want water rights.’ So I found this property, I think on Craigslist.”

She happened to see someone selling a large yurt and decided, ‘You know what? I’m going to buy it.’ 

“Well, it was kind of a quick solution, I guess, to housing. I think it felt a little bit overwhelming being a single person and working full time and having a teenage daughter and like how I don't know how to build things. I don't have someone to help me build things So it was kind of like, okay, this is something that I felt like I could make happen quicker that would be a structure to live in.”

And so that’s how Janelle found herself coming full circle back to the off grid life she thought she’d left behind. So now she had land and a structure but wasn’t sure how to get it assembled. She asked her friend Pat to fly out and help her put it up. Sure, he said. They had to download the instruction manual.

“And I mean, just getting the roof on. The roof is so heavy, getting it up, you have to put it through the skylight. We had scaffolding in there, a winch, five, six big dudes. The first time it got put out, they didn't have the winch and a gust of wind came because the walls weren't on yet. And it picked it up and blew it into the apple tree. Took down the fence. I was so grateful that it didn't rip.”

It didn’t rip and they got the yurt up safe and sound. When her lease ended at her rental, she moved in. And now this is the affordable housing solution Janelle’s embracing.

“Sometimes it's a little bit overwhelming to think about because I feel like I am getting older and there are pros and cons to living in an off-grid structure. And I mean, this is kind of like a big canvas tent. You know, so when it's windy down here, which it gets very windy in the spring in northern New Mexico, sometimes I'm like, ‘Oh, I hope it's still standing.’ And I've been down here in the summer where there's really intense lightning storms and I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh. Like I should probably get in my car right now. I'll be safer in the car.’  And it's a tinderbox, you know what I mean? We had those really bad fires, Holman Hill and over there it's hard to find insurance, you know what I mean? Because it's so fragile.”

Janelle realizes this is a bold move at her age. But so many people across the American West are just like her – forced to make courageous decisions to protect themselves from a world that’s leaving them behind.

“Sometimes I think like, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing as I get older?’ Modern conveniences are very nice, you know?”

But she’s also proud of herself for learning the basics of taking care of her place alone. Like how to install a door knob. How to maintain her solar array. How to share an acequia with neighbors. She relies on friends and family to help her with the big stuff. Like her plan to build a deck. And getting all her fruit trees pruned. The number of projects are exhausting to think about so she tries to just figure out one thing at a time.

“The yurt’s very comfortable and it's really a nice space, but there are certain amenities, like in time it'll be more challenging. And no, it's not the snow that we get in North Park, but you have to have wood and you have to chop the wood and stack the wood and get the wood delivered.”

Like so many people trying to make a life in the American West, Janelle’s path hasn’t been an easy one. It still isn’t. But she refuses to let the affordable housing crisis force her to leave this place she calls home. She’s not sure if she’ll be able to live in her yurt longterm. Maybe she’ll put a tiny house on the property at some point instead.  The future is still uncertain but one thing she knows…

“ My sons were raised here, I think they still consider this home. But it's hard when you don't have a home to come back to, you know what I mean? So this at least is a property that I hope will stay in the family and I can give to them.”

As more and more people flood into northern New Mexico, jacking up prices and pushing out the locals, Janelle has found a way to stake her claim. This piece of land at the foot of the cliff, it’s hers and her children’s. Sure, there’s still so much work to be done. But hiking along her acequia to the little waterfall under the apricot tree, things start to make more sense to Janelle.

“I came down here on Easter, it was the first time since last year that I saw the water running. And, I mean, it just made me wanna cry. It was like, to me, this is like my happy place. Like life gets to be a lot and overwhelming and just the hustle and bustle. But when I come here, I just connect and I feel at peace.”

MUSIC ATTRIBUTION: 

• Private Hurricane (Instrumental Version) by Josh Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

• Grey Snow (Instrumental Version) by Josh Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

• Hollow Grove (Instrumental Version) by Josh Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.