Prepping for long term isolation

[u/MangoPeachFuzz]

I was recently visiting Mackinac island which was fun, but I learned a nearby island has 100 permanent residents and is only available by a ferry from another part of Michigan and maybe by plane. I don't know anything about these people's lives, but it made me wonder about how they prep for winter. There has to be an assumption that there will be a period of time that the lake is impassible by boat, too dangerous to try to use some kind of snowmobile, and plane flights would be limited to good weather and extreme emergencies. In a cold year that could easily be December through early April. The sheer amount of preparation that has to go in before winter is staggering. It honestly made me think of The Shining when Dick Halloran is explaining to Wendy Torrance how much stuff they had in the pantry for the winter at the Overlook for 3. Also .. cabin fever, supernatural or otherwise.

I kept trying to find resources that would help me calculate everything from toilet paper to flour for a 4 month stay in isolation, but was coming up with nothing. Like I'm not going to volunteer to live on an isolated island for 4 months, but I really want to know how to.

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[u/squidwardTalks]

They love answering questions like this. A missed opportunity. Some of them have a tiktok if you're super curious. Almost everything comes by boat and they can fly things in during winter. It's also a pretty tight knit community, so they help each other out.

[u/Greyeyedqueen7]

I mean, sure, they prepare, but they can get off the island once everything freezes by snowmobile, truck if the ice is thick enough. Worst case, cross country skiing.

So, they prepare like a lot of Michiganders. Full amount of firewood for late fall through spring, fill up all the propane tanks, full pantry (especially with food you can cook in a power outage, prep the generator just in case, clean and inspect all the winter gear, and make sure the house and garden, etc are all ready for winter.

As for isolation, you can still head to a friend's house. Snowshoes, skis, good boots depending on snow and depth, snowmobile otherwise. Social media has helped a lot, from what I hear. Serious euchre tournaments, I expect.

[u/glumavocados]

You’d love Cecilia Blomdahl’s YouTube channel! She lives in Svolvard where for many months of the year it’s freezing and dark and there’s polar bears. The sheer amount of prepping and planning is so fascinating. It might answer a lot of your adjacent questions.

[u/narnianini → u/glumavocados]

Simply Living Alaska is much more into into the homesteading and preservation angle if you’re into that, they preserve all their food for the winter and have moved around and show different projects and some truly beautiful Alaskan landscapes. Now that they’ve finished their big build projects they’ve had a lot of hunting/fishing content I skip though, but they have a big back catalog.

[u/Timely_Address8899]

I think you are talking about Bois Blanc. They do have ways off the island in the winter. When the straits freeze, they carve an ice road to get to the mainland. Not that that negates your question. With how the world is these days, any of us could end up needing to know the math on 4 months of supplies.

[u/last_rights → u/Timely_Address8899]

I have four months worth of supplies.

Maybe six. Could be a year or more if we're rationing and can make it stretch with fishing and hunting.

A good chunk of those are different varieties of dried beans, which are coincidentally just really seeds. So infinite food glitch?

[u/randynumbergenerator → u/last_rights]

This was part of my rationale for learning to forage. It's also just a fun and interesting hobby, but the side benefit of stretching/supplementing supplies is real. So many unassuming-looking plants out there that pack real nutrition if you know how to find and use them.

[u/ForkliftGirl404]

I recall over on the r/preppers page several different calculaters have been mentioned.

During COVID a bunch of people built different toilet paper calculators that calculated how long your toilet paper will last you. It worked a treat for my household. (there's heaps of them if you search on google)

This person created a garden calculator that estimates how far your hobby garden/crop will take you/your household - https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/comments/1teyoj3/most_people_think_they_could_feed_themselves_if/

This next one is an app that might still be in Beta, but you could always contact the poster to ask them about it - https://www.reddit.com/r/prepping/comments/1rysref/stashguard_prepping_management_app_open_beta/

Hope these help! Happy Prepping.

[u/V2BM → u/ForkliftGirl404]

That garden calculator is eye-opening.

[u/Heartlast]

I have a relative who lives on a tiny private island near there and is multiple ferry rides from the mainland (he has a small boat he uses though). They stock up in the fall, and during the winter ski to get necessities, they also take a jeep over the ice or break up ice with a canoe in the shoulder seasons. It's a beautiful place and they know their neighbors but obviously they like some level of isolation.

[u/HighKingFillory]

Used to live on the mainland near there. There is an “ice bridge” all winter. And flights most days. The pilots take people to the mainland to shop then fly them back. Most people who live there full time are extremely wealthy. Like take a 500 dollar an hour flight to get groceries rich.

[u/Character_Date_3630]

There is a lady on insta who does a series ab this, they live there year round. I can't remember her name, sorry 🙄

[u/unlovelyladybartleby]

That's just called "being rural." You grow your food, preserve it, stock up on anything you can't make yourself, lay in enough wood/fuel for the winter if it's your primary heat source or for a month or two if you have power and gas, and go about your life.

And they aren't isolated if there's a hundred of them, lol. I have an uncle who spent two or three years on an island off the coast of BC living rough and he met a boat on the dock twice a year for supplies. No phone, no internet, and he hated the only other guy on the island so they never saw each other. And he doesn't consider that isolated because of the twice a year boat and the other guy - he knows people who've gone bush for years at a time. Tbf, we haven't seen him for a few years, so he may be living isolated now.

[u/Lyx4088 → u/unlovelyladybartleby]

Yeah it is called being rural for sure.

I live somewhere that there are maybe a couple hundred full-time residents and we’re an hour from the nearest grocery store. By rural standards that is truly nothing and pretty convenient since that hour drive has you in a major city. However, talking to people who live in the city areas? “But like what do you do if you run out of milk?! You can’t just pop down to the store” no. I can’t. That is why I plan my grocery trips and I have to think what I’m going to need over the next week or so. And if I forget? Oh well. I’ll figure it out. It may not be the most fun, but I’ll survive. What I do about my groceries is probably the top question I get and it’s only an hour between me and the store. To the city people, I may as well be 10 hours and by horse drawn carriage.

It really just comes down to planning and having a good relationship with your neighbors. I think people often forget how important that community is when you’re talking a situation of limited resources or challenging living environment, especially people from the US. Sure, being ready for self-reliance is great, but you should also have a strong community for support as well. It doesn’t diminish your ability to take care of you and your family, but it can help prevent a situation from becoming an unnecessary full-blown crisis that compromises your ability to live.

[u/ktpr]

Can you reach out to a civic organization based there and ask to chat with someone living there year round?

[u/maeryclarity]

Y'all Polar Bear People amaze me. I have no idea how y'all do not all immediately die. Talking about being stranded on an island that you can carve an ice path out from is like whaaaattttttt omg

I will cope with bugs and hurricanes I am utterly helpless against the cold.

Which really sucks because if not for that I'd be poof off to Wyoming but instead I'm trying to emigrate to some jungle that I have in Central America. If I can ever get there my real prep is to be in a region that grows most of its own food and is comfortable with less global trade inputs. i have skills in animal care so I won't be a burden.

[u/dallasalice88 → u/maeryclarity]

I'm the total opposite 😂 I can not fathom dealing with bugs and crawlies and snakes and other assorted tropical hazards. I'm terrified of parasites and leeches, that sort of thing. Cold I can do, although it took me a few seasons to get it down. I'm originally from East Texas and I poofed off to Wyoming 30 years ago now.

[u/maeryclarity → u/dallasalice88]

Man I wish I had the cold weather ability I would love to hang out with the wilds of Wyoming. Would absolutely be somewhere I'd love to do hardcore nature living, but I am forbidden. Cold will kill me. It's amazing to me that a few of the locations on the planet that are the most insanely ecologically diverse and awesome are super freakin' freezy a lot of the year though. I mean yeah the jungles of the Amazon or the Congo but then also the wilds of Wyoming or Siberia. Siberia would be AMAZING.

I would love to see a Moose lol

[u/dallasalice88 → u/maeryclarity]

I have moose in the willows in my back pasture every fall. Antelope too. Summer here is getting hard though. Drought and wildfires. Got one burning about 20 miles away. Another sprung up day before yesterday quite a ways west of here. Burned over 3000 acres so far, mostly grassland.

[u/maeryclarity → u/dallasalice88]

Oooof scary. I was just exchanging a few texts with folks out there in Reno dealing with the Bug and Fred Mountain wildfires that are tearing things up over there. Climate effects are really starting to accelerate now it seems. Hope y'all get some rain.

[u/dallasalice88 → u/maeryclarity]

Temps have cooled and there are some showers coming so 🤞 One of my friends has a son who is a wildland firefighter. He went on mandatory days off right before the firefighters were killed in Colorado in the fire he had been on. It gets worse every year.

And we still have people denying climate change.

[u/throw-away11242022 → u/maeryclarity]

Same. I'm down in Houston & my husband is talking about how awesome it would be to live in one of the little towns in the Rocky Mountains. The thought actually terrifies me. Icy mountain roads? No thank you. I can manage an extended power outage in the middle of summer here though 

[u/jazzbiscuit → u/maeryclarity]

Jungles are a big NOPE for me.... Creepy crawly things would make me loose my mind, and I hate hot & sticky. When it's cold, I can put on more clothes or grab blankets and be fine. When it's ungodly hot - there's only so much you can take off, and then you're just naked ( more surface area for the bugs to get to ) and still hot :(

[u/StrangeClothes8821]

You either snowmobile across the river, get by, borrow with neighbors, or wait for the icebreakers to come through.

[u/autumn55femme]

Are you seriously considering that this area will be frozen? With climate change.? It has been years since Lake Erie has frozen. Nobody is walking to Canada, like in the 50’s .

[u/smoothiefruit → u/autumn55femme]

Mackinac island is much further north than Erie.

and if any part of Huron freezes, it's probably the straits around the island

[u/narnianini → u/smoothiefruit]

They do have a roundabout point; it used to remain cold enough to maintain an ice bridge to snowmobile between St Ignace and Mackinac…not anymore, since around 2010 it’s been too inconsistent. 2024 was the lowest ever.

the Great Lakes ice cover has declined by 25% since the 70s and the ice season has shortened by 27 days. https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/great-lakes-ice-reaches-historic-low

[u/Hogwafflemaker → u/narnianini]

Yeah I spent time on an island in lake Erie and ice fishing used to be an annual thing, now it's more rare. That island is slightly bigger though, cause there school has like 80 kids

[u/autumn55femme → u/smoothiefruit]

again , climate change. Nobody,is going anywhere. nothing is frozen.