When Off the Grid Goes Off the Rails

The people leaving modern life behind

George J. Ziogas
4 min readAug 3, 2023
© Brian / Adobe Stock

As daily necessities like food, housing, and health care become prohibitively expensive, many people are starting to consider different lifestyle choices. Wanting to live “off the grid” is an increasingly popular dream, but pursuing the lifestyle can be extremely dangerous.

Sisters Christine and Rebecca Vance (and the latter’s 14-year-old son) most likely had very good reasons for heading into the Colorado wilderness to live “off the grid.” However, the tragic ending to their story was revealed recently when the remains of their bodies were found by a hiker in the Rocky Mountains. It’s thought that they died from either starvation or exposure to the elements during the winter last year.

In an interview given to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Rebecca Vance’s stepsister, Trevala Jara, told a journalist that Rebecca wanted to make the radical lifestyle change because she “was fearful of a lot of things with the way she thought the world was going.” Jara also revealed that she and her spouse had offered the group the use of a remote piece of property that contained an RV, a generator, and access to a nearby store, but the Vance sisters refused the offer.

Although definitions vary, “living off the grid,” according to the Cambridge online dictionary

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George J. Ziogas

Vocational Education Teacher | HR Consultant | Personal Trainer | Manners will take you where money won't | ziogasjgeorge@gmail.com