Couple living in remote off-grid Alaska homestead reveal brutal winter reality including wolf encounters, 6-hour grocery runs

A couple who relocated from the suburbs of New England to live in a remote, off-grid homestead in Alaska have opened up about the extreme lengths they go to in order to survive the brutal winter months—from braving encounters with wolves while sourcing water to driving six hours to the nearest grocery store.Dennis and Amy—who have kept their last name offline for privacy reasons but are known online as “Holdfast Alaska”—have been living self-sufficiently by raising, hunting, and gathering their own food; using renewable energy; and living with minimal waste for the past decade—even welcoming a child, Lena, during that time.Recently, they decided to begin sharing their journey on social media in the hopes of helping others who wish to pursue an off-grid lifestyle but aren’t sure where to start.The couple offer up the tips and tricks they have learned while figuring out how to live an almost entirely self-sufficient lifestyle.“We did not grow up homesteading or in Alaska or living in the bush; we both grew up in the suburbs of New England,” Amy says in a recent YouTube video, charting their move from “suburbia to remote Alaska.”She goes on to reveal that she and Dennis met shortly after they had graduated high school and soon moved into an apartment together.

However, she says they quickly grew “very dissatisfied with city living” and began focusing on their shared dream of building their own property off the beaten path, where they’d be able to raise a family together.“We really wanted our own property to build and raise a family on, and to really live a homestead lifestyle and produce a lot of our own food—that was always a real big dream for us,” she explains.Initially, the duo started looking closer to home, with Amy recalling how they would “scour Craigslist” for land in places like rural Maine, before eventually happening upon a sprawling property they were able to buy for just $5,000.That site would go on to...