They're getting ready for the downfall of America. Just don't call them preppers.
Hokyoung Kim for BI
After an hour of driving down winding dirt roads without cell reception, I caught up with the plume of dust billowing behind Jesse Fisher's pickup. We were headed for the same destination, the only one for miles in any direction: Riverbed Ranch, a burgeoning off-grid community in the high desert of western Utah.
Riverbed isn't a commune or a typical farming community; it's a land cooperative made up of 135 shareholders with a single goal: living independently of modern mass-scale systems of production. "True wealth is how long you can survive without money," Fisher, one of the community's earliest members, said. He and Philip Gleason, the founder, agreed to show me around the property last July.
In summer 2019, Fisher and 15 other households broke ground on the 1,245-acre property, beginning the long process of bringing their dream of a self-sustaining community to life. "During the pandemic, I had neighbors who were losing their homes due to unemployment," Fisher said. "I thought: 'This is really silly that we keep having this problem. Why don't we solve it?'" While this line of thinking was idealistic — the latest economic downturn actually slowed Riverbed's growth — today some 40 families live there full time.
The stereotypical doomsday prepper — the paranoid fearmonger stocking bullets and canned goods in a bunker — is a fringe figure, but a growing number of Americans have gained interest in learning survival skills and preparing for disaster. Last April, the financial-services firm Finder found that the number of Americans who said they'd recently spent money on emergency preparedness jumped from 20% in 2020 to 29% in 2023. They spent an average of $150 on items such as nonperishable food, medical supplies, and cases of water. Today you can't turn on a streaming platform without catching recommendations for popular survivalist reality shows such as "Alone" or "Naked and Afraid," and on social media, homesteading and disaster-prepping influencers have amassed millions of followers across various platforms.
Disaster preparedness is on the rise, in large part, because disasters are as well: from the supply-chain shortages caused by COVID-19 lockdowns to the climate crisis, from wars in Ukraine and Gaza to tech-driven loneliness, from runaway disinformation to intractable political polarization. More people are asking: Am I better off being hyperdependent on the global industrial economy? Would it be safer to grow my own food, store my own water, and not depend on complex systems I don't understand?
The folks at Riverbed Ranch have answered these questions decisively, embracing a radical turn toward self-reliance and small-scale sustainability. But as I spoke with them, I couldn't help but think of all the people that their vision would leave behind.
I met Gleason, the 73-year-old founder of Riverbed, at the community center — a sparsely furnished single-story building with a large, open space and a vintage "Star Trek" pinball machine tucked in the corner. He spoke in a soft, gravelly voice at odds with his firm handshake and tugboat stature. I noticed he was wearing an Apple Watch.
The idea for Riverbed Ranch, he told me, began after a harrowing experience decades ago: He was a young father to three young daughters living in a rural trailer park near a worksite in Idaho when, during a harsh winter, the power went out in the middle of the night. "Our drinking water was frozen, the temperature was dropping rapidly, and we had no way to feed our babies," Gleason said. He suddenly realized the extent of his family's dependence on complex social, economic, and technological forces that he could not meaningfully control. "That experience rewired my brain," he said.
Jesse Fisher
From there, Gleason developed a yearslong obsession with how to become less dependent. He studied permaculture, stockpiled canned goods, and researched off-grid communities around the world. "I was feeling pretty good about what I had accomplished, and then I heard a little voice," he told me. "'What are you going to do if the problem lasts two weeks longer than the resources you have stockpiled?'" Riverbed Ranch became his answer. He and the initial group of shareholders split the cost of the property and began building.
Gleason took me for a ride around the ranch in his pickup, pointing out landmarks, construction projects, and empty land with long-term aspirations. Each of Riverbed's shareholders gets a 2.5-acre plot that they agree to furnish with a modern septic system, a solar array for power, and infrastructure to grow food. As we drove past countless vegetable patches and at least one house made of hay bales, Gleason explained that residents ran an agricultural co-op where everyone could share the food they grew. The goal is to be able to grow enough food for everyone in town to live on in the event that outside resources become unavailable, but in practice, most residents still rely on external income to fund building projects as well as buy food and supplies from regular stores.
If disaster strikes, the ranch is relatively well prepared: It has a medical clinic, a volunteer fire station, gas and diesel tanks, and a town store. Gleason also pointed out an impromptu gravel-mixing plant that one resident launched as a joint venture with the co-op. There's even a church belonging to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints run by volunteers on-site (roughly 70% of the residents are members of the church, but that's more reflective of Utah's demographics than a religious agenda). There's no cell reception, but Elon Musk's Starlink blankets the area, allowing many residents to support themselves by working remotely. Until the apocalypse hits, most people still need to earn a living.
Andru Blonquist
Gleason likes doing things his own way, but in the interest of long-term stability, he has sought to maintain positive relationships with local county officials. Riverbed Ranch is 60 miles from the nearest post office and completely untouched by physical utility grids (residents are served by groundwater and private solar systems), but legal entities are appropriately registered, building codes are enforced, and tax dodgers are not welcome.
Joining the community is not as simple as purchasing a plot of land — residents are interviewed and vetted by elected board members for their level of commitment to the endeavor, relevant skills, and reliability. "The main thing that we look for are people who have integrity," Gleason said. "One of the most important things is that when somebody says they're going to do something, they believe they're going to do it." Once approved, shareholders spend $35,000 to receive water rights, a plot, and access to communal facilities. They also earn the right to vote on certain issues and elect representatives who oversee things such as road management and conflict resolution.
"It's pretty cool to see what's happening out here when things are not going south," Gleason said, "or at least — not as fast as I think they will be in the future."
It seems logical to call Riverbed a "prepper community." Gleason's wife, Colleen, said of Riverbed residents in a 2021 TV interview: "Most of them tend to be prepper types." But many residents I spoke with bristled at the term. Prepping, or "survivalism," often brings to mind nefarious compounds or right-wing fanaticism. Most residents saw the community as something markedly different from the stereotypical gunslinging doomsday preppers.
"There are some who are more focused on storing bullets than anything, and that shows their worldview that power makes right," Fisher said. "We don't embrace that at all."
From my impressions of the dozen or so residents I met, Fisher's statement rang true. Most of the shareholders I talked to struck me as committed, apolitical hobbyists who wanted to forge a deeper relationship with the systems of production that their lives depended on.
Jesse Fisher
"This group has a little bit of everybody," Priscilla Hart, a shareholder who was in the process of moving from Ogden, Utah, to Riverbed with her husband, told me. "There are people who just want to retire out there. There are people that are preppers. I think that there are people that are conspiracy theorists. But I think there's a really wide range of people who just want to be able to take care of themselves. We want our foundation strong enough to be able to manage if there's trouble."
Hart's lot contained only a storage shed and a well at the time, but construction was getting started on a house and septic system. "We have a strong interest in getting our hands in the dirt and all the things that go along with self-sufficiency," Hart told me. In Ogden, the couple had chickens and a garden, but they had wanted to commit to the lifestyle more deeply. The only hiccup had been the question of making money. Even in a community that aims to be self-sufficient, most residents can't escape the need to maintain finances and earn a living. Hart and her husband were both employed in the medical field doing hands-on work, which is difficult to translate into a remote job. But Hart told me they planned to develop a business that could be run from home.
"We just really liked the concept of the community, the remote location, and the off-grid homesteading package," Hart said. "When you homestead, you can be really isolated. Even just living out in the country, you don't necessarily have a lot of close neighbors and people to draw off of unless you've been there for a long time."
Many residents echoed her sentiment: They moved to Riverbed because they wanted to live close to other people who were similarly eager to be less dependent on broader political, economic, and social structures. Hart pointed to a vague sense of looming social instability as a major factor. "The more you can learn to take care of yourself and not rely on government, the better," she said.
Sarah Vezzani moved to the ranch with her husband in November 2020. A trained chemical engineer, she had become skeptical of the products created by modern chemical production — things such as pesticides and microplastics — and wanted to live away from what she saw as the increasingly toxic environment of cities and agricultural areas. "It's nice that science can come in and show why some things are working," she said in an interview with Fox News, "but in many ways, it messes up what's already there."
"I want to be real," Vezzani said. "I want to live with purpose and intention, and I really thrive with being connected to the earth."
Jesse Fisher
One person I met was visiting the community to decide whether it was worth the move. Brittany had been invested in off-grid, self-reliant living for years on her family's permaculture farm in Nebraska with her husband and daughter.
"I discovered the 'Survival' podcast probably about 13 years ago, and it made me aware of the nefarious nature of our government," Brittany said, referring to a survivalist podcast that intersperses permaculture advice with lessons on casting lead bullets. She had reservations about whether Riverbed would be a feasible option — it would mean downsizing, and her family needed ample grazing land for their cattle. Still, she was hopeful it had what she was searching for: "that community vibe — but still not under the government's thumb." She added: "If you don't have enough people, it tends to fall apart."
Perhaps more than any other disaster in America, Riverbed hopes to address the crisis of trust. In 2023, only 16% of respondents to a Pew Research survey said they trusted the government to do what's right, a historical low. And 79% said that Americans had "too little" or "far too little" confidence in one another, while 64% agreed with the statement: "Americans' level of trust in each other has been shrinking."
For all the distrust of government and other abstract power structures, trust is a core tenet of what Gleason aimed to foster and what residents said they were looking for at Riverbed. Gleason told me he hoped that by restructuring society around a smaller network of relationships, Riverbed would become a comfortable place for families to raise children in a safe environment with strong ties to the land. Already, 52 children belong to shareholder families — not all of them live on-site permanently, but two were born there.
Jesse Fisher
"This is about kids," Gleason said. "Our belief is that if you can teach people how to teach people how to fish, you can feed a nation."
In these unstable and uncertain times, it's easy to understand why some people want to disconnect from what isn't working and start from scratch. But even a project such as Riverbed Ranch, as it exists today, ultimately remains dependent on the global systems that residents are turning their backs on. Solar panels, vehicles, satellite internet — even the know-how to grow food in a sustainable fashion — are all sourced from modern technologies and industrial supply chains, the results of decades of societal advancement at a civilizational scale. It's not like you can simply walk into the desert and pummel dirt into solar panels.
When I visited Riverbed Ranch, Gleason — with a loan from another shareholder — had just closed a deal on a 1,298-acre plot of land in northern Arizona, where he hoped to build a second community of up to 200 households. In the long run, he wants to expand to five communities across the Rockies. His determination is inspiring, but beneath the quaint veneer of chicken coops and hoop houses, I felt a faintly pessimistic aura at Riverbed Ranch — not a pessimism of the will but a lack of faith in society at large.
"Civilizations rise and fall," Fisher said while showing me around his 864-square-foot lofted house. The interior had just been completed, and Fisher was living there only part time, spending the rest of his time in Santaquin, Utah. "The American idea that we're going to go on forever is naive at best. Societies transition from one type to another, and the transition is very uncomfortable. There are people who say that we're on the cusp of a major transition in America, and it just makes sense that if you're producing your own food, water, power — you're probably going to make it through."
A solar-powered sprinkler cycled across his lot, watering the lone apple tree. Today, he told me, nine more trees surround it.
Jesse Fisher
It's absurd to believe that someone could sustain themselves on a life preserver in the middle of an ocean, and the people at Riverbed understand this — it's why they have banded together. Maybe that's the most people can do amid today's tumultuous uncertainty: take care of themselves. But I found it hard to ignore that a place such as Riverbed could exist only if its residents were willing to write off the possibility of larger, more transformative social change.
To channel the same level of energy that made Riverbed Ranch a possibility into local politics or community-organizing efforts might not scratch the same existential itch, but anyone who imagines a coming doomsday is faced with a choice: to prepare for it or to play a small part in working to stave it off.
Evan Malmgren is a writer who covers power and infrastructure and is currently working on a book about American off-gridders.
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