Building Your Own Mountain Hideout: A Step By Step Guide

Way back in the day I was really enamored with all this society bullshit, this pushing and pulling, this tugging to reach higher plateaus of existence, schmoozing and smooching the stars and shagging random married women at film festivals; ah, it was the life, sipping champagne and smothering myself between the knockers of some so-and-so that you’d see in the gossip papers a few days later. I had the tux, I had the Bentley, I had the chateau by the sea where I flew my helicopter. It was all there, folks, some kind of high living as they called it, though after some years it made me want to puke, so I burned it all down and threw away the key.

In fact, that’s half the reason I started travelling, was to get away from all those fakes and into the grit of it all, you know, live like the low-life scum who always tried to break in and steal stuff from my fancy places of residence. You could surmise it was all fun for awhile, and indeed it was, but there was simply something about society that made me cringe after awhile.

Maybe it was all the lack of fresh air at those cocktail parties, or getting sneered at for wanting a burger instead of some food-fusion bullshit that they serve at these places that pass as “restaurants” these days, hey, I’m not a psychologist. I just got tired of it all, packed it all in, moved around a little, saw the lower levels of the world’s population and laughed with them, cried with them, fucked them over in bad business deals. I never said I’d lost my edge.

But even that’s not enough after awhile. It’s just a matter of time before most of us just lose it, snap, get tired of all this human to human interaction that’s bandied about as the be-all and end-all of our existence. Hey, I like computer games, living in someone else’s basement, attacking people online when they get out of line; I hate that whole working stuff, especially the fancy-kind of work where you don’t need to ask someone if they want fries with that. The disposable life’s for me, and while it took some soul searching to really make It clear, I can tell you well and truly that the dumpster is one of my better friends.

Ah, but I’d leave him too, for a little peace and quiet. I’d wager that all of the suburban garbage in the world wouldn’t make up for some decent hunting and trapping skills – kill your own food, make your own clothing. Live far away from all those assholes and the entire notion of commerce. It’s all icing on the candy-cake of the apocalypse, raining down on us sooner or later, maybe in a few years if the Mayans were right, if not then fuck ‘em – I’m getting out anyways.

The private chateau was indeed pretty isolated but you needed a butler, a helicopter, and a steady stream of ingrates to keep the thing going. What any self respecting anti-socialite really needs is an obscure mountain hideout, and I mean obscure – not some bullshit cabin in Aspen or Whistler, or some namby-pamby tropical island in the Bahamas that you bought for a cool five mill. That’s pedestrian, that’s posturing, that’s a waste of my time.

I’m talking real isolation – think the Canadian territories or Siberia. I’d hesitate to say Alaska as it’s been overrun by gun-toting Yankees who will try and play their “home of the brave” homeland security card on you sooner or later, but if you can carve out a hideout just behind the frozen mountains up there, then do so. The key is the remoteness – no vehicles should be able to get within a day’s hike, or climb, of the hideout. Caves are best, but are often occupied. Hidden cave systems are worth their weight in platinum. I had a line on some but a random Saudi dickhead beat me to the punch.

You’ll need supplies. If you have money to burn, just buy a flatbed truck, fill it up with stuff, and get it near there. Bring piles of human labor, maybe some construction guys, to manufacture it for you, if you’re all up in the luxury stuff – but the problem then is that they’re going to sell you out. Fuck that, I say – learn the tools of the trade, and build a modest camp where no one can find you. Haul up a generator or two if you really feel the need for electricity. It was all going well until Benjamin Franklin fucked it up, and I still don’t know why in the hell we bother with the stuff. Live by the sun, die by the sun, I say.

Guns are an option and I’d advise having a few around, with a few thousand rounds of ammunition, but on a daily basis you’re a dipshit if you think you’ll be hunting with a rifle or two. Get yourself a crossbow, fashion your own bolts. Learn how to melt pewter and lead, learn how to take down elk with an arrow at fifty yards. It’s silent, and it’s healthy. And if anyone dares fuck with you in the backwoods, you can save your ammunition for when it really matters – when you need to lay waste to bandits and hikers and then loot their stuff.

You’re also looking at long winters, which is fine in my opinion, as there isn’t any reason to leave your house anyways. Build a fire or two. Have gallons of gasoline sitting around just in case you can’t get the damn thing ignited on its own. Do like the ancients did – pick berries in the fall, grow vegetables in the spring, preserve your meat for the winter. The northern lands are excellent for this. Go down into the tropics and you’re competing with all sorts of problems, not least of which are rebels in the jungle – though you can subjugate them and probably become their leader after awhile. But that’s another story for another time.

Ultimately the mountain hideout is a great idea once you tire of society and, in my opinion, is the best escape from the fast life that people seem obsessed on living. Let them have their possessions, ruled by bills and protocol, stuck in a rat race on the slow road to hell, watching themselves age in a foggy mirror and wondering where the time went, what happened to their health, and how they’ll ever leave the corner they’ve painted themselves into. Out in the woods you’re free, living your own way, unless of course you get within five miles of my own hideout and then I’m not really sorry to say that you’ll be picking lead shot out of your ass for months to come.