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New West Series

Off the Grid in Montana, Part 1: Winter in the Earthship

By Joshua M. Potter, 3-14-11

Tom Leonard built an Earthship on top of a hill near Florence, Mont., for his family to live in after reading an article about the homes almost 20 years ago. Knowing very little about the technology required to run a self-sustaining house, and with limited building experience, the project took nearly two decades to complete. Tom says it's still a work in progress. Photo by Josh Potter.

It’s a warm weekday in the middle of January in the Sapphire Mountains south of Missoula, Montana. The ground is slushy and an inversion hangs just below the peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains across the valley from Tom Leonard’s home.

He’d like to be cross-country skiing, snowshoeing or hiking the hills that surround his home, which sits outside the town of Florence, but the warm weather doesn’t fool him. He’s spent enough winters up here to know that, even in June, it can drop below freezing around these peaks, and his stockpile of wood is looking a little thin.

There’s still a long way to go before the end of the winter. He chucks a log into its home under a canopy that extends from an exterior wall.

“That’ll get us through until at least March,” he says.

He packs up his chainsaw, houses his ax and eyes the solar panels on the hillside. It’s getting late in the season and the sun is changing position, but he decides he’ll change the angle on the 16 panels next week.

A calculator-sized electronic device plugged into the panels’ cables was registering 83 amps per hour earlier. Apparently, this is pretty good.

Although it’s long past the winter solstice and the angle of the earth is changing, Tom knows it won’t be the end of the world if the he waits another week to reset the angle of the solar panels.

In fact, he gets the most energy on days like this, when it’s extremely cold, but still sunny. The booster automatically kicks up the juice in lower temps, but the panels are still producing their maximum energy because of their exposure to sunlight.

“I’m actually getting more solar right now than in the summer,” he says. “The days are nice and the booster works better. ... When it’s cold and the sun is shining, it makes a lot of difference.”

Up here, Tom says, “You’re your own power company. No one’s going to come up and fix it for you. You learn a lot on the way.”

Tom lives with his wife Tara live in a home that is not connected to a grid of any kind. It’s called an Earthship and it’s gaining popularity among the most dedicated among green-living types.

All utility systems including water, heat and energy come from the house itself and self-replenishes what the home depletes. Solar panels power batteries, a backup generator and a pump moves water from a well into the bathroom, kitchen and shower. A cistern on the roof trickles water into a reservoir dug just outside the west wall and the windows are slanted at a 45-degree angle to catch as much sunlight as possible in the coldest months.

The house itself is shallow – one room deep – so the wood stoves and windows don’t have to work as hard to warm rooms further away from heat sources. But the back of the ranch-style home is tucked into a berm in the hillside to further insulate what little natural heat is produced in the dead of winter.

Twenty years ago, Tom knew next to nothing about power conversion or how important the solstice and the changing angles of the earth were to exposing his home to the most warming sunlight possible.

But, Tom, Tara and their two then-young daughters (Holly and Maureen have more recently grown up and moved away) decided the best way to learn how to operate a house like this was to build it themselves.

It took almost 20 years to get it the way Tom had imagined it in his head. Twenty years of setting something up then watching the technology change drastically the next year. Twenty years of commiserating on details like the angle of the windows or how much water, exactly, the cistern would catch, then realizing no matter what, they’d need to build a well for the dry Montana summers.

Tom, a lifelong lover of the outdoors, got on board after reading about Earthships in Mother Earth News. He didn’t think it sounded all that difficult: Pick a plot of land with southern exposure, get your hands on a few hundred tires and tin cans, learn how to mix stucco and the rest would take care of itself.

“Your ideas kind of morph through the years and you realize this takes a lot of money and a lot of time,” Tom says. “More than you anticipate.”

These days, they can sit back, enjoying a pot of beet stew they made from their garden, appreciate their hard work and laugh at how physically demanding it all turned out to be.

On this day, it’s warm inside because the sun has been shining all day and the wood stoves have been burning for hours. Only a few lights can be seen from towns on the other side of the valley. With their daughters gone and the Leonards a generation older now, most of the work is maintenance and not building.

But when they started, Tom says, “At that age, being in good physical shape, it’s like ‘I don’t care how long or how hard I have to work, I’m going to do it.’”

“We weren’t completely young,” Tara reminds her husband. “I turned 40 when we moved up here, so Tom was 38. That’s one thing I felt: taking on an endeavor like this in your forties? Better do it in your twenties.”

Although it’s quite a drive from the stretch of Florence along Highway 93, it’s not hard to find the Leonards’ home. There’s only one road that leads to it and it lies at its end. Halfway between Lolo Pass and Skalkaho Pass, a two-lane highway that goes up into the Sapphire Mountains turns to dirt and takes a sharp left. The house is at the end of the tracks Tom’s well-worn Ford F-150 left in the mud before the ground froze.

The closest neighbor is 200 yards downhill, past the camping trailer, the well and the propane tank.

Tara remembers the day they found the plot of land. They had been at an impasse about just how far from civilization they wanted to live. She needed something a little accessible for the girls and to commute a half-hour north to Missoula. He wanted something right out of Henry David Thoreau. Tom stood in the spot on the property where the trees thin out and give way to a high-elevation pasture and said, “That’s as far in as I’m going to go.” Tara remembers looking at him and saying, “That’s as far out as I’m going to go.” They had a spot. Building the home came next.

For a few years, the couple had been living in the then-undeveloped woods outside Missoula in a camping trailer Tara’s parents gave them. It now sits at the low end of their property. After the birth of their first daughter, the Leonards couldn’t keep their growing family crammed in the mobile home.

That’s when Tom, who had been making his living surveying land for logging companies and the U.S. Forest Service, read the article about Earthships and headed down to Taos, where the original developer was holding a seminar.

“Pretty much everything you do has to begin with some sort of master philosophy or at least a picture of what you want to see in the end,” Tom says.

But he admits he was idealistic: He wasn’t simply going to build a house with his bare hands by himself. He would build it to be independent from any grid using newer technology and skills he hadn’t learned yet.

He loved the outdoors. He loved his family. He loved the plot of land, and for him and his wife, that seemed enough.

NEXT: Building and maintaining the Earthship.

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