My Page: Josh Potter

New West Series

The single track road leading up to the pink-stucco one-story is turning to mud, and water trickles from the berm behind the home all the way down to the creek at the end of the neighborhood. Although the mountains adjacent to his house are still frozen under near-record snowpacks, it’s already predicted the rivers will flow higher than average this April and May. Spring is coming, and Tom knows that means he’s going to be very busy.

“March comes, so now I’ve got essentially two months to get stuff done in the house before I head out to work,” Tom says.

He works seasonally in the wilderness around Western Montana, doing inventory on entire swaths of land for companies interested in logging and other natural resources. It’s been his lifestyle for more than 20 years, leaving for months in the summer to come home to a frozen landscape and, sometimes, a near freezing family, to continue work on the Earthship.

New West Series

Holly Leonard returned to the U.S. last year from Kenya, where she had been doing nonprofit work with adoption agencies. As she relocated to Denver to work at Hope’s Promise headquarters, her roommate called her with some bad news: She had found an apartment, but they’d have to share a bathroom.

“I just laughed at her. I grew up sharing a bathroom that is a hallway with my entire family,” Holly says.

Although there is nothing special about the two-bedroom Denver apartment where Holly, 25, lives now, she says it’s the most luxurious place she’s ever had: It has a flush-toilet, electric heat and a TV.

From the camper van where she spent the first years of her life, to the off-the-grid Earthship her family built in the hills above Florence, Montana, to the crammed dorm rooms of the University of Montana, luxuries have been defined as heat, personal space and doors.

Holly will be the first to tell you she’s not the Earthship type. 

New West Series

Two days after a late January snowstorm, Tom Leonard is in the Earthship on top of the hill in Florence, Montana, preparing beans he harvested from his garden earlier in the season.  He soaks them in a crockpot.

There’s hardly a cloud in the sky. It’s just above freezing. While his wife Tara is at work for the afternoon, Tom says he wants to use the time to realign his solar panels. There’s one large frame with 10 panels on the berm behind his house and another with six more powerful panels on his roof.

Although the solar panels are actually one of the more easily maintained aspects of the Earthship, Tom says that most people are turned away from alternative housing projects like this one because of the necessity of solar power. The upfront cost of the panels and installation can add up to $30,000 or more. And no matter if a house is on the grid or not, it will require pricier, energy efficient appliances if any of the electricity is to come from solar power.

New West Series

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.