From home to viable land
Find land worth driving to.
We rank reachable counties, show what land costs, and help you vet the properties you find.
From home to viable land
We rank reachable counties, show what land costs, and help you vet the properties you find.
National rankings
A first pass through the index: high-scoring counties for bolthole land, with a budget lens when carrying cost matters more.
The Bolthole Index ranks every county in America for backup land, off-grid living, and long-term resilience. We score seclusion, self-sufficiency, administrative boringness, durability, property autonomy, and carry cost while treating budget as a constraint instead of the whole thesis.
A British word, an American search
A bolthole is a place of refuge—somewhere to go when ordinary systems fail or you simply need a way out. Here it means reachable rural backup land with enough water and productive capacity to support a household, but modest enough to own quietly and carry for years.
Jon Ragsdale built this independent project after reading Barton Biggs’s Wealth, War & Wisdom, a history of markets, real assets, and wealth preservation through World War II. Read the origin story and the full definition →
Methodology
The score is a first-pass due diligence model for bolthole land. It favors counties with practical self-sufficiency, distance from dense systems, durable climate and hazard profiles, workable local rules, property autonomy, and manageable carrying costs.