In this episode of Occupy the Land, we make strides on our off-grid dome by completing half the concrete floor pour for the laundry-bathroom area, keeping it moist to cure in the Arizona heat. We prep for the next pour while tackling errands in town, including exchanging boards and fixing Donna’s car. Join us for a hyperlapse ride along our desert roads, maintained with our tractor, as we share insights on road upkeep, shade solutions for our pool, and the realities of living 70 miles from Phoenix. Experience the balance of dome construction and desert life!

Transcript:

All right. Well, we got half of the laundry room and bathroom done, and the bathroom part’s over here, so we’re going to be prepping this later today, if not early tomorrow. And, we’re letting this cure, so there’s, Yeah, concrete underneath. We keep it under the plastic and wet so that it, Because it’s hot. You want to, be moist for God a week, you know, to get it to harden and cure.

Well, and then we’ll go ahead and we have the, expansion foam there at the end. So that’s the seam that’ll go over here. You go ahead and put it down to the, what we’re going to be doing today is we have to take in Donna’s enclave, you know, which is, you know, over there, you know, engine light went on.

So what we’re going to do is go into town. We have to return some, boards. You know, I wasn’t clear on, you know, at two by ten, two by 12. Man. So she got them 12ft long, but the dimensions were the width. So we’re going to take some boards back and exchange them for what we need. And, we’re going to take the truck in with the enclave and leave it to be worked on.

What we’re going to do is I’m going to go ahead and put the, I mean, you get more cement and more stuff. We make a use of the trip, but what we’re going to go ahead and do is Gideon put you on the ride, and I’ll just show you the road, the traveling we have to do every time we go to town.

So you can see the who built the roads. It was me. So we’ll get to go over it needs, next time it rains, we’ll go over it with the back blade on the tractor again and smooth it out. It’s starting to get a little bit rougher. I got to do maintenance on it every now and then. But, you know, this is the dome that’s going to go on the pony wall and then we’ll, you know, cover it.

But we just put these shade cloths on there. They work really well. Now, a friend of mine, Bob that has one of these domes, you know, the, a 30ft like we have on the workshop. And he found these triangle shade things that you can just buy for, like, $50. And they seem pretty heavy duty, and you just orient them however you want.

And so we ordered, one of those that we’re going to put over to the pool, and I have some aluminum, two by two tubing that we’ll put up and kind of get a shade for it because it’s only going to get hotter. And we really like having the pool to cool down. But when you’re out in the blazing sun.

Oh my God. So that’s what we’re going to do today. We’ll go ahead and take you on the trip so you can see the roads that we have to do. Now I have two other montero’s like that. We got the first one and that thing just kicks butt. We’ve had for God 20 years. So I have another one has bad fuel pump that will get it going when I got time.

And we’ll be using that. So we have, you know, the Jeep that’s over there, the engines going on that one. And we want to, you know, fix that. We have our 2500 Ram that we gotta work on. We gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta. So God, accumulating some vehicles, but they all have a purpose. But the enclave is, you know, Donna’s nice car, so we got to go get that taken care of.

And you’re along for the ride to see the road. Okay, we’re on our way into town now. We’re about 70 miles west of, Phoenix. See if I can clean this windshield a little bit.

Make that better. And there’s Donna at the runway. It goes down that way, but we’re going on the border road. That’s on the east side of the property. Now, this is one that we built. It’s pretty good shape. Every time it rains, we take and get the box blade out, get the tilt of the road just right so the drainage does right.

Find out where the check dams go and all that. But in the last, it’s been like 14 months, 15 months. We’ve only had one decent rain that actually flowed on the washes. And this was just a big giant gully here. This is just, you know, a rut. So we fix this road and so on. You’ll see that the road’s in pretty good shape.

And, but when we get to what’s called Pipeline Road, they have five high pressure natural gas lines. They’re only 5 to 10ft underground, so they don’t want you, you know, fixing the road. Now, the controversy is that the way the Safety Pipeline Commission of Arizona, whatever their definition, is that if you’re scraping it at all, even with the back blade, what you’re doing is you’re excavating not allowed, can’t take even a fraction of an inch.

But if you’re dumping material under the road, then that’s road maintenance. So that’s kind of the the bad I’m. Oh I road maintenance all all day long. I’ll bring my little green dump trailer and put some stuff on and level it out. And we’re all good. But the piping company, you know, was it Camper Morgan? I think it is.

They got 80,000 miles of road all over the, country, and they’re like, no, we don’t want to have to unless we have to. And you’re not allowed. So it’s a kind of a negotiation. We have two ways to get in. When we get down to the tee here, you’ll see they call it Kotori. I don’t know why.

Because cows sleep on the river or something, but, you go left, which is north towards I-10, the highway there, and or you go right south. Now, we don’t go north even though the road is fine. We got it all fixed, but the Cowboys are down there and doing the roundup. They just as soon not have people going through there, even though we have access.

But just to be a good neighbor. Yeah. We’ll go this way to the right and, you know, then make them happy. So when we have to, we’ll be going the other way. If they make it to where this road gets bad enough and they’re not going to fix it now, this is just our road that we’re maintaining. It goes about, a few miles and then you hit the pipeline.

Road runs diagonally in front of these mountains here. Now, it goes for miles and miles and miles and miles. Now it comes from, I think, Texas. And that is the fuel that powers the peaker plants. Get around Palo Verde nuclear power plant now as we’re driving, you know. So I put it on Hyperlapse and you get to see some of the, short panels and the big giant solar farms, and you’re just more and more and more just keep popping up out of here.

And, they use the natural gas to power these gas. Natural gas turbine, make it go where we get super energy right away. You don’t have to heat it up. It’s, you know, push a button and boom, you got power. They’re called peaker plants for when everybody turns on their air conditioning or something. So the baseline power is from the nuclear power plant.

The nuclear power plant, provides electricity really for in Arizona. And they sell it all over the place. There’s like a, you know, co-op group of somebody owns the power. Now, this is where I get a lot of our material. Now, there’s different areas on this drive to where it has, different grades of gravel that have naturally kind of been separated out with the flow, with the washers and so on.

So you’ll see a lot of as we drive, there’s piles on it put up on the side of the road because there was so much sand and gravel, I had to remove a bunch of that just to even get to where you could make a nice road. But those piles are also what we use for, you know, various things on the land.

So I’ll come out here and get several trailer loads and go back and dump it. And this is where I had to get, it had to be at least 150 trailer loads, dump trailer loads to just put over the roads on the land. Because once you break through the surface here, it turns into moon dust and it’ll go right up to the axle and you get stuck.

So, you know, we have one neighbor that shares this road. Well, two cattle, the cow boys. But, yeah, we’re just trying to make sure his front wheel, two wheel drive Kia Soul that his wife drives, is able to make it. So that’s what we’re doing now. I’ll go ahead and, Cast up the. You can kind of get it.

You know, this is how the road is across the desert, and then we’ll do a hyperlapse going into town. Now, once we get to where you start seeing farmland, then that’s where the county actually maintains the roads. And we’re probably six miles from where they maintain the roads. And, you know, now I got to do it. So you kind of get an idea.

Okay. Donna’s coming up behind me. I don’t want to take the camera down, reset everything. But, if you go left, I-10 is up there about 9 or 4 miles or less. And if we go this way on the other side of Saddle Mountain there. And that’s where our friend Bob is, right on the other side. There now are mesh network.

That’s the communication that we needed to bounce off another mountain that’s over to the left, up here to get around that mountain so you could hear and, get the data. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go down what’s called, Courthouse Road here, and then we’ll hit Salem Highway. But this is pavement. You start to see all these different farms, and a lot of this is alfalfa.

And they just every five, six weeks, they harvest it, make big bales and shipping off to Saudi Arabia or whatever they do with it. Now there’s a lot of farms, but these are being turned into solar farms. Now I’m going to go ahead and leave it on, record video here. So you can see just there’s a bunch of these and they go way far back all over the place, but you’ll see it was gone nine months ago that they started construction on this.

And then all of a sudden, boom, you got a solar farm and there’s a bunch of them, and I’m not sure how they go into the crib. Arizona’s got plenty of sun, so a lot of places sure may not work. You know, I’m not a big fan of when you got this big giant thing after ten years. Doesn’t work and it’s an eyesore decommissioning to pay it off.

But but, in Arizona, solar would be a work of just fine. So, you’ll get to see how they put in all of these transmission lines. Power, substations, all that stuff. Now, off to the left, up here. I don’t know if you’ll see it in this frame. They have a natural gas peaker plant on the other side of Saddle Mountain over there.

Right about ten miles is where Palo Verde yucca plant is. And they have a lot of natural gas plants all around it and solar. So Arizona has produced a crap ton of power. How they’re going to do that in with AI or if they’re just, you know, power and everybody’s increasing population, the air conditioner. But, that’s what’s going on there.

So I just go ahead. We’re coming up on the, solar plant here. You kind of get an idea that maybe I’ll swing the camera over a little bit. Okay. Over there. See, there’s stacks for the natural gas, and we come up here directly in there. Maybe not, because we got this berm here in the way. Yep. There you start to see the stacks here and exhaust stacks.

So that’s the, natural gas peaker plant. And you’ll go ahead and see it as we clear these trees here.

And there. So that’s natural gas runs there. And then the solar plant. All this was put up in March. It was amazing. And they, you know, did a lot of work on that. And then they just keep had them now west of where our land is all the way back where we were, you know, a few miles west of that is another solar field.

And they’re doing so these solar fields that you see here are just spot all over the desert. Let’s get a surprise. Took as long as they did to finally do it, you know. But I guess solar panels are so cheap that they start making they pay themselves off within a few years. Now in the news where they find it out, oh, there’s little Chinese chip in.

Might turn it off, kind of, you know, make the panels go bad or something. Thank me. And nothing surprises me anymore. But that’s what’s going on. I’ll put it back on hyper and we’ll get, Where are you going? To see the first stop we’re going to make is before we even leave the desert is a post office box.

We have, things delivered now. You always deliver to the post office box. You either have a friend out here, a friend, or. Or to my daughter in West Phoenix. And the surprise area name of the town surprise is where we drop off. Have delivered a lot of our orders, so on, because they don’t like P.O. boxes, but now we’re going to stop by the old box.

I think they got some goodies for us. Well, this is the post office where we get a lot of our post. Now, the palm trees that you see over there, it’s hard for me to see this in the light. The palm trees over there, that’s a spring. It’s a hot springs. It’s natural hot springs. Been here for freaking ever.

And it’s really nice. And you may have seen videos of Don and I going over there before now. If you saw the white buildings, they’re over behind the trees. Yeah, you can see them over there. They’re, eggs. Hickman Eggs has big giant penthouses out there. And when they first put it in, probably, I don’t know, 4 or 5 years ago.

And, and sometimes in the summer when they open it, I hear it smells and it’s just dam. So there was a big controversy between this RV park that’s over here now fills up. I mean, it fills up, especially when they have the outage out to nuclear power plant, which is on the other side of it over there. And, they’re making oodles and gobs of money.

And then they had to put up with Smells Like Death. I mean, it’s just really bad smell. You know, it’s not all the time. Just every now and then you get a big with, especially when they open the doors or clean it out or whatever. And so for years this was vacant and a, you know, did a lawsuit back and forth now to quit it.

And finally they got some kind of compensation. They opened it back up. Now on the other side of, these RV, there’s a little auto repair tire kind of thing here by here’s the intersection for the highway I-10. That pilot there were where, two trucks coming here to fuel up and everything. And that’s where we got kind of a little general store and subway and that kind of stuff.

So you get semi civilization, but you have some, food trucks that are down here. But this off ramp has been here for God decades, but it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And it starts filling up now over on the other side, this foliage here, you probably didn’t see it coming in, is a mature big giant cornfield.

And the corn grows tall and then back. This way back there. There are some more fields that are corn fields. So I didn’t know there was as much corn here. And I guess it I guess it works. You know, they got a bunch of corn. So we’re going to be getting on to the freeway here. And, and I’ll do a little bit of hyperlapse, just kind of show you how we’re coming into town from out here.

Yeah, but this is how we get to town. You know, it’s a thing. Now, there’s another entrance. When I said before you go north from there, when we hit the asphalt, that you go north to the highway up there. But it’s under construction, and a lot of times it’s backed up and just. Yeah, we go this way because it’s the exact amount of time to get to this point here.

You know, if we go to the other way. So it doesn’t really matter. All right. Okay. Now we’re starting to get into civilization. This is on the west, west west part of the valley. The Valley of the sun. The Phoenix metropolitan area. And this is where it really starts getting, you know, new buildings and so on. But it’s very small.

Lots you know, they’re nice homes, but they’re on postage stamp watch. It’s just how fast can they build? And, it’s this is where civilization is kind of really starting to come out. And you can tell when it’s coming. I’ve been in the Valley since the early 70s, and I tell you it starts with a convenience store and a gas station and boom, an exit, all kinds of stuff.

Now, where we at the pilot that we went on to I-10, the freeway from the post office right across north of the highway there, is where Belmont is going. That is Bill gates, you know, smart city plug in the back of the head matrix saying, you know, make sure you got your happy shot. And, that’s going to be interesting how that comes out.

Now. Miller Watson Road here. This is where you start getting into your Lowe’s and Home Depots and Harbor Freight and all that kind of stuff. And, so when we have to go get supplies, this is how far we’re having to come. Now we got another, I don’t know, 15 miles or so to go to where we need to go, but you kind of get the idea.

This is how far out we are from the valley of the sun. Peace

List of links:

https://old.bitchute.com/video/U0JcQjbOQ1yX

https://rumble.com/v6w1ueo-dome-floor-prep-and-desert-commute-occupy-the-land.html

https://www.brighteon.com/9ede4252-f3e3-4ff8-bc3a-72fd52a6e347

Dome Floor Prep & Desert Commute: Occupy the Land!https://t.co/lbBCBhpmFO

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) July 11, 2025

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