Off-Grid Country North of St Johns, Arizona

A Mile Up in the Arizona High Country, With Nothing to Hurry You

Head north out of St Johns on the kind of Arizona backroad where the pavement stops mattering, and about fifteen miles later you’re standing on forty acres of high desert at six thousand three hundred twenty-four feet. The Painted Desert is somewhere off to the north, the Little Colorado River is running its old course south of you, and the only thing between your truck and the horizon is the horizon. This is the kind of country that doesn’t ask anything of you except that you show up.

Off-grid is the whole point out here. Build a cabin, stake out a solar array, park the camper while you figure out where the well is going to go, and learn the wind. Mule deer move through this country, antelope hold the flats, and the night sky is dark enough that you stop checking the time and start checking the stars. Off-gridder, cabin builder, homesteader who’s tired of the neighbor’s motion lights, guy whose wife finally agreed to “somewhere quiet”? The Arizona high desert has room for all of you.

Zoning here is Agricultural, which is the friendliest designation in the state for somebody who wants to actually do something with their land. No time limit to build. No minimum dwelling size. Site-built, modular, manufactured, mobile, and tiny home are all on the table, and you can live in an RV while you build (camping is allowed for thirty days without a permit, longer with one). There’s no HOA and nobody to tell you that your paint color is wrong.

St Johns sits about fifteen miles south, first settled by Hispanic families along the Little Colorado River in the 1860s and originally called San Juan before the name got anglicized to St Johns somewhere along the way. Petrified Forest National Park is roughly fifty miles north, which means the two-hundred-million-year-old logs laid down in the Triassic are about an hour’s drive from your tailgate. Show Low is about seventy-five miles west when you need a full Walmart run, and Gallup, New Mexico is about the same distance east if you’d rather cross a state line for your groceries.

Let me give it to you plain about the logistics. There’s a recorded legal easement for roadway and utility access to the parcel, the physical road just hasn’t been cut in for the last thirteen hundred feet or so between the nearest existing road to the south and the property line, and building your own way in is part of the deal (on the bright side, that’s one more thing nobody else gets to decide for you). No power, no water, no sewer at the lot, so solar plus a well or a cistern plus septic is the standard off-grid play in this part of northern Arizona. Annual taxes round to about the cost of a tank of gas. Summers at a mile and change are mild by Arizona standards, winters are cold and dry, and the stars are the same whether or not the road is finished.

A mile up in the high desert with no road yet and no neighbors yet, and nothing but the Painted Desert over the next ridge. That’s the kind of starting line most people never get to stand on.

• Forty acres of northern Arizona high desert sitting at 6,324 feet, about 15 miles north of St Johns
• Agricultural zoning, no time limit to build, no minimum dwelling size, no HOA
• Site-built, modular, manufactured, mobile, and tiny home are all allowed, and you can live in an RV while you build
• About 75 miles west to Show Low, roughly 85 miles east to Gallup, New Mexico, and around 180 miles northwest to Albuquerque
• Nearest full Walmart Supercenter is in Show Low to the west, with Gallup as the eastern backup for supply runs
• Petrified Forest National Park sits about 50 miles north, Painted Desert country out the back door
• Camping is allowed up to 30 days without a permit, longer with one from the county
• Recorded legal easement for roadway and utility access, physical road not yet cut for the last 1,300 feet or so from the nearest existing road to the south
• Off-grid ready, no utility hookups, solar plus a well or a cistern plus septic is the standard move
• Low annual taxes and not in a flood zone