Ken and Janet Clark

Interview of several back-to-the-landers including Ken and Janet Clark by Nancy Renk, 24 February 1996, in Sandpoint, Idaho.

R: How did all of you get interested in moving back to the land? What, what spurred you to try this?

KC: …Mother Earth News… Yeah, I think we were a product of the times too. It was the, you know, early ’70s and mid ’70s and always had a great appreciation for the outdoors and living (). For me anyway, where I grew; I grew up in a small town in Oregon and then moved to Alaska and that was one of the things that drew us to North Idaho was it was kind of a happy medium between what we knew in Oregon and Alaska. It was kind of a nice blend of the two for us and we were looking for a place where we () the simply life and get back to basics and we traveled around extensively for a couple of years in a Volkswagon bus and looked at northeastern Oregon and parts of Washington and () each time. And then in the course of conversation and meeting people in Alaska that had been here before, it sounded interesting to Janet and I both. And our first exposure was we came into Coeur d’Alene in the December, in the winter and we went south of Coeur d’Alene and looked around the Saint Maries area and it was very rainy and drizzly.

JC: No snow that year.

KC: There was very little snow down there and very little here. And then we chose to look us here the last portion of the trip during that expedition down here and it was a beautiful, clear blue sky day and the snow was just light and dusty and it was really, coming across the Long Bridge and seeing the lake and all that and we ended up actually buying some property over, at that point like in ’74, ’75 over off of Dufford Road. And then we returned back to Alaska and put a thing up on the wall looking at this property and that was our goal, the thing that kept us going, you know our dream and work and work and work and to come back here. And we came back here in the spring, early summer of ’77 to the land over off Dufford Road.