THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, July 30, 2019 |A
nearly 3½ mile hike or ATV ride
over a rough path. A night on the
uninhabited island costs $320 in-
cluding meals and transportation.
A storm whipped up during Ms.
Chew’s visit and she didn’t at-
tempt any whale-watching. A bro-
ken shade in her bedroom failed to
block the lighthouse beam flashing
onto her walls. She couldn’t play
gin rummy on her iPad because
she had no internet. “I thought it
was boring,” said the 71-year-old
retiree from New Braunfels, Texas.
“I slept a lot.”
Ed English, the inn’s owner, said
plenty of people trek to an indoor
whale-watching station no matter
the weather. Just the other day, he
said, visitors watched an orca eat
a baby humpback whale off the
coast. Every night, guests drink
water with iceberg chunks from
the North Atlantic. “If you’ve got
to watch videos or play games
then, nah, don’t come,” he said.
By this August, Mr. English
hopes to open his newest addition,
a more than $600-a-night glass
box he’s calling the “iceberg nest.”
The see-through floors will jut out
from a cliff over the churning
ocean 100 feet below.
Guests already want to know
when they can book the room,
which comes as no surprise to Mr.
English. “When you’re sitting
there,” he said, “you’re the only
thing in the world.”S
ummit Prairie, a vaca-
tion home atop a tower
deep in the Oregon wil-
derness, doesn’t have
many amenities. There’s
no Wi-Fi, no TV, no
clock. It’s about an hour from gas
and groceries. The nearest bath-
room is an outhouse down four
flights of outdoor stairs, unless
visitors want to make use of a fun-
nel attached to the edge of the
deck. And it’s closed the entire
month of August because it might
burndowninawildfire.
Yet travelers are lining up to
stay here. It has a 300-person wait
list and spots for the year book
within minutes. For a bare-bones
experience that people used to
achieve simply by pitching a tent
at a campground, guests pay
nearly $200 a night.
Simplicity is the ultimate luxury
as travelers search for new ways
to unplug this summer. The prom-
ise of escaping everyday life has
always lured vacationers. But now
people whose daily routines are
consumed by digital demands and
distractions are going to ever-
greater lengths to do nothing in
the middle of nowhere.
On travel-booking sites, Ameri-
cans are finding increasingly idio-
syncratic routes off the grid. Op-
tions include a coastal hideaway
with cutting-edge design but no
electricity, a cabin stocked with
hotel comforts in the middle of the
woods, a getaway surrounded by
whales accessible only by boat, a
solar-powered dwelling perched
over a waterfall.
Part of the appeal is a chance
to escape the hordes of mass tour-
ism that have made some tradi-
tional destinations nearly unbear-
able. People work hard to get to
Summit Prairie, set on a vast
meadow near Tiller, Ore. Trips to
the home modeled on a fire look-
out require written directions and
a phone call with the hosts, since
travelers who get lost on the way
won’t have cell service.
The guest book explains why visi-
tors go to the trouble. It is filled
with entries about the clarity of the
Milky Way, the sound of the wind,
the sight of cows in the morning
mist. “Like a fool, I packed makeup,”
one guest wrote, “and promptly re-
alized there was no mirror.”
These vacations reflect the
same yearning for nature that has
given rise to glamping, or glamor-
ous camping—the Instagram-
friendly trend featuring tents
tricked out with five-star ameni-
ties like air conditioning, high
thread-count sheets and chande-
liers. But some travelers are seek-
ing an unplugged experience more
geared toward achieving minimal
distractions in maximum locations.
And they’re paying for the
privilege.
Last summer, Phyllis Anderson’s
family spent three days at an In-
ternet-free home in Alaska’s Denali
National Park, where rates now
tally $3,150 per person per night.
To reach the Sheldon Chalet, ele-
vation 5,755 feet, the guests had to
travel by helicopter. Once the fam-
ily arrived, the gang got to bathe
in evening sunlight on a deck so
close to the top of the highest
mountain in North America they
felt they could touch it. At the end
of a snowshoe hike over a glacier,
they enjoyed a gourmet picnic on a
table cut from the ice.
“Just to spend a few days in
touch with nature, these are the
gifts from heaven that you don’t see
if your head is down in your
phone,” said Ms. Anderson, a 65-BYELLENGAMERMANLeft: Phyllis andSteve Anderson
were cut off from everything but
their family in Alaska’s Denali
National Park. Below: Gather Greene
cabins in Coxsackie, N.Y., are like
hotel rooms. Bottom: Sheldon Chalet
in Denali is reached by helicopter.nGet written directions and con-
sider bringing an old-school road
map. Many of these places are
too remote for cell service to
work, so Google Maps won’t help
youifyougetlost.
nMake sure you understand ex-
actly what amenities the accom-
modation will and won’t have.
Will it have Wi-Fi? Its own bath-
room? Make sure you are game
for the level of remoteness.
nFellow travelers reluctant to
go off the grid? Consider a com-
promise—there are plenty of
places surrounded by nature that
still have Wi-Fi and amenities like
fancy soaps and sheets.
nBring entertainment that
doesn’t require the internet:
books, cards, board games.
nMake a list of necessities and
comforts to bring with you. Re-
mote destinations may limit bag-
gage size and weight.Planning to Unplug
year-old retired lawyer who lives in
Tulsa, Okla., with her husband, a
former energy-industry executive.
Social media and the internet
have fueled the popularity of off-
the-grid destinations, many found
in spots too extreme for camp-
grounds or hotels. Zach Klein,
whose “Cabin Porn” social-media
feed boasts more than 435,000 fol-
lowers, has inspired a book out
this fall, “Cabin Porn: Inside,” fea-
turing photographs of curated in-
door spaces in far-flung places.
“You have accounts like ours on
Instagram that have really spawned
a taste for a very specific kind of
place, a simple rustic retreat in a
beautiful house,” he said. Mean-
while, “Airbnb and similar plat-
forms have created this tremendous
marketplace that allows anyone to
create a space and market it.”
For some, the backcountry sum-
mers are a grown-up way to recall
simpler trips of their youth. When
Chad Rawlings celebrated his 40th
birthday recently, he wanted to re-
create the fun he had camping
while growing up in West Texas.
The New York City leather-goods
designer suggested three days at
Gather Greene in Coxsackie, N.Y., a
property featuring $250-a-night
cabins with king-size beds and en-The Most Luxe
Vacation Is
Unplugged
Americans pay thousands of dollars to go off the grid
LIFE&ARTS
Clockwise from left: ‘Kudhva’ tripod
shelters in North Cornwall, England;
Summit Prairie perched atop a tower
deep in the Oregon wilderness;
Maggie Hewitt’s family on the beach
near the kudhva grounds.suite bathrooms stocked with lo-
cally sourced organic toiletries.
The 16 friends he persuaded to
join him came prepared, hauling in
hundreds of dollars’ worth of food,
including pastries, berries and
chips. Charlie, a friend’s Labradoo-
dle with his own Instagram ac-
count, frolicked undisturbed in a
pond. Later, tree frogs croaked so
loudly that some of the travelers
wondered if they were hallucinat-
ing. “They got their fun little get-
away,” Mr. Rawlings said. “And I
gotmycampfire.”
When on vacation, Maggie He-
witt likes to completely immerse
herself in the natural world. The
walk to a shared compost toilet
wasasmallpricetopayforher
$150-a-night “kudhva,” an archi-
tectural shelter set on tripod stilts
along a quarry in North Cornwall,
England. (Kudhva is Cornish for
“hideout.”) During the vacation on
the Celtic Sea, her three sons
spent days exploring tide poolsand collecting mussels.
Ms. Hewitt, a 38-year-old Detroit
native living in London, wanted un-
interrupted time with her husband,
a British pediatric surgeon, and
their young sons. Last year, instead
of a kudhva, her family reserved the
property’s solar-powered cabin, an
open-air structure with a tree grow-
ing through the deck that sits atop
a 40-foot waterfall. Her boys
climbed down to a quarry below
and paddled a raft Huckleberry
Finn-style to a cave.
“It’s nice to go where you’re un-
reachable,” she said. “To me, that’s
a massive luxury.”
Even an unplugged vacation can
sometimes blow a fuse. This sum-
mer, Peggy Chew visited the Quir-
pon Lighthouse Inn, a spot on an is-
land surrounded by whales and
icebergs in the northern reaches of
Newfoundland. The inn and working
lighthouse are accessible by boat
followed by either a short walk or,
depending on sea conditions, aFROM TOP: JOEL BELMONT; GEORGE FIELDING; MAGGIE HEWITT; THE ANDERSON FAMILY; KELSEY ANN ROSE; TOTEM ENT.