Mountain man meets building inspector

March 13, 2013, 10:35 p.m. ET
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Ah, Wilderness! Mountain Man vs. the Building Inspector

County Shuts Rustic Preserve; Self-Sufficiency Doesn't Meet Code

BOONE, N.C.—Eustace Conway says he has stared down a grizzly bear, wrestled a thrashing buck and ridden a horse from coast to coast. But he may have met his match in the Watauga County planning department.

Mr. Conway, 51 years old, is best known as "The Last American Man," the title character of a 2002 biography and National Book Award finalist by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of "Eat, Pray, Love." He has lived in the wilderness since the early 1980s.

He traps, shoots and grows much of his own food, makes pants out of buckskin and stitches his own wounds. He bathes in the cold creek that rolls through his 1,000-acre Turtle Island preserve in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. And he teaches others how to live off the land.
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But now, Mr. Conway is devoting most of his time to the type of meetings, red tape and compromises he went to the woods to avoid.


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