Kelsey Vanderm has opened up about the childhood drills her father forced her and her siblings to practice in preparation for an apocalypse he believed was imminent.
Vanderm, who grew up off-grid in the Montana wilderness, revealed on the Dan Becker Podcast that her father would regularly make the children pack their survival gear and flee into the hills. “We’d have to pack our go bags and our survival kits and pack our llamas and like just practice if the world was ending,” she explained.
The family’s retreat from society began after Vanderm’s father immersed himself in biblical prophecies and became convinced that civilization’s collapse was near. He moved his growing family into a teepee-style tent in the mountains while he hand-built a wooden cabin that would become their permanent residence.
Vanderm was the first child born inside that cabin. Her father would eventually father 20 children with several different women, all of whom lived together in the remote compound.
Daily life revolved around total self-sufficiency. The children milked goats, chopped wood, and gathered food from their gardens so that no external supply chain could threaten their survival. Notably, the family avoided stereotypical prepper behaviors like constructing bunkers or hoarding massive food stockpiles.
The psychological pressure escalated sharply when Vanderm decided she wanted to attend high school outside the compound. Her father responded with intensified warnings about the dangers of the outside world.
“When I went to school, he would always just sit me down and say, ‘Okay, you got to sit by a window. Make sure you’re watching. If you see like army men SWAT team coming around like you got to get head for the hills,'” Vanderm shared on the podcast.
She continued, “So I just feel like there was so much fear already cuz he’s like for sure we’re going to get taken over and so all the time I always thought like the world’s ending tomorrow, the world’s ending.”
The constant dread became deeply embedded in her worldview. “I grew up my entire life always believing the next day is going to be your last the next day is going to be your last,” she added.
Despite the absence of electricity, running water, or any connection to mainstream society during her earliest years, Vanderm described her initial childhood as relatively normal within the context of her family’s isolated existence. The radical departure from conventional life was her parents’ choice, not a response to any immediate external threat.
The drills with llamas and go bags served as both practical training and ritual reinforcement of her father’s apocalyptic beliefs. Each practice run through the Montana wilderness underscored the imminent danger he insisted was coming.
Vanderm’s decision to pursue formal education marked a turning point that her father apparently experienced as a direct threat to his control, prompting the heightened surveillance instructions and militarized language about SWAT teams and invasions.
The compound’s gender dynamics also distinguished it from typical survivalist communities, with multiple women sharing domestic and reproductive labor across 20 children in a single cabin structure.
Vanderm has since established herself as a public figure willing to discuss the psychological aftermath of growing up under constant eschatological threat.