He escaped Iron Curtain on a flying go-cart. Now lives in 1-person Ghost Town
Apr 27, 2025
Ivo Zdarsky lives alone in Lucin, Utah—a ghost town so remote it barely registers on most maps. His home is a metal airplane hangar, surrounded by dirt runways he graded himself. There are no neighbors, no cell service, no paved roads—just one man, his plane, and a vast, empty landscape.
It’s a quiet, self-sufficient life, but getting here was anything but simple. Zdarsky was born in Czechoslovakia, under the shadow of the Iron Curtain. In 1984, at the age of 24, he built his own aircraft from spare parts: a tiny two-stroke engine, hang glider wings, and a hammock-like seat suspended in a skeletal metal frame.
Before dawn, he took off from the eastern side of the border and flew west, buzzing the rooftops of Vienna before landing next to a commercial jet at the international airport. With a calm that belied the risk he had just taken, he stepped out and asked for political asylum.
Years later, after founding a propeller company and growing tired of city life, he saw a classified ad for land in the Utah desert—400 acres, complete with abandoned World War II-era airstrips. He bought it sight unseen. Then, true to form, he built himself a hangar that would serve as both workshop and home, choosing the design not for style but because it was the most economical way to house both his planes and himself.
Today, he flies 45 minutes each way to shop for groceries once a month and keeps enough freeze-dried food on hand to last a year—just in case. Sometimes, he adds to the pantry with a local antelope, hunted and preserved on site.
—Read about Ivo Zdarsky's incredible escape story:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...
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Out here in the Great Basin where we prefer vast, uninhabited landscapes, I met a hermit named Ivo whose ingenious escape story left me astonished and inspired.
www.narratively.com
