I spent last Tuesday night doing something I suspect a lot of you have done lately. I was sitting at my desk, half-watching the news, half-scrolling, trying to reconcile the morning’s headlines with the previous evening’s headlines. One promised peace. The other promised obliteration. Both were about the same conflict, the same region, the same global energy chokepoint that quietly determines whether your gas costs four dollars or nine.

I closed the tab. I opened TALON. I started looking at water.

There’s a version of this post where I rant about geopolitics. That’s not this post. You already have opinions. What you might not have is a plan — and more specifically, you might not have data for your plan.

Here’s what I mean.

A lot of people I know — engineers, designers, remote workers, small business owners — have started having the same quiet conversation. Not the loud prepper fantasy. Not the bunker-and-ammo thing. Something more measured. More like: what if I found a place? Somewhere with good water, healthy forest, decent solar exposure, enough land to actually do something with. Somewhere I could work from, grow food on, maybe raise a few animals. Not off-the-grid in the tinfoil sense — just… resilient.

The problem is that when you go looking for that place, you realize how blind you are. Real estate listings will tell you the acreage and the tax assessment. They won’t tell you whether there’s a reliable spring on the parcel. They won’t tell you the slope will turn your garden into a mudslide. They won’t tell you the forest is a monoculture pine plantation with no structural integrity, or that the creek runs dry by August, or that your southern exposure is blocked by a ridge.

That’s the gap TALON was built to fill.

Some backstory. I didn’t set out to build a resilience tool. I grew up in rural Vermont — surrounded by people who worked the land for a living. Foresters, loggers, surveyors. They understood terrain the way software engineers understand systems. Boundaries, watersheds, timber stand composition, soil drainage — it was all just legible to them in a way it isn’t to most people.

I went the tech route. Spent nearly a decade in QA and software engineering. But the land knowledge never left. And when my mom called me over Christmas 2024 asking for help finding a specific unlisted property near Waynesville, North Carolina, I realized something: the data to understand land at a deep level exists. LiDAR elevation models, hydrological networks, forest inventory data, soil surveys — it’s all public. It’s just scattered across a dozen federal databases, encoded in formats nobody outside academia touches, and completely disconnected from the way normal people search for property.

So I started building.

TALON — Terrain Analysis and Land Opportunity Navigator — processes public remote sensing data and translates it into something useful. Point it at a parcel and it’ll tell you things no listing ever will:

Water. Where springs are likely to emerge, based on topographic position analysis at multiple scales. Which watershed you’re in. What the upstream drainage area looks like. Whether that creek on the property line is perennial or seasonal. Microhydro potential if you’ve got the gradient for it.

Forest. Structural integrity scoring derived from LiDAR point clouds. Is this old growth with complex canopy structure, or a plantation that’ll blow over in the first ice storm? Individual tree segmentation. Canopy height and density mapping.

Terrain. Slope and aspect analysis for every square meter. Solar exposure modeling. Flood risk topography. The stuff that determines whether your homestead site is viable or a beautiful mistake.

None of this requires setting foot on the property. It’s all derived from publicly available data — primarily the USGS 3D Elevation Program — processed through algorithms I’ve built and refined over months of development. When you do visit, you show up knowing more about the land than most owners do.

I’m writing this from Arlington, Virginia. By this fall, I’ll be in western North Carolina — not because I picked a property off a listing, but because I spent months building a platform to analyze terrain, water, and forest health from my desk. TALON narrowed the search. The next step is boots on the ground, inspecting candidates in person, with more knowledge about each parcel than most owners have about their own land. That’s not a sales pitch — it’s just what happened when I stopped doomscrolling and started doing the math on water and soil and trees.

I’m not going to tell you the world is ending. I don’t know that. Nobody does — including the people making the most confident claims in either direction. What I will tell you is that understanding the land beneath your feet is valuable in any timeline. If everything’s fine, you’ve got a beautiful property with great water and a healthy forest. If things get weird — and the news suggests they might — you’ve got something more than a plan. You’ve got a place.