Utah Dad Opens Up Massive Doomsday Compound for First Time (Exclusive)

On a recent rainy afternoon in the hills above Bountiful, Utah, multimillionaire Jayson Orvis trudged through the mud on a 300-acre self-sustaining sanctuary he built for him and his family, along with 200 friends, to gather in the event of a civilization-ending apocalypse.

Orvis was touring a small number of journalists for the first time ever through his compound, where a similarly themed TV show he created, Angel Studios’ Homestead: The Series, also films.

The property, home to Orvis, his wife and three of his seven children, has an armory (and enough high-powered weaponry to outfit a small army) as well as a a machine shop, greenhouses, butchery and a massive storeroom filled with everything from medical textbooks to portable radios and leather-working tools.

After touring his visitors through those stops, the 56-year-old Orvis walked through his “food forest” that grows a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers.

“We have more asparagus and raspberries than we can pick,” Orvis told PEOPLE as he handed one visitor several bitter-tasting chokecherries plucked free not far from his lumber mill. “We don’t have cattle, but we have wild deer, turkey, elk, goats, rabbits and chickens—natural meat that lives a full life and then we harvest it.”

About the only thing that Orvis — an entrepreneur who made a fortune 15 years ago after his credit repair business was acquired by an equity fund — doesn’t have is a massive blast-resistant underground concrete bunker. Which may seem odd, given that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg have their own high-security subterranean retreats as preparations for the end times seemingly go more mainstream among the country’s wealthiest people.

Orvis is admittedly very interested in survival amid catastrophe, however unusual that may sound to the public, and he offered up this rare tour of his retreat as a chance to explain his views on making so-called doomsday prepping less “dark, nihilistic and antisocial.”

He co-wrote the post-apocalyptic thriller Black Autumn book series that has been spun off into the feature film Homestead and now a TV series, which just began streaming through the Angel app.

But the idea of relying on a fortified bunker to survive the end of civilization isn’t thinking big enough, he says.

“It’s like a weird prepper idea from the Cold War,” he says. “If you’re going to be right at ground zero [it might make sense] — but up here, you don’t need to bury yourself in the ground. And even if you did, what are you gonna have once you emerge from the ground?”

The answer to that question, explains Orvis, is pretty simple.

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If things go south and society collapses, he and his group of family, friends, medical experts, master gardeners, beekeepers, Navy SEALS and even a few Afghan refugee commandos would retreat behind the gates of his compound, with its stockpile of 110,000 pounds of grain, a freshwater well and a massive array of electricity-generating solar panels, and get to work.

“We’ll be super well defended and we’ll also do the best we can to share and to help our neighbors along,” says Orvis, who calculates the group could survive “indefinitely” on their cache of supplies and what they can cultivate from the land.

Besides preparing for civilization’s end, Orvis is determined to “redefine what preparedness means.”

That’s also a theme he and co-writer Jeff Kirkham, a former Green Beret with multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, explore in their books. (Orvis writes under the pen name Jason Ross.)

“One would think that it’s every man for themselves, kill or be killed [when society collapses],” says Orvis. “Jeff told me that after having seen what happened in places like Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan, it isn’t the people with the belt-fed machine guns who survive. It’s the people who bind together and form powerful, strong communities.”

The fictional world that Orvis creates in Homestead and Black Autumn revolves around a group of survivors who seek refuge in a fortified mountain compound following a nuclear attack that destroys Los Angeles.

Orvis, who puts in four to five hours of writing each morning before going to work on his compound with his younger brother, Bob, has been focused on getting ready for the end of times since his childhood in Anaheim, Calif.

“My dad was a firefighter turned metal fabricator and a prepper,” he says, adding that he wrote his first article for a prepper journal at the age of 15.

“I grew up with chickens, bees, rabbits and gardens in the backyard, so preparedness has always been kind of a hobby,” he says.

After selling his business in 2010, Orvis began focusing on philanthropic work and soon found himself “called to help” former special forces soldiers, using his social marketing skills to help them launch entrepreneurial ventures like Black Rifle Coffee and the self-reliance website retailer Readyman.

That’s when he met Kirkham, and the two began brainstorming ideas for their faith-based post-apocalyptic series that now includes nine books and, says Orvis, has allowed them to tell stories of “high peril and high hope.”

By then, Orvis had already begun transforming his massive property into a paradise for the point of no return.

“We had a garden and food storage, but we didn’t have goats, rabbits, chickens and all this,” recalls Orvis’s wife, Pamela, 56. “So Jayson started digging into it. Before long, everything just snowballed and we took it to the next level.”

Their oldest daughter, Alex, is unfazed by how the estate — complete with multiple food storage buildings, vineyards and a trout pond — and her father’s efforts have evolved over the years.

“He makes everything seem like a good idea,” the 31-year-old says. “It’s also pretty standard in our family for things to get carried away and become big things.”

Still, the question remains: What if the apocalypse never happens and civilization continues on like it has for the past few millennia? What will Orvis do then?

As it turns out, “I’m pretty damn sure the world isn’t going to collapse,” he says. “It is possible, but I think the odds are probably sub-2 or 1% in my lifetime.”

He pauses for a moment, glancing out at his massive survivalist safe haven, then adds: “But learning how to ranch and grow things, doing all this together with our kids, it’s been fantastic. I don’t regret any of this in the slightest.”