Turtle Island is in a remote hidden valley in Triplett, NC, in the heart of the Appalachian mountains. Separated from the busyness and conveniences of modern living, this homestead is more than a "camping trip" for the adults and children who visit-it's a unique way to experience what the earth has to offer. Besides the year-long homesteading experience, making your own food, clothes, utilities, and equipment, Turtle Island offers week-long and summer camps for both adults and children. In addition, several North Carolina schools have taken groups of students there for day trips to learn skills such as recycling, how to treat animals, and making crafts using nothing more than hands and some primitive tools.

Families or individuals who stay at Turtle Island for a week or more learn how to live the way the early pioneers lived, gardening their own vegetables, gathering their own meat, making household items like flour and soap, cooking on a wood fire, using outhouses and streams for water, and training animals to pull farm equipment. Living quarters are built from scratch, and some hardware, like ladders and chains, is also built from raw materials. Residents learn how to use some of the simple tools like an adz, broad hatchet, wedges, drawknife and axe.

Eustace Conway's vision for Turtle Island is for visitors to have a life-changing experience, realizing their own abilities and potential to be stewards of the land and "specialists" in tasks like building or plumbing that most people contract out to professionals. Living at Turtle Island is not "roughing it," but understanding how to negotiate the natural materials the land and environment provide to meet our most basic needs of eating, having shelter and appreciating nature's beauty and resources. A group that builds a work table, for instance, not only learns how to split and measure the wood from the tree, but they also learn how to work with the grain of the wood without the benefit of electric tools (although they occasionally use chain saws). The exercise gives participants an appreciation for their history and an understanding of the relationship between different trees and plants and their practical uses.