10/07/2026
What Happened to Eustace Conway? His Life After Mountain Men and Where He Is in 2026
When Mountain Men introduced Eustace Conway in 2012, television had not created his wilderness life. The cameras had simply arrived unusually late to it.
By then, Eustace had already spent decades living far outside what most people considered ordinary. He had moved into a tipi as a teenager, spent years traveling through the wilderness, walked the Appalachian Trail and crossed the country on horseback. He had even become the subject of Elizabeth Gilbert's book The Last American Man. But the most important part of that background was what eventually brought Mountain Men to him: Turtle Island Preserve, the wilderness education center he began building near Boone, North Carolina, in 1987.
That made his story on Mountain Men different from someone simply retreating into the woods. Eustace was trying to keep an entire way of life going. Turtle Island needed timber, food, working equipment, buildings and enough income to continue teaching people the traditional skills around which he had built his life. Much of what viewers watched — repairing old machinery, cutting logs, hunting for winter meat or improvising a solution when something broke — came back to keeping that place alive.
And not all of the pressure came from the wilderness.
During the show's early years, Eustace found himself fighting to keep Turtle Island operating after Watauga County officials inspected the property in 2012 and raised concerns about buildings that had been constructed without conventional permits, along with sanitation and code issues. The county restrictions temporarily stopped the preserve from hosting the visitors, interns and camp activities that were central to its work.
For Eustace, the dispute went much deeper than fixing a few buildings. Turtle Island had been deliberately built around primitive construction and traditional methods, while the county was applying modern building standards to structures that had never been intended to function like ordinary houses. He pushed back, and the argument eventually went beyond the county to North Carolina's Building Code Council and state lawmakers. In 2013, state law was changed to provide exemptions for qualifying primitive camps and farm buildings, allowing places such as Turtle Island to continue operating under a different set of requirements.
It was one of those moments when the real story behind Eustace was larger than what viewers saw in a single episode. But the change that affected his life most deeply came a few years later.
Preston Roberts had been beside Eustace long before Mountain Men. He was not simply another person who occasionally appeared at Turtle Island; he was Eustace's longtime friend, teacher alongside him and one of the people most closely connected with the preserve. Their friendship became part of the show almost naturally because it was already part of Eustace's everyday life.
Preston's death on July 24, 2017, at 60, after complications connected to an inoperable liver tumor, changed that world. Eustace continued working and continued filming, but viewers who had spent years watching the two men together were suddenly watching Turtle Island without one of the people who had helped define it.
Eustace did not immediately leave Mountain Men. In fact, he remained part of the series for several more years. The show continued following him as he worked around Turtle Island, taught younger people and found old-fashioned solutions to problems most people would solve with modern equipment. Even in Season 12 in 2023, viewers could still see him hunting for winter meat and building a huge log-and-pulley system to lift a boat.
And then, without the kind of farewell episode viewers might have expected after more than a decade, Eustace simply stopped appearing regularly.
There was no dramatic announcement that he had abandoned Turtle Island, no retirement special and no public falling-out explaining his absence. Instead, what happened off television seems much quieter. Turtle Island itself now explains that after years of traveling, speaking, demonstrating and meeting people, Eustace has chosen to live more privately. He remains connected with the preserve and can still appear during certain classes, volunteer events or special occasions, but his life is no longer as publicly accessible as it was during the height of Mountain Men.
That distinction matters because Eustace did not disappear from the life viewers knew him for. He largely disappeared from the cameras.
Even in 2026, he has continued making occasional appearances. On September 26, he appeared at Armstrong Artisan Farm in North Carolina for an event built around storytelling and questions from the audience. At 65, he is therefore still willing to step into public view from time to time, even if he no longer appears to want television to follow his everyday life.
That also brings up the question longtime viewers are now asking as Mountain Men prepares for another season.
Season 15 premieres October 7, 2026, but Eustace is not among the cast members currently announced by History.
For someone who spent so many years on television, Eustace Conway's story after Mountain Men has actually been remarkably understated. Turtle Island is still there. The work he began decades ago continues. He still teaches, still makes selected appearances and still remains connected to the land viewers associated with him.
What changed is not really the life itself.
It is how much of it Eustace Conway still wanted the rest of us to watch.
