Mom Moves Her Family to Rural Alaska for a 'Slow' Lifestyle. Now She Travels 9 Hours for Costco Hauls

Olivia Jones and her family moved to Eagle, Alaska — a town just beyond the very end of State Highway 5, home to barely 100 residents — to "slow down life."

"The mile markers end and our house, you have to just keep going to get to us," she tells PEOPLE, of her family's home.

That distinct fact about her house's location is also the unique inspiration for her social media account's handles. On TikTok, under the handle @beyondthemilemarkers, Jones posts for her 117,900 followers about her life bordering the Canadian Yukon.

The Joneses came from a decidedly warmer place — St. Louis, Mo. — to start their new life out in "The Last Frontier," after Jones' husband's job in IT went remote as a result of COVID.

The decision to pick up their family and move out into the almost-wilderness, though unique, didn't just happen on a whim.

Jones' family originally forged their first connection with the state when her grandfather went up there in the 1970s to pursue gold mining, so Jones grew up visiting the surrounding areas. Her grandfather has been there since, and later, her parents fell in love with the landscape and also moved to Alaska, where they've been for about 13 years.

For a while, Olivia and her husband were in the in-between stages of considering the move.

"We sat on it for quite a while, going back and forth, and trying to figure out: 'What does it look like if we do this?'"

For the Joneses, their primary concern was how the move would impact their four children, with Jones admitting that it did impact them "tremendously."

(READ MORE - people.com)