Permaculture Puzzle: East of the Oregon Badlands

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For hours, days, weeks!, I've been asking myself: Is it possible to develop a smart, highly efficient, maximally effective "set it and forget it" plan for transforming a landscape from brutal wilderness to a platform for permacultural homesteading abundance over the course of a decade?

I don't have an answer! So I set up what I'm calling a "Permaculture Puzzle" to help me ponder. Is it possible to tread the line between lazy, crazy, and smart?
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Puzzle Prompt: You have come into ownership of a 40 acre piece of overgrazed land out past the Oregon badlands. Your ultimate vision is to transform the property into a permacultural paradise. However, you won't be living there full-time. In fact, you'll only be allowed to visit the property for 1 week per year. Your goal is to get the property "as ready as possible" at the end of 10 years, such that you can move onto it and begin to build your vision in earnest with a healthy head start.


The setting

Site info:
The Oregon badlands are, as they say, high, dry, cold, and windy. Plant hardiness zone is 6a. I'm using the nearby "established settlement" of Brothers as a climate analogue. (Fun fact: Oregon Rocketry uses a launch site near Brothers because there's basically nothing in the area)

Numbers from the Western Regional Climate Center:
- Average total precipitation: 9 inches
- Average total snowfall: 25 inches
- Average temps in January: Low 17, High 38
- Average temps in July: Low 43, High 82
- Brutal!

The soil in the area is gravely loamy sand - old volcanic ash. Very well draining.

Local plants include "big sagebrush, rabbitbrush, and various bunchgrasses, including Idaho fescue and bluebunch wheatgrass. In the spring, the area blooms with a variety of wildflowers."

Assumptions:
- The site can be assumed to have 0-10% gradual slopes, with no major gullies or rainwater-channeling features in the natural landscape. It's flat and wide. Great for dark sky viewing. Not great for rainwater harvesting.
- No zoning / codes / HOA / CCRs to worry about. Let's just pretend there's no rules.
- No more grazing will occur on site.
- Annual budget is flexible. This is a creative exercise. I was initially thinking $1,000 per year in terms of on-site expenses (not considering travel etc), but it seems arbitrary to set a hard restriction.

I'm curious about the feasibility of a plan like this. Could 1 week per year of highly efficient work in such an environment actually make a difference? Am I just a lazy idealistic Gen Z? I'm going to post a "draft plan" below, but I'm more curious what the permies have to say about the idea of something like this. What do YOU think???

My own answer draft:

Year 1
Summer: observe property (aka go camping), hoping that it rains at least once during the week to watch water flow.

Year 2
Winter: observe property, ideally while it's raining or snowing, create and finalize permaculture design.

Year 3
Summer: observe property, rent excavator. learn how to use excavator. dig initial earthworks.

Year 4
Summer: observe property. rent excavator again. modify earthworks that didn't work, mulch & plant native / pioneer plants where they did.

Year 5
Winter: observe property, evaluate earthworks and performance of natives. design more extensive plant guilds.

Year 6
Summer: observe property, rent excavator to extend earthworks, mulch & develop maturing earthworks. plant native guilds. locate and map potential microclimates for establishing non-natives.

Year 7
Summer: observe property, rent excavator, dig more earthworks. plant more natives, test hardy non-native plants in beneficial microclimates.

Year 8
Summer: observe property, evaluate performance of non-natives. expand and ideally finalize earthworks if you still have money & motivation for excavator rental.

Year 9
Winter: observe property, design permanent shelter in zone 0.

Year 10
Summer: observe property, world domination.

Reflections:
Turns out most of the work I came up with is "observe property", "dig earthworks", "plant native guilds", and "test hardy non-natives". 40 acres is huge so I assume the earthworks would take a while, even if you rent heavy machinery each year (which would pretty much blow any budget under $2k a year). More added costs would be bringing in organic matter to mulch existing earthworks as you go, and like, food and stuff. But I feel that, given the relatively low amount of time commitment per year, it might actually be relatively valuable for attaining the ultimate vision if it's possible to stay focused on the highest leverage tasks at hand.

But is doing this more valuable than just jumping in full time at year 9? I don't know. The feedback loops year-to-year would probably be beneficial for iterating on earthworks design. Are earthworks the highest leverage activity for laying the foundation of permaculture abundance?

This plan lacks specificity in terms of what the native & non-native plants would actually be. Also, given that there isn't an actual "map" of a site, there's no specificity in terms of earthworks design or permaculture design in general (e.g. where plants would be placed for windbreaks, where swales actually go, access paths, whatever else). Maybe that means a true "Permaculture Puzzle" would require a specific site so that permaculture puzzlers could design, draw, plan, and play more tangibly. But that sounds like something I'd have to start paying people for... Food for thought!

With only 9 inches of rain a year how will those native plant guilds survive?

I would add:

Year 1: read the work of Brad Lancaster.

https://permies.com/wiki/51855/Rainwater-Harvesting-Drylands-Brad-Lancaster