How to recruit great hackers in a remote location?
Mz: If I were in your shoes, I would try to find out what gets people to go live in Antarctica.  Here is a super short article about life as a "Polie": 
http://www.worldhum.com/travel-blog/item/life_as_a_polie_at_...And I would do some web surfing about The Mojave Desert and Barstow California.  I lived on NTC for a while.  The High Desert and Barstow had some phenomenal info on the web at that time about all of it's "assets": Natural beauty, solitude, etc (ie it's remote and there's virtually no sign of civilization).  It used to crack me up.  Funny personal anecdote:  My spouse tried to get out of going there because he was sure I would divorce him over it.  Then we (the whole family) loved the place and tried to extend our stay. :-DYou need to figure out what would motivate someone to go where you are and you need to figure out where to look for people with that type of motive.  I would work on developing that understanding by looking at similar examples elsewhere as best I could.