2020 Seattle to Utah to Seattle - October roadtrip

tehschkott

Well-Known Member
First Name
Scott
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Location
Flavor Country
Vehicle(s)
2020 Ranger Lariat Crew Cab 4x4
Occupation
Cat herder
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1
9 days
3010 miles
No hotels
No restaurants
100% wildcat camping (dispersed)

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My wife and I do a lot of outdoors activities, mostly pivoting around bikes. This time we're going to Utah to ride Cathedral Valley near Capitol Reef in Utah. We've not taken the truck on a road trip or camping affair of any seriousness yet. This is the first and we're still sorting out some of the details.

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Weather's good, early fall has started in. Crossing the Columbia River here heading east. Taking a slightly roundabout way to get down there, I want to take her through Montana and Yellowstone and the Tetons. She's never been through any of it. The Tetons and the Wind River Mountains are some of my favorite places on earth. We won't be able to do more than drive through but the hope is by glancing through it'll inspire us to get back in there next year.

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Come nightfall we camp out up Fish Creek Road in Montana, just short of Bozeman. First night.

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.

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Next morning it's rain/sleeting. It's pretty but nothing you want to hang out in.

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Found this great hat at the gas station.

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Whole rig is icing up pretty good. Bikes are iced up. Truck is iced up. Have to turn off parking sensors and adaptive cruise control, they are going haywire.

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FOORRRRRRRRRRRRD

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Yellowstone is as you expect it to be. It's still majestic as hell. Fortunately very few people in the park due to the borderline weather. Crowds annoy me.

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Alright well so much for the Tetons and the Wind River Mountains. The sleet/snow/rain really started dumping. Couldn't see a thing. I was pretty disappointed. Seriously, you didn't really want to set up camp in it, and weather forecast said it was going to turn into snow in the night and dump a foot and a half. Pushed on through to Jackson Hole. The rain/sleet finally stopped but was due there in a few hours too. Had a quick talk and decided to crush it through the night and straight into Utah.

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Welcome to Capitol Reef, Utah.

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Found a great little wildcat site on BLM land just outside the national park along the Fremont River (I think). I racked out in the shade of the truck to catch up on sleep and my wife bedded down in the tent. High altitude desert in the fall means it's 85 degrees in the sun and 65 degrees in the shade. Darn pretty site.

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Shower tent is fun and useful. But we will be using a different shower tent in the future. lol
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Next day got up and drove into Moab. My dumb ass forgot to grab sealant for the bike tires and Moab was the closest place we could source it. We were really trying to stay out of Moab, the place is a madhouse tourist trap. This would take the day to go out and back but eh, this is what adventure is made of. Might as well.

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Picked up tire sealant and a great little bike shop called Poison Spider Bikes, talked bike shop with one of the guys there - my wife is a bike mechanic and I've been wrenching for 15+ years (unprofessionally) so we can generally talk shop. Always good to say hello and make friends. Thought eh, might as well hit Arches National Park since we're there. The wife had never seen it. Got there, there's a line 3 miles long and a sign at the end that says "come back in 3 hours". We bagged it, hit a few small bike trails outside Moab and then headed back to Capitol Reef to make camp.

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This is as close as we got to Arches. 25 miles away in the distance. Thanks telephoto! Whatever. Arches is great but staying out of the tourist mess that is Moab is better.

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Ran into this fantastic oasis of awesomeness. It was absurd and whimsical. My favorite combination.

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That night we camped out at a different site I'd spied the day before, woke up and got ready to do a 2 day bikepacking trip up Cathedral Valley near by.

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Hey little buddy!
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It was pretty hot and I started having... a bit of a water problem.

Hyponatremia occurs when the concentration of sodium in your blood is abnormally low. Sodium is an electrolyte, and it helps regulate the amount of water that's in and around your cells.

There were no water refills on this trip. You carried everything you needed from start to finish. and in short, I overhydrated to a dangerous degree. Drank 50% of my water 25% of the way through the trip, got the dry heaves. Bad business. I was using a different nutrient powder than normal and... never mind. My system got all thrown off. That's the jist. In any case it put me in a bad state. We would not be bike camping this trip after all. What a bummer. It was a pretty nice dang ride but if we were just going to do an out and back we didn't need to bring all our bikepacking gear. Bleh.

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Next morning got up feeling quite a bit better. Made breakfast. Truck kitchen/camping kit is pretty good. Truck is awesome.

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Plan for the day is to drive back out the Cathedral Valley and try to reach something called the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon. No idea what these are but if we'd continued on the bike trip we'd have visited them yesterday. The road seems plenty drivable, though there are parts with big sand pits that might get you stuck if not careful. Plan is to drive out as far as we can and take bikes the remaining way just to see what we can see.

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Cathedral Valley lives up to it's name. Man.

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I didn't really stop and picture any of the sandpits unfortunately. There was a fair degree of 4x4 required, and a little rear locker action at another point. Eventually we hit a sandpit I wasn't sure we'd get through so stopped and pulled bikes off. That's the Temple of the Sun there. We'd just ride the remaining distance.

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It was majestic. Both it and the Temple of the Moon were just stunning.

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and then light caught our eye and we headed over to this - I give you the Mountain of Glass. Which was more of a weird warty hill but... by god it was made of glass alright.

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Weird, but neat. Then it was time to head out. Actually, below is one of the sand pits, but the picture isn't really doing it justice. You'd step in it and it'd come to above your ankles. That's why I'm on the side of the road there, I'm pushing my bike around the sand in the road. My wife took this of me. Probably best I didn't get the truck stuck in that. No telling when someone would be by next. I had recovery gear sure but... well if you've done this before you'll know why I didn't push it. Best thing you can bring is someone else and everyone was a long ways away. It's not like there are trees to latch a snatch-block and a come-along to out here, and I didn't have a sand anchor. Wasn't worth getting stuck over. No regrets.

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Good thing I stopped to get sealant. See all those spots on the side of the tire? Each of those would have normally been a flat tire. Tubeless bike tires rule.
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And the drive out was great! I can't embed it here but if you want to see a little hyperlapse video you can see it here:

Driving out the Cathedral Valley - short vid


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Coming out of Cathedral Valley, we stopped at Carls Critter Garden in Hanksville

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Afterwards went over to explore a nearby valley called Goblin Valley. Never heard of it, sounded interesting. We had no idea what was in there.

Boy, were we in for a treat.

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Whole place is just magical.

It was dusk so went and found a killer little nearby wildcat site up this red rock gulley to stay the night. We'd be back in the morning.
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Truck kitchen is still a little haphazard but it gets the job done.

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Back into the Goblin Valley before hitting the road for home. We should have lit out at daybreak but we slept in, had pancakes and rode bikes through Goblin Valley instead. No regrets.

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And then suddenly we rounded a bend on this trail called "Dark Side of the Moon" and....

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It is hard to tell but that is a 1000+ foot drop to the right and wind is gusting and... and... and...
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It is I think, the prettiest, most incredible place I've ever been. And I've been some great places. We took a bazillion pictures trying to capture... well everything. the beauty. The power of it. The sheer drop you felt like you were on. I mean, our little cameras just couldn't do it. But boy we tried.

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And then wildfire smoke started rolling in so we said our goodbyes and hit the road. You can see the smoke on the right coming in on the below pic.

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It's a 2020 Ranger Lariat I bought July 20, this year. I crested 11,000 miles today, Oct 29. I just can't say enough good things about this platform. What a fantastic vehicle. I am really looking forward to the next 90,000+ miles.
Sponsored

 
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GavG Ranger

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That is majestic. A fantastic write up. I'm very jealous. My favourite has to be the Moutain of glass.

Kudos for not pushing your luck in the sand, that would be a lonely place to be stuck.

We don't have wild camping in the UK, not really, i love how u just decide to pitch up in the middle of nowhere. The nights photos must be amazing.

Thanks for sharing.

Gav
 

Deleted member 1634

What an amazing trip!! We do the same sorts of things with our Ranger, but tow along our off-road teardrop to camp in. And the Ranger is a darn near perfect platform for this type of thing. Perfect mix of on-road comfort, off-road comfort, off-road ability, towing/hauling capacity, fuel efficiency, etc.

I'm always curious about dispersed camping. We do it every once in awhile, but there just isn't as much open space and ability here in the dense woods of the Great Lakes region. Did you scope out your sites beforehand or just come across a good place and set up camp?

It's winter here already, and our camper is all put away winterized and in storage, so we won't be doing any adventures like this for at least 6 months when winter starts letting up a bit. So this makes me super jealous! haha
 

Msfitoy

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:clap::like:Amazing trip Scott! Congrats on a safe adventure. Sorry about your water incident but this'll still go down as one of the longest outing for a Ranger...
 

AzScorpion

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Looks like a great trip. We just got back from SW Utah and it's a beautiful area. We're looking forward to going back and seeing more of it but I need a hotel and restaurants. lol
 


GregM

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9 days
3010 miles
No hotels
No restaurants
100% wildcat camping (dispersed)

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My wife and I do a lot of outdoors activities, mostly pivoting around bikes. This time we're going to Utah to ride Cathedral Valley near Capitol Reef in Utah. We've not taken the truck on a road trip or camping affair of any seriousness yet. This is the first and we're still sorting out some of the details.

50538582347_92aa8e2c2a_b.jpg


1604031450701.png


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Weather's good, early fall has started in. Crossing the Columbia River here heading east. Taking a slightly roundabout way to get down there, I want to take her through Montana and Yellowstone and the Tetons. She's never been through any of it. The Tetons and the Wind River Mountains are some of my favorite places on earth. We won't be able to do more than drive through but the hope is by glancing through it'll inspire us to get back in there next year.

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Come nightfall we camp out up Fish Creek Road in Montana, just short of Bozeman. First night.

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.

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Next morning it's rain/sleeting. It's pretty but nothing you want to hang out in.

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Found this great hat at the gas station.

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Whole rig is icing up pretty good. Bikes are iced up. Truck is iced up. Have to turn off parking sensors and adaptive cruise control, they are going haywire.

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FOORRRRRRRRRRRRD

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Yellowstone is as you expect it to be. It's still majestic as hell. Fortunately very few people in the park due to the borderline weather. Crowds annoy me.

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Alright well so much for the Tetons and the Wind River Mountains. The sleet/snow/rain really started dumping. Couldn't see a thing. I was pretty disappointed. Seriously, you didn't really want to set up camp in it, and weather forecast said it was going to turn into snow in the night and dump a foot and a half. Pushed on through to Jackson Hole. The rain/sleet finally stopped but was due there in a few hours too. Had a quick talk and decided to crush it through the night and straight into Utah.

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Welcome to Capitol Reef, Utah.

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Found a great little wildcat site on BLM land just outside the national park along the Fremont River (I think). I racked out in the shade of the truck to catch up on sleep and my wife bedded down in the tent. High altitude desert in the fall means it's 85 degrees in the sun and 65 degrees in the shade. Darn pretty site.

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Shower tent is fun and useful. But we will be using a different shower tent in the future. lol
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Next day got up and drove into Moab. My dumb ass forgot to grab sealant for the bike tires and Moab was the closest place we could source it. We were really trying to stay out of Moab, the place is a madhouse tourist trap. This would take the day to go out and back but eh, this is what adventure is made of. Might as well.

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Picked up tire sealant and a great little bike shop called Poison Spider Bikes, talked bike shop with one of the guys there - my wife is a bike mechanic and I've been wrenching for 15+ years (unprofessionally) so we can generally talk shop. Always good to say hello and make friends. Thought eh, might as well hit Arches National Park since we're there. The wife had never seen it. Got there, there's a line 3 miles long and a sign at the end that says "come back in 3 hours". We bagged it, hit a few small bike trails outside Moab and then headed back to Capitol Reef to make camp.

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This is as close as we got to Arches. 25 miles away in the distance. Thanks telephoto! Whatever. Arches is great but staying out of the tourist mess that is Moab is better.

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Ran into this fantastic oasis of awesomeness. It was absurd and whimsical. My favorite combination.

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That night we camped out at a different site I'd spied the day before, woke up and got ready to do a 2 day bikepacking trip up Cathedral Valley near by.

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Hey little buddy!
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It was pretty hot and I started having... a bit of a water problem.

Hyponatremia occurs when the concentration of sodium in your blood is abnormally low. Sodium is an electrolyte, and it helps regulate the amount of water that's in and around your cells.

There were no water refills on this trip. You carried everything you needed from start to finish. and in short, I overhydrated to a dangerous degree. Drank 50% of my water 25% of the way through the trip, got the dry heaves. Bad business. I was using a different nutrient powder than normal and... never mind. My system got all thrown off. That's the jist. In any case it put me in a bad state. We would not be bike camping this trip after all. What a bummer. It was a pretty nice dang ride but if we were just going to do an out and back we didn't need to bring all our bikepacking gear. Bleh.

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Next morning got up feeling quite a bit better. Made breakfast. Truck kitchen/camping kit is pretty good. Truck is awesome.

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Plan for the day is to drive back out the Cathedral Valley and try to reach something called the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon. No idea what these are but if we'd continued on the bike trip we'd have visited them yesterday. The road seems plenty drivable, though there are parts with big sand pits that might get you stuck if not careful. Plan is to drive out as far as we can and take bikes the remaining way just to see what we can see.

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Cathedral Valley lives up to it's name. Man.

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I didn't really stop and picture any of the sandpits unfortunately. There was a fair degree of 4x4 required, and a little rear locker action at another point. Eventually we hit a sandpit I wasn't sure we'd get through so stopped and pulled bikes off. That's the Temple of the Sun there. We'd just ride the remaining distance.

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It was majestic. Both it and the Temple of the Moon were just stunning.

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1604030203645.png


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and then light caught our eye and we headed over to this - I give you the Mountain of Glass. Which was more of a weird warty hill but... by god it was made of glass alright.

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Weird, but neat. Then it was time to head out. Actually, below is one of the sand pits, but the picture isn't really doing it justice. You'd step in it and it'd come to above your ankles. That's why I'm on the side of the road there, I'm pushing my bike around the sand in the road. My wife took this of me. Probably best I didn't get the truck stuck in that. No telling when someone would be by next. I had recovery gear sure but... well if you've done this before you'll know why I didn't push it. Best thing you can bring is someone else and everyone was a long ways away. It's not like there are trees to latch a snatch-block and a come-along to out here, and I didn't have a sand anchor. Wasn't worth getting stuck over. No regrets.

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Good thing I stopped to get sealant. See all those spots on the side of the tire? Each of those would have normally been a flat tire. Tubeless bike tires rule.
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And the drive out was great! I can't embed it here but if you want to see a little hyperlapse video you can see it here:

Driving out the Cathedral Valley - short vid


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Coming out of Cathedral Valley, we stopped at Carls Critter Garden in Hanksville

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Afterwards went over to explore a nearby valley called Goblin Valley. Never heard of it, sounded interesting. We had no idea what was in there.

Boy, were we in for a treat.

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Whole place is just magical.

It was dusk so went and found a killer little nearby wildcat site up this red rock gulley to stay the night. We'd be back in the morning.
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Truck kitchen is still a little haphazard but it gets the job done.

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Back into the Goblin Valley before hitting the road for home. We should have lit out at daybreak but we slept in, had pancakes and rode bikes through Goblin Valley instead. No regrets.

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And then suddenly we rounded a bend on this trail called "Dark Side of the Moon" and....

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It is hard to tell but that is a 1000+ foot drop to the right and wind is gusting and... and... and...
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It is I think, the prettiest, most incredible place I've ever been. And I've been some great places. We took a bazillion pictures trying to capture... well everything. the beauty. The power of it. The sheer drop you felt like you were on. I mean, our little cameras just couldn't do it. But boy we tried.

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And then wildfire smoke started rolling in so we said our goodbyes and hit the road. You can see the smoke on the right coming in on the below pic.

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It's a 2020 Ranger Lariat I bought July 20, this year. I crested 11,000 miles today, Oct 29. I just can't say enough good things about this platform. What a fantastic vehicle. I am really looking forward to the next 90,000+ miles.
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Forum software isn't letting me delete the below duplicate images. Maybe it's the CDN caching. Whatever. I'll try to delete them later.

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Wow what an awesome adventure. Great pics and write up. Glad you had a good experience with your Ranger. Congrats :like:
 

IdahoRanger

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Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Did I say beautiful? :thumbsup::please: What a wonderful adventure.

Love the cousin Eddy hat! I have a couple of them and up in these parts they are useful.
 

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What an adventure. Fantastic photos. Ford should use some of them in their adds. There are so many different uses for the Ranger, but yours is near the top of the adventure/fun chart. Well done!:clap:
 
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tehschkott

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What an amazing trip!! We do the same sorts of things with our Ranger, but tow along our off-road teardrop to camp in. And the Ranger is a darn near perfect platform for this type of thing. Perfect mix of on-road comfort, off-road comfort, off-road ability, towing/hauling capacity, fuel efficiency, etc.

I'm always curious about dispersed camping. We do it every once in awhile, but there just isn't as much open space and ability here in the dense woods of the Great Lakes region. Did you scope out your sites beforehand or just come across a good place and set up camp?

It's winter here already, and our camper is all put away winterized and in storage, so we won't be doing any adventures like this for at least 6 months when winter starts letting up a bit. So this makes me super jealous! haha
Thanks everyone! Glad you liked it. If for some reason you want to see more pics or higher res versions you can see my Flickr gallery here

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tehschkott/albums/72157716616594801

Re: dispersed camping.

We pre-scout what we can for sure, but that's not always so easy. We use an app called The Dyrt to do an initial virtual scan of an area. That gives us a decent base to start from. We also have good maps (Locus Maps - John Thorne USGS maps) to do additional virtual scouting. Once in the area though you learn to start looking and making mental note. We'll select a spot virtually on the map and make our way to it while keeping a look out for alternates along the way in case the site we aim for isn't good, or is already filled by someone else, or if we find something better.

Mentally noting alternatives and lonely roads along the way is really the way to go. Maps and apps only get you so far. Being flexible is where it's at. This also means you need to be thinking about it during daylight hours. Locating a site in the dark is not of course impossible, but you run the risk of waking up somewhere you'd not meant to be (someone's land, or a national park for example).

But that's really it. We have an enormous tent - takes 60 seconds to set up and 3 minutes to break down. We have insulated cots which are just... excessively nice. We have ENORMOUS 0 degree bags that weigh I dunno, 10lbs each. Its much much different than our bikepacking gear which is also good, but focused differently - for example I have a 20 degree bag that weighs 18oz and an inflatable ground pad with a high R value. It's comfortable and warm too, but it's not luxurious in the same way our truck camping kit is.

One other thing to think about, in the desert at least is being cognizant of flash flood channels. These will frequently look to be inviting open and smooth spaces and they are... because they are also drainage. Lol. It's an easy thing to look out and be mindful of though.
 

Deleted member 1634

Thanks everyone! Glad you liked it. If for some reason you want to see more pics or higher res versions you can see my Flickr gallery here

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tehschkott/albums/72157716616594801

Re: dispersed camping.

We pre-scout what we can for sure, but that's not always so easy. We use an app called The Dyrt to do an initial virtual scan of an area. That gives us a decent base to start from. We also have good maps (Locus Maps - John Thorne USGS maps) to do additional virtual scouting. Once in the area though you learn to start looking and making mental note. We'll select a spot virtually on the map and make our way to it while keeping a look out for alternates along the way in case the site we aim for isn't good, or is already filled by someone else, or if we find something better.

Mentally noting alternatives and lonely roads along the way is really the way to go. Maps and apps only get you so far. Being flexible is where it's at. This also means you need to be thinking about it during daylight hours. Locating a site in the dark is not of course impossible, but you run the risk of waking up somewhere you'd not meant to be (someone's land, or a national park for example).

But that's really it. We have an enormous tent - takes 60 seconds to set up and 3 minutes to break down. We have insulated cots which are just... excessively nice. We have ENORMOUS 0 degree bags that weigh I dunno, 10lbs each. Its much much different than our bikepacking gear which is also good, but focused differently - for example I have a 20 degree bag that weighs 18oz and an inflatable ground pad with a high R value. It's comfortable and warm too, but it's not luxurious in the same way our truck camping kit is.

One other thing to think about, in the desert at least is being cognizant of flash flood channels. These will frequently look to be inviting open and smooth spaces and they are... because they are also drainage. Lol. It's an easy thing to look out and be mindful of though.
Thanks for that info! All makes sense and would be the way I'd go about it as well. Just not something that is quite as feasible in our area, despite the large amounts of public land. I have a feeling like anything else once you get into it and get experience it comes a lot easier.

Our camping setup is very easy to setup and teardown. Just back into a spot, unhook if you want, and then you're essentially done. There are a few other things we do to make it more homey like swinging out the awning and setting up the lights and what-not. But otherwise very easy. We used to do the whole inflatable pad, small tent, and sleeping bag thing (and I still do for kayaking and backpacking trips) all the time, even for car camping, but it just wasn't good enough anymore. Invested in the teardrop and we're very happy we did.

Happy camping and I look forward to seeing more of your adventures!
 

Gazmic

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So cool. I was planning a WA to UT trip myself but still hasn't happened. Thanks for showing me what I'm missing. ?
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