Boondocking & Backpacking in the Mountain West
One old truck, a new camper shell, and a month of adventuring…road-tripping around Utah, Wyoming and Colorado. Our maiden voyage with a newly DIY’d seeping platform and storage solution in our Tacoma, we managed to spend 10 nights boondocking, 11 nights backpacking, and 6 nights in actual beds. Here’s how it went, what we learned, what we liked, and why you should do something like it!
The Grand Idea
Living a more nomadic lifestyle, traveling for a longer period of time…that sounds cool, right? But before selling everything and moving into a van down by the river, I remembered the principles of lifestyle design. Ideate, Prototype, Test, Scale. So, first step was done, I had an idea. Prototype and Test was next. Lots of scribbling in notebooks, and it was decided that we would buy a camper shell, convert the bed of my Tacoma into a sleeping/storage area for all our camping gear, and we’d hit the road for about a month. A guiding principle was, of course, to keep it as inexpensive as possible. We would also have to work our ‘day jobs’ a bit along the way.
The Truck Set-up
I poured over the internet and watched hours of YouTube videos on truck bed camper builds. There were several design objectives. It must not only hold all our stuff, but allow us to easily access stuff…
