Winter in the Desert

A year in The Amazing Spider-Van

Winter is a good time to visit the desert. About 6:30 this morning, I stumbled out of the van looking for the bathroom, but the sun was coming up and the light was changing fast. Distracted by pink and purple clouds I wandered up the hill, looking for the horizon. There’s something particularly serene about the desert.

I took a picture:

Last night, up on this same hill, the ranger pulled out the most powerful green laser pointer in the world, and showed us around the planets (Saturn and Jupiter), stars (North, Polaris), constellations (Cassiopeia, Orion, Big and Little Dippers) and the faintest smudge of another galaxy — Andromeda.

We could see our own galaxy — home of everything else we saw in the sky as a fuzzy glow down the middle - the Milky Way.

I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight, with a billion stars all around …

Back to this morning — back up on that hill, my body reminded me why I had left the coziness of the van. Before something unfortunate happened, I hustled back down to the bathroom.

Walking back to the van, a white dot bobbed frenetically ahead of me down the road — a jackrabbit didn’t want any part of me. In the desert, creatures roam in the space between night and day.¹

A cup of coffee later, it was adventure time. It was still early and off we went to find a trailhead. Jostling down a rutted dirt road, we startled a coyote. Coyotes are also crepuscular. He darted out in front of us, only to cross back over the road a hundred yards later to finish the hunt, tracking us all the while with a dirty look.

The trailhead was empty. We hiked a couple hours and didn’t run into a single human.

NATURE. Why you go.

Today (or tomorrow or yesterday) is the one-year anniversary of us owning this little camper van. I pulled out our journal and was surprised by the stats: so far we’ve taken 16 trips, driven over 11,000 miles, slept in the van over 40 nights and have been on the road over 70 days.

Oh, and stickers:

To celebrate a year, I gave ASV sticker a makeover and started building out theamazingspidervan.com where we can put up pretty pictures and whatnot. When planning trips, I’ve been frustrated by how hard it is to build a map that covers multiple-leg routes including the distance and time between each stop. You’d think Google Maps or similar would do this, but no.

So, I got completely distracted and built this trip planner where you put in a list of stops and it does just that. Give it a try and checkout the rest of the site, which, although today is more flash than substance, will get done someday.

While I’ll take a morning hike with no people — like the stars, like the animals, like the plants — the people you run into on the road are pretty entertaining too.

Every trip I’m amazed by the rigs people roll up in and how genuinely nice (and happy) everyone we meet on the road is.

I’ve been mentally categorizing the variety of people and rigs and came up with four categories loosely based on a common tech consulting framework called THE MAGIC QUADRANT ²

Imagine a 2x2 matrix with a continuum at the bottom going from left-to-right that starts at no money and goes to too much money, and a second continuum going from bottom-to-top, representing increasing appetite for adventure. That gives you four categories.

They are, from bottom-to-top, left-to-right: Good Enough, Warriors, Big Rigs and Builders.

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Good Enough

If you’ve got a car, you can camp. That’s how everyone starts — it’s how we started. The variation here is huge. I’ve see a lonely Tercel parked with the windows covered, nothing else. I’ve seen a guy pull a mummy bag out of his trunk and sleep on top of the picnic table.

Tents on top of cars, shells on top of trucks, a Chevy Astro with a mattress stuffed in. Whatever you got, you can make it work.

Warriors

Wheels and gear are but a means to reach the summit for this group. Backpacker camps have a totally different vibe than tent campgrounds. I’ve seen a bike camper roll in on two wheels at 6PM, pull out a sleeping bag and gear from a saddlebag and they’re gone by 6AM

The overlanding crowd straddles the car campers. They’re really popular in the desert; spotted this guy in Utah:

Big Rigs

These rigs cost coin. The three at the top of the below gallery are all European and they travel in them for years. A typical route goes from Europe across and down through Canada, through the US to South America and then back up the other side. The military green one — that looks like it’s about to storm Kyiv — had a cage with dirt bikes off the back, and when they pulled in, a lady hopped out and immediately started doing pushups followed by 30 minutes of calisthenics.

Tons of 5th wheels; some silly big compared to the truck trying to pull them up the hill like that one in the bottom we were stuck behind leaving San Jose.

At the extreme end of this group are massive diesel pushers — more Fleetwood Mac Tour Bus than camper, nearly as big as a semi. These can’t fit in a normal campground so they go — well honestly, I don’t know where they go.

Builders

We’ve been building homes on wheels since the covered wagon. In the 80’s I lusted after one with with bay windows and shag carpet. I would’ve built one in a minute, given the chance. I flirted with the idea once we got around to getting ours, but to do it right you really need to know your electrical and … plumbing.

I’ve got a lot respect for the self build crowd. It’s not the weekend, it’s their life.

We spotted this guy — car camper, van camper — who knows, on one of our first trips to Kings Canyon.

Goals!

1. Crepuscular.

2. Maybe someday I’ll write about Gartner and the Magic Quadrant and while it’s a monumental corporate grift, it also says a lot about how business’ work and manage risk.