Category: step van

This is a video I made roughly one year after beginning my new life living out of my van.

Parking is one thing I cover in this. The transcript reads like…

Hey, what’s up? This is Ian, and we are hanging out by the river. In this video, I’m going to talk about—it’s been around a year of sort of traveling and living out of my van—and we’re going to talk about parking locations: where you can park and where I parked over the last year.

This water is super clear and cold, super cold. It’s one place when you’re traveling on the road where you can find places like this to jump in the water, wash up a bit, and refresh.

So, let me think of all the places I’ve parked. I’ve parked on Forest Service land, BLM land, Walmart, ski areas (which are often forest land), rest areas, and I’ve done urban parking. I guess the best part is that I haven’t paid any money for parking at all. And the best has been places like this—this area is super awesome.

I came out here to a super remote ski area called Titan Pass Ski Area. Not to be confused, there’s a Titon Pass in a couple of locations, but this one’s in Montana. It’s a really remote ski area—you got to travel 11 miles on a dirt road to get there. When I first heard about it, it was three miles, and I was like, “Geez, I don’t know if I’ll even make it. I’m going to go and check it out,” because my van is a step van so it doesn’t handle very well, plus all my stuff is in it and things rattle, like the doors and stuff.

But it turned out this road was actually in pretty good condition, and the Forest Service told me they recently graded the road. It took me a while—my first night I stayed about a mile in on the dirt road, and then the next day to go 10 miles took a long time, over an hour. I hiked up to the top of the ski area, which was maybe 1,200 feet. It’s kind of a smallish ski area, but it’s on a pretty gnarly mountain, and once you get up, you see all the gnarly mountains around you. It’s really smoky; at night it gets worse, though right now it doesn’t look too bad.

So, I’ve had really good luck, a lot of it coming down to Forest Service land and ski areas. (I worked at two different ski areas.) Last night it was super windy—you could see the sticks on the road and my van was rocking from the wind, and I was a little worried a tree was going to fall on my van. But Forest Service land has been good.

Walmart is super popular, but in my experience, lots of Walmarts don’t even allow overnight camping, or they post a sign that says not allowed, and you might be able to get away with it (that was the case for me). I’ve probably stayed at Walmart maybe 10 times over the year. It’s not a regular place for me. Parking in urban Walmart areas always makes me feel on edge; I don’t really sleep that good because it’s kind of illegal and you know it, and you don’t want to wake up to someone knocking on your door. You’ll sleep better if you just find out the rules on where you can legally park.

Rest areas: a few times I’ve stayed at rest areas, but they can be loud or have bright lights, so they’re not so good for sleeping.

Urban: I’ve done the urban thing a bit, and yeah, I don’t really like it. It’s usually illegal to park in a neighborhood. I’ve parked at a church a few times, and near apartments thinking no one’s going to know, but I didn’t do it too many times because I wanted to stay inconspicuous.

The great thing with Forest Service land is you can legally park for 14 days in one spot. That’s great, and then you can move around to a new location in the forest and get another 14 days. That has just been the best situation. For me, probably 70 to 80% of the time, that’s what I’ve done.

Another sidetrack: when you find a place to settle in, getting a gym membership is great. You get a sauna, a shower, and you can work out. I paid like $60 a month at one place and $70 at another, so you can find cheap ones and it’s a really good deal. Washing up in the creek or a public restroom works too, though warm water is nicer than freezing cold water depending on the time of year and where you are.

Let me check my list here: BLM land (which is kind of like Forest Service land), Walmart, urban areas, rest areas, ski areas, water, cleaning, gyms. I think I pretty much talked about all those things.

I’m walking back to my van right now. This area is super awesome, kind of like a hidden gem. The ski area is tucked back behind these big mountains, and it’s cool that the roads are dirt because it would probably blow up with a lot more traffic if they were paved.

So, that’s my overall experience. There’s my van, and those aspen trees are really nice. You don’t always have to drive far down a dirt road; do your research, and if you find Forest Service land nearby, you usually don’t have to drive forever to find parking (I usually don’t because I hate driving down dirt roads).

Pretty sweet. That’s been my experience. If I forgot something, I’ll put it in the comments down below or the description. At one time I was wondering where I was going to park when I first started traveling, but this is Ian saying so long.

I am a little late about a yearˆˆ to add this to the blog. I think I filmed this roughly a year ago in the fall. And I will soon add a new one for 2026.
Here is a transcript that might help…

Yo, what’s up? This is Ian, and we are in Montana. Take a look around at the scenery.

And bam, there’s my van. So, in this video, I was going to talk about—I’m a little tired, I didn’t sleep too good. I stayed up too late the last couple nights, kind of messed my schedule up and whatnot. So, I’m going to talk about what I did on my van in the last few months, or the last eight months starting in April.

So, one of the first things I did was those hinges. I changed those hinges. They used to have these kind of barn door style hinges. You can see the impressions of them there below that top hinge. And yeah, there’s a lot of rivets in this door. I’ve redone this door like so many times. So, I put four of these strap hinges. These are aluminum. Why did I change? I guess the other ones worked fine, I just didn’t like how they looked and they rusted. They were steel, they weren’t like stainless steel or anything like that. They would rust, and I would try to put clear coat on it and different oils, but they would still rust.

And I just kind of liked how these ones looked. They’re kind of expensive—like a few hundred at least for eight hinges. So I like them. They’re solid looking. I did that back in April.

Now the other thing I want to show you I just kind of did yesterday. I’m going to climb up here so we get a little bit of a view. So, I put that stove top cap on the roof, and we went straight through the roof. Where that bluish ESL Insider sticker is—that is where it used to come out.

I used to have a 90-degree bend and come out the side because I was basically afraid to go through the roof. Going through the roof was something I really stressed and thought about for a long time. It took some time and preparation. I searched for a long time on how to get a stove cap that I liked, and that was the best one I found. It’s stainless steel from Dickinson Marine. They make diesel heaters for boats and stuff.

Let’s go inside. It’s nice and messy in here.

Talking about the roof—this is the original roof. This is how thin it is; it’s transparent. You can see the light shining through the yellow up there. That’s fiberglass, and this is how thin it is. When I first bought this on the drive home from North Dakota and spent my first rainy day in it, it didn’t give me a sense of security. It sounds like you’re in a tent, basically.

So, I wanted something a little beefier. The whole cargo area of the roof—over the fiberglass roof, I put a lot of cork underlayment. And then I got this massive sheet of aluminum. It’s pretty thin, but definitely stronger and beefier than that fiberglass. And I riveted it to the roof. I made a video about that, I believe.

Let’s see, what else did we do this year? Try to turn on some lights. Got a new yoga mat, which I’m pretty happy about. It’s a cork and natural rubber yoga mat.

Where to start? We’ll start here. In previous videos, I talked about the solar, and this was kind of like the big project of the summer. It took me two months to complete. We wired all these things together. I got two lithium 100 amp-hour batteries. There’s a Renogy DC-to-DC charger with MPPT. Up on the upper left, there’s a battery monitor that tells me it’s at 100%. A 12-volt fuse block, a whole lot of fuses, wires, connectors, and a battery shunt.

The tough thing was learning what goes with what—the connectors, the lugs, the wire, crimping them together. Depending on what you’re connecting, you need different size wires and connectors. It’s a lot of information, and it’s really complex. Now, the box I actually built like a year or a year and a half ago, so this summer was kind of piecing it all together. That’s a 200-watt inverter.

Another thing I did this summer—it’s not complete, but it’s getting there—is setting up my turntables. It’s been a goal. These are my turntables; it’s a work in progress, but we’re connecting it all together. That is an SL3, a device that connects to your computer so you can play MP3 files through your turntables using digital files with a turntable. I’m not too far away from completing it.

Other things I did this summer: we did three carpentry pieces. That bench right there, this cabinet-like thing, and that sort of shelf-like thing.

I’m pretty stoked with it. I have space and storage here. I haven’t used it so much for storage, but it’s pretty comfortable; I can sit on it. Up there, I started some drawings, and eventually there’ll probably be some paint and color on it. That’s my bed—it folds down; it’s a Murphy bed we did a few years back. On the cabinet, the top lifts up. Pretty stoked with how that turned out, though the yellowish color of the birch wasn’t really my favorite. But yeah, that is our bench.

These other things we did since I’ve been in Montana. Since August, I made this cabinet and this shelf. This one I’m pretty happy with; it’s the most recent besides the stove. I finished this just a few weeks ago before starting on the stove. I finally got it bolted up on the wall using rivnuts. Those are a little tricky, but I’m pretty happy with this. I like the open setup where I can just toss random stuff in there. It works good for my style, since I’m not a super organized person and there’s no cabinet or drawer to open.

I noticed when I make drawers—like my clothes drawer here for socks and t-shirts—I like it, but this other shelf section, you kind of throw stuff in there and it’s not so organized. I was unsure if I should make it so I could pull these out, or if I should put a door on it, or put a front on it so it slides out like a drawer. This is all new to me; the carpentry and woodwork on this van is pretty much all the woodwork I’ve ever done, aside from making painting canvases and building frames from scratch. So we’re learning, and it’s been a process.

For this countertop, I used a piece of aluminum. I could probably clean it and get some of the water stains off. It’s just what I had available. I asked online about using aluminum for a countertop, and on Reddit everybody said, “That’s a horrible idea.” Maybe it is, but I did it anyway. I put epoxy over it. It was really shiny, but I didn’t really like the shine, so I sanded it.

Some problems I had with the epoxy were three stupid flies. When you pour it, you have to put stuff on the sides to prevent it from dripping. Three flies landed in the epoxy before it cured and got stuck. There’s a blemish here where I had to pick the fly out while it was wet, another one landed over here, and another one here, leaving little dents. These aluminum sheets used to be part of a shelf—all those doors on the outside with the hinges were made from the same piece of aluminum. They were the original shelves in this postal van, and we cut them up to make doors and this countertop. There aren’t many bugs in Montana, but there seem to be a lot of regular house flies.

This is the inside of my stove setup. We just finished this last night. I had a friend help put this all together. This deck fitting is from Dickinson Marine. I had to build a wooden support because that thin fiberglass roof is flexible. This rectangular space up here was originally planned for a skylight. My plan was to put a big skylight here; I might still do it.

To change this setup—the old pipe went up and then out the side right there. I cut a new piece of birch and put that in to cover the old hole. The old setup didn’t draft well, so I’d get a lot of backdraft out of my stove. This support here is pretty sturdy.

One mistake I made was this piece of wood. The deck fitting on top is steel, with a rubber gasket and RTV sealant. We had to cut a little bit off this stainless steel auto pipe to get it to fit. We haven’t used it yet, so hopefully there are no water leaks from up above, but I lined it up pretty well.

This plywood piece is actually two pieces of 3/16″ glued together with a hole cut out. It’s not squared up; it’s kind of off at an angle. That was one little thing I missed when drilling all the holes. Maybe I should have cut it to match or made it round so it wouldn’t look weird, but I’m not taking it off and doing it again because of all the sealant on top.

Anyways, this is Ian. We’re in Montana, looking out my window, and that’s what I did the last eight months working on my van. Peace.