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.