10 RV Boondocking Tips - Dry Camping Tips For Newbies to Veterans

hey guys colorado camper ma'am brian here so in today's video i'm going to give you guys 10 tips for bone dock camping or wild camping or dry camping or whatever you call camping without any hookups now a couple things on this uh this is primarily going to be geared towards dispersed camping uh like a national forest land or blm land or you know private property however you might be able to get some tips out of this too if you're going to campgrounds where there's no hookups these tips are also going to be geared towards campers that are self-contained so that have a fresh gray and black tank you know so you have a toilet shower and things that nature so let's go ahead and get into the 10 tips so the first tip that i have for you guys is if you're new to boondocking give it a test run you could do this simply by pulling your camper onto the side of your house and living out of it for a couple days not hooking up to power and just solely relying on your camper for you know electricity water shower toilet etc or you could go to a campground that does have say electricity and maybe they have some bathrooms and water but don't use any of that stuff unless you absolutely need to this will give you a good indicator of if you actually are going to enjoy doing this and it will also give you a good indication as far as how long you can last with your battery your water situation and how quickly you will fill up your tanks so now that you've done your test run and you know oh man i definitely want to get out there and do some boondocking tip number two is you gotta do a lot of research and figure out where you're gonna go now obviously if you're going to be going to a campground without any hookups this is a little easier you're probably just going to have to make a reservation and there you go we actually really enjoy going to national forest campgrounds those campgrounds are anywhere from five to fifteen dollars per night usually they're a little bit more remote the camping spots are a little spread out and usually they don't have any hookups now if you're going to be going on national forest land or blm land i did a video about how to scout and then also just a general video about dispersed camping and how you find spots and all that stuff so i'll put a link to those videos right now so when you're going on national forest land or blm land we really all need to practice leaving no trace so our main goal should be camp where others have already camped and what there's already an established kind of camping area so usually you can tell this because there'll be a fire ring there or it'll just look like there's some general camping areas now when you're doing this research if you are going to be going on blm land or national forest land it's a great idea to scout it out beforehand drive up there without your camper so you can check and make sure that your camper's clearance is going to be good that um you're there's spots to be able to turn around because you the last thing you want to do is be towing your camper and get into a situation where you get stuck or your camper gets hung up or or whatnot so the third tip is to make sure that you fill everything before you leave your house so you want to make sure that your fresh water tank is completely full got to make sure your pro paint tanks are full make sure your black and gray tanks are empty you also want to do things like charge headlamps or bring little extra power banks make sure that your battery is going to be charged up fill up your vehicle with fuel bring extra fuel if you have a generator make sure that you bring extra gas you want to make sure anything that you are potentially going to deplete that source fill it up and make sure that you're topped off so the fourth thing is to bring extras and you really want to be prepared pretty much for anything i did a video solely on the top 15 items to have while dispersed camping so i'll put a link to that video but things that you're going to want to bring would be you know stuff like a shovel or a chainsaw or bow saw you definitely want to bring extra levels because more than likely if you're going to spurs camping you know national forest land blm these are not going to be flat sites you got to bring a lot of extra levels i did a video just on leveling your camper while dispersed camping i'll put a link to that video some of the other stuff we talked about in the previous one gas water propane stuff like that uh but also bring extra clothing make sure you have extra shoes really look at the weather and the conditions of what it's going to be and make sure that you have the appropriate gear and definitely extra gear as well and you want to take into consideration how long you're going to be out there how far away you are from a society and civilization and make sure that you pack your extras accordingly so the fifth tip that i can give you guys is consider the road conditions there's a couple different aspects to this one aspect of this is will your vehicle and your camper be able to make it where you're planning on going camping are you going to have any clearance issues we had some major clearance issues on this camper one time when we took this camper out on our first dispersed camping trip i actually got hung up on a cattle guard by my rear jack i was luckily camping with some friends they helped me get it off it and one of those guys actually then helped me flip my axles which gave us an extra five and a half inches of clearance on our camper and that has helped out tremendously and since then we've been able to camp pretty much wherever so besides things like clearance issues other things that i would recommend is if you do have equalizer stabilizer bars as soon as you get on a dirt road i would jack the camper off up and take those off because those can limit your articulation and your turning radius and you don't want to mess up your system another point with road conditions if you are going to be camping uh in the snow or mud definitely bring with you some tire chains i actually camped on our land here where it's no two feet i'll put a link to that video but uh the only way i was able to get my camper out of here was tire chains um otherwise i would have been stuck here for a couple days longer until all the snow melted because i was legitimately stuck and i could not get my truck and camper out of here so now that you're all set up the sixth tip is conserve remember you have a limited amount of power of water and of storage of your your gray and your black tank so you got to try to conserve everything possible i know people who have gone out dispersed camping for the first time and they fill their gray tank on the first day because they're used to having full hookups and they have an unlimited supply of water and waste so they'll be doing dishes or they'll take a nice long shower and their gray tank will fill up on day one you really got to be mindful of all that stuff you also are going to have a limited amount of power even if you have solar you're going to be dependent on your battery bank or if you have a generator you're going to be dependent upon how much gas you have so tip number seven we're going to talk about water so with water i would strongly recommend that you bring extra water with you on this trip here we have a 45 gallon fresh water tank we brought an additional 18 gallons of water with us a good rule of thumb for water is bring three to five gallons per person per day that should take care of your drinking water dishes and then shower now that's being on the conservative side you know if you'd like to take longer showers or you know whatever you may have to plan for more so a couple tips and things that we do before we head out we make sure that we fill all of our water bottles prior to coming out here because that's primarily you know how we drink our waters our water bottles so we have all those full prior to getting here we have a separate drinking jug that we use for just drinking water we also have an outdoor hand wash station all it is is an old laundry detergent dispenser and that thing is amazing if you wash your hands outside you're not going to fill up your gray tank and those little jugs will also limit how much water you use versus going to the sink you can also buy those outdoor shower bags and take showers outside i've also seen people do dishes outside they get those collapsible water containers and then they do dishes in there so there's a lot of different ways that you can conserve your water and things that you can do and i encourage you guys to do as much of those as possible if you are going to be using dishes outside or taking showers outside try to get some biodegradable soap or something that's going to be earth friendly as well so the eighth tip is power now we're gonna talk a couple different things about this uh for our setup we really set our camper up for dispersed camping and boom docking so what did we do to our camper well for starters we got a larger battery that's meant uh for solar and for going longer periods of time so we have a renegy 200 amp hour deep cycle gel battery i'll put a link in the description where you can check that out on rendy's website we've had that for two years and we absolutely love that thing now to replenish all the energy that we consume from that we started out with a renigi 100 watt portable solar panel i ran over that with our camper which is a different story but so when that happened i installed 200 watts on our rooftop i bought a hqst solar 200 watt solar panel kit on amazon i'll put a link in the description where you can check that out as well as a video i did about what all we can do with that but ultimately we can do pretty much everything in our camper as long as the sun is out really the only things that we cannot operate on our 200 watts is our refrigerator because it's a ac propane only our microwave and our air conditioner if we're not using our microwave or air conditioner and it's sunny out we would not even have a need for a generator when we go out we go camping we try to only run our generator when we absolutely have to um so like when we're running our air conditioner or our microwave or if our battery is pretty discharged and we need to be able to run some devices and stuff like that then we'll fire up our generator so the ninth thing we're going to talk about is propane a couple tips here you're more than likely going to have several devices like say your refrigerator or your water heater that could have a dual power source for instance our refrigerator can be run on ac power or propane when we're out boondocking we only run it on propane same thing with our water heater it could either be ac power or propane we only run it on propane so you want to use those accordingly and how you have it set up if we had a powerful enough solar array and we had a a refrigerator that could be run off at bc we would potentially consider doing that to save on propane another way that you could save propane would be if you're winter camping to get a little buddy heater furnaces and campers consume a lot of propane and besides consuming propane they also conserve energy because they have to have a fan that runs so if you're doing some winter camping you could look at a buddy heater or if you're winter camping and plugged into a generator you could also be using a space heater another thing that you can do too versus cooking on your stovetop inside your camper you could get you a little outdoor stove and do your cooking outside with a little one pound with those little one pound cylinders or you could get an additional tank just for your stove and your outdoor stuff we have a little outdoor coleman stove we do a lot of cooking out there and we absolutely love it the 10th and final boondocking trip is leaving no trace now we could all do a better job at this ultimately your goal should be when you get to a camp site whether it's blm national forest land or just at a campground is to leave it looking better than when you first got there with us we bring plastic gloves and we always have a five gallon bucket and we'll spend at least five minutes just cleaning up our campsite you know sometime throughout the course of our trip five minutes is not a whole lot of time but if you imagine every single camper just spending five minutes cleaning up trash and making sure that their campsite looks better than when they got there that would make a huge difference now when it comes to fire pits please make sure you only use existing pits a lot of times what i'll see at dispersed camping areas is there's multiple different fire pits because one gets full and rather than people digging up a hole and burying those ashes they go ahead and make another fire pit and with fires please make sure that your fire is a hundred percent out before you leave so a lot of people complain and say hey well i don't have fresh water at the end of my trip or i don't want to use up my valuable water source in order to extinguish the fire so they won't put in water in a fire but ultimately that is the best way to put a fire out so one tip and one thing that you could do is use your grey water um that's what we do we have a little jug that we fill up from our gray tank and we'll use that to fully extinguish the fire and we'll dump gallons of water on our fire and make sure that it's a hundred percent out before we leave our campsite all right guys well that's pretty much it um do you guys have any other boondocking tips or things that you think are important when boondocking if so please put them in the comments below i've mentioned a lot of other videos and products and things that you guys have seen so please check the description for that but otherwise if you guys enjoyed the video please give it a thumbs up and i look forward to seeing it in the next one [Music] 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Channel: Colorado Camperman

Views: 140,195

Keywords: boondocking rv, boondocking travel trailer, Boondocking, dry camping travel trailer, dry camping tips and tricks, dry camping rv, Boondocking Tips, Wild Camping Tips, Wild Camping, Wild Camping RV, rv boondocking, dry camping, boondocking tips, Boondocking tips for beginners, dry camping tips for beginners, rv boondocking basics, tips for dispersed camping, tips for camping without hookups, camping with no hookups, National Forest Camping, camping on blm land, Camping

Id: bNy66iDyYSI

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021