Cheap Van Life Living: Live Cheap Camping on Quechan Indian Land

hi everyone today i want to talk to you about camping uh one of the things that i love about my life is that i get to camp for free year around almost always on public land uh such as national forest or blm that's where i like to camp but there are other places to camp for free some people go to the slab city which is a public land some people will go to corps of engineer campgrounds or national wildlife refuges there are more options i spend on nearly all my time in the arizona desert on blm land or uh or on national forest land in the summer so those are the ones i like and do the most often now what i do is called dispersed camping now not just me but a lot of us uh do this dispersed camping and what that means is you stay for free without paying anything now you're all familiar with campgrounds you know you've all been to a state park or national park or national forest or even maybe some of you to blm land a national campground you go into campground there's a host there's an iron tube you a lot of you get reservations anymore at any rate you pay for the privilege of camping there and there's a host who cleans up after you and tells you all the rules well that's not what i do i i never almost never do that i've spent less than twenty dollars uh thirty dollars in the last 10 years on camping i just don't enjoy that kind of camping i want to be alone i want to be free i don't want to have a host breathing down my deck i don't want to have neighbors packed in tight like sardines around me so i i just don't do that what i do is dispersed camping it's a legal technical option that the federal government offers on nearly all public land there's a few exceptions but not many and you can just go and set up your camp and anywhere you go so you go down unless there's a sign that says no dispersed camping and i do see those signs occasionally especially the closer you are to a uh a big city or a major metropolitan area so unless there's a sign i just assume all public land is open to dispersed camping and there will be signs sometimes but not often so you drive down the road you find a nice campsite that's your camp it's just that simple you pull over you set up camp every so often i'll see signs that say camp only in designated areas that means that you can disperse camp but they have chosen where you can camp and you have to camp there i generally avoid those areas but i have been in them occasionally so i camp for free almost always in in dispersed camping on public land let me add that very few national parks have public land that's rare a few do not many that's rare you're going to be mostly mostly national forest or blm land those are both very common but there are places where you can pay next to nothing or very cheap to camp and i'm in one of those right now uh i'm on indian land now that's kind of odd but all over the west there's tons and tons and i'm sure in the east too but on the west coast there's just tons of indian land reservations money land that was set aside and given to the indians and they can camp on it it's theirs they own it uh in a way they become their own sovereign nation in that land and so they do what they want with it it's theirs to manage i am on uh kuchin indian tribe land i am just uh 10 miles from yuma arizona in california i'm actually in california i'm across the colorado river and just south of me a few miles is not even a few miles i'm going to show you in a video i'll turn around and i'll show you where all these things are just south of me is algodones and you've seen me and talked read about me and seen me in videos talked about algodones i go to algorithms every year i just went in and got a year's supply of my high blood pressure medications uh and so that's what i'm doing here and uh i camped i come down here and i camped for a few days on i'm right now on cuchin land and while we were here we went out and visited some people and we found people here that are paying 86 a year to the indian tribe and that allows them to camp here for free for the for 86 dollars for free for the rest of the entire year now most of them don't stay year round it's just too hot i mean this place whoa yuba is hot i mean 120 is not exceptional yuma is the warmest place in arizona i think by far uh one of the warmest in the entire country death valley's hotter but not by a whole lot uh yuma's really hot yuma also has an extreme amount of sunshine yum has more sunshine than any other place in the country more days of sunshine i believe it's over 300 days a year you will get sun in yuma uh everyone thinks uh florida is the sunshine state it is not it rakes like 15th in the na in this of all the states and how much sunshine they get all the rest above it are in the desert southwest yuma's the most sunshine arizona new mexico southern california they have the most sunshine per year uh but sunshine of all cities in the united states yuma has the most so that's one reason to come here is you get a lot of sunshine i mean if you're using solar you got an abundance solar that's not going to be a problem you can also go south just walk across the border and eat in yuma in algodones in mexico every day you could eat uh at just not even a half mile drive you can walk there i could walk there in probably half an hour from here cross the border eat drink come back so i get all the low cost of mexico and all the safety of america it's really quite an opportunity for 86 dollars most of the folks here do leave in the summer it's just too hot but it's really a great thing and i imagine the local indian tribe the kitchen do keep track and do want you to pay although i would think they'd be slow my experience has been with the indians they're a little slow in my things but eventually they'd catch you not just 86 dollars a year why not just pay it go in and say hey i want to stay and uh it's really really an amazing opportunity so uh let me look around i'm gonna zoom out and and spin around and you can see where i am uh and get a better idea for this land so let me spin around and i'll zoom in and out and i'll try to hold the camera as steady as i can and we'll just see how well i can do great opportunity here to live really cheap really really cheap uh if if that's what you want to do let's take a look so let me give you the tour of the area uh right now we're looking at the q casino which is right on the corner of the uh of the freeway when you get off the freeway so that's the queue casino and then i'll just go over here so that's our camp and here nearby are other people camping these are just campers i don't think most of them will be here year round so this road is a california 86 it goes up to uh the freeway and then south to algodones and i'm going to pan around and you can see all the traffic on it on there to and from algodones and now i'm pointing uh pretty much due west yuma is right over there not even 10 miles away so from and yuma is a large city a very large city you can get pretty much anything you want in yuma best buy like three walmarts it's a big city everything you want is going to be there and so that makes this a really good place to camp it makes it cheaper because you can buy everything you want for a good price and that's the all-american canal there's actually uh fishing in that that's stocked and a lot of uh birding and wildlife here because it's a canal and you can see all the reeds all in fact i'll spin around here and show you some birds and you can actually fish in there i believe because this is cute and land that one of the guys that lived here uh told me that because this is koochin land they can issue their own fishing licenses so by staying here for 86 a year you can also fish in the canal pretty sweet as you can see if you're a birder there's uh there's good birding here anytime you're in the wa along the water in the winter in the southwest you're going to have birding so if you're a birder this would be a very good place for you continuing our tour we're continuing along the all-american canal that's not the colorado river it's just nearby now here uh we are actually looking at mexico what we're seeing here is the nation of mexico that's the queue uh very distance just below the horizon is the cube parking lot you park there and go into uh mexico and just over here is the border crossing [Music] so it's from here to there it's not more than two miles it's an easy walking distance that tower is in mexico so it's just down there i mean really really close okay and i told you that there were people here that lived here around now i'm going to zoom in again and pan around and show you them so here's one of them this guy's paying the 86 dollars and he's here as much as he wants he can be here 12 months out of the year if he can endure the heat and uh he's probably in a pickup with a shell i don't think he could endure the heat i think i would be leaving but maybe he does and now we're coming into uh where is everybody out i think we're about there that's the road oh yeah there they are okay so i'm gonna zoom in and you're gonna see the white dots that's all they are here at this distance so dead center in the frame is one of them and just to the right of him there's another guy camping that's probably a big rig fifth wheel oh there's several two three little ones in there oh there was one of them i missed him so there's dead center one two three there's dead center but i think there's and there's more than you can see a lot of these you're only seeing the top of the biggest rigs over the brush a little cluster there and there are many more you know the vans you can't see at all they're all too low to be able to see um and so i think there's we walked over there oh there's a good 20 or 30 people living over there not year round because it gets too hot although i guess a few do uh they run their generators and uh endure that and then over here you can't see them there are more in the brush i've walked it so i know and one little more there's another guy and that's about all you can see uh there's just a lot of people there and then we're back we've done a complete circle to the queue big q casino now they if they could these folks could always go over there and dump their trash at the queue casino they could use their restrooms uh so it's not like you don't get anything for for your money you just get the right to be here all year and not be harassed and be within very good distance of some very good uh shopping very very good shopping easy walk into mexico or drive into yuma uh you can see the freeway behind us we're just that close to the freeway we got good internet here although i think down in the valleys which a lot of these people are it gets really poor because they're below line of sight uh where we are we get pretty decent inner wet you can tell it's noisy uh you can hear road noise and and road noise is an issue uh because of the colorado river the all-american canal it distributes the water so their fields everywhere they grow crops year round it's december no it's january 2nd right now and this is a common sight all around yuma it's a bus actually there's a couple of there you can't see them behind the tree uh that came in from mexico full of migrant workers they're not migrants say people who live in mexico they cross the border every day they go through the border checkpoint they show their passports the passport guards do an uh head check people go through people come back and they have work visas they come here and work we desperately need mexicans to work for us americans aren't out there doing the back breaking labor of of uh of harvesting crops uh there you have it we're at the uh kuching indian land 86 dollars a year you camp for very close to yuma to mexico to uh really cheap dental really cheap uh prescription drugs so we'll talk again and i'll i'll do this as a series i'll go around uh we'll go to new mexico and talk about the new mexico park pass i'll start showing you more of my dispersed camping uh i'll get may i'll try to make it so you know how to find places let me recommend you go to my blog uh i've talked about this at great great length i talk about details of maps and how to find places and google the mvum and on and on and on things you've never heard of before uh in the description i will have links if you go and search those links out you'll get most of the information you need from my blog so there you have it thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it you learned something you're inspired i can do this i can pay 86 a year for a pla safe pleasant place to live imagine that you can do it all you gotta do is get in the vehicle and come down here and you can do it uh so uh until next time uh subscribe to our channel like us on youtube share this on public media on all your social media so that others can learn about this too you can do this i promise you so we'll talk to you later and until then happy trails

Channel: CheapRVliving

Views: 587,057

Keywords: live, living, car, van, RV, Fill-time, nomad, gypsy, camper, camp, boondock, travel, Quechan, Casino, Indian, Yuma, Algodones

Id: TVfOCiSGIm8

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2017