EXTREME Off-Grid Living in a 4 Season Tent & Tiny Truck Camper

[Music] there is nothing better in my opinion than having like a good snowstorm outside where the snow's really coming down hard and you've got your stove going and you've got your lights on inside your tent and you're baking up like some cookies or some biscuits or something and your dog's over there crashed out on your cot and it's nice and warm in there and it's crackling and you're just hanging out and having a nice time and there's no one else around those times are so peaceful it's just [Music] amazing i'm a full-time nomad and i've been on the road since july 5th 2015. i live in a little tiny pickup truck with a five-foot bed and then the wintertime in a tent with a wood stove and then i've got my dog with me sierra and she she is just the most fun travel companion you could possibly have i was in the corporate world for 19 years i was in sales for a long time and then i had my own small business that i owned i got to the point to where i didn't like being in that environment but every time i go camping i felt great and i loved it and i would feel energized again i'd sleep great and i thought you know what if i what if i just did this full time what if i figured out a way to downsize all my expenses pare down my lifestyle just live real simple carry everything that i have with me and just live life kind of on my terms and so that's what i did you know i kind of just consider myself a digital nomad i do content full-time that's how i make money with my youtube channel and then also working with outdoor brands i first started in colorado and started truck camping here and then as the winner came about i thought well i don't really have a solution in place for winter and i came across this really great tent um from cabela's it's called the bighorn three it's an outfitter style tint so it's made for real harsh conditions the coldest temperatures that i've had in that tent outside was negative 24 and the wind chill was negative 37. that was pretty chilly the tent actually has two different portions there's the main portion of the tent and there's a massive vestibule that goes on it and so the main portion of the tent it's kind of nice you can zip off the interior of it so at night when you're heating up the tank you only heat up the main portion what i'll do is i'll usually use the vestibules like a mud room because this room doesn't have a floor in it but it does have flaps that go down so you can put snow on it on the outside and create like a nice airtight seal in there so that you don't get any wind blowing in i'll chop firewood in there that'll also put my fridge out there and that way at night time when it gets nice and cool you don't use any power keeping the fridge cool you can let the you know weather keep it cool then going into the main portion of the tent on the left hand side is where you're gonna have my cot now i always put my cot on this side because on the right side and the far corner is where the stove jack is for the wood stove underneath the cot is where i'll have storage i'll put like my snowshoes some hiking poles my backpack down there a couple extra blankets my toiletry items things like that so i'll use that area underneath that's kind of like stuff to store out of the way and then at the end of the bed will be sierra's bed this is this stove is awesome it's a workhorse horse of a stove it's heavy as all get out it's about 50 pounds it's a real good gauge of steel it's called a a three dog dx stove and it's from four dog stoves out of minneapolis i cook on it the boil water i do all of my camp functions that require heat over the stove and it's great the one thing about camping with a tent with the wood stove is that throughout the evening you will get up to stoke to stove even if you're using hardwoods then just next to that on on the main portion of the tent there it's just a big living room area moving on a little bit more i'll have my water station and any sort of cooking stuff that i'll want inside the tent so all together with the vestibule and the main portion of the tent you're looking at 224 square feet of living space in the wintertime i've never had any issues with predators coming around with the smells coming from the refrigerator or from cooking over the stove you know living in this tent i like it so much that i see myself doing this every winter i do have a seasonal storage locker that i use for any gear that i'm not using at that time but i just think that living this tent it's so much fun in the winter time and it opens up so many more recreational opportunities that you don't normally have like when it when the snowstorms hit i just grab my snowshoes and go out and start snowshoeing with sierra we have a blast there's no one back there so i love the solitude aspect of it just being out there by myself and i think i'll just continue winter camping i would say i mean i'd like to go until i'm about 70. so that's another 25 years because i'm 45 right now so after i'm done with the winter time i i move into my truck for the summer and the 4x4 truck that i have it's a toyota tacoma it's a 2005. i like that truck for the simple reason that it's small in size a lot of these 4x4 trails are old mining trails and as a result they tend to be really narrow now i do compromise comfort my whole reason for living small and living tiny like this is to be able to access hard-to-reach places so um my truck is a five foot bed if you notice there sleeping in it has been a chore over the last five years figuring out the best way to dial it in because i still want to keep like a low profile with the truck and so the best option i could come up with was still keeping this profile was to build this slide out extension in the rear and so what this does is this essentially turns a five foot bed into a seven foot bed and this is a slide out extension it's two feet um i have it on rails but this whole slide out extension here it only weighs a total of 42 pounds on the interior i had these screws that came down from the roof rack so if you'll see there there's these screws and i utilize those to put in these shelves and that's where i put all my clothes and so i'm able to to get the clothes up and out of the way for sleeping for the bed here i actually do have a little mattress it's like a four inch memory foam mattress that creates a really comfortable sleeping area and then during the daytime what i'll do with the blankets is i'll put them over on the sides like this i do have a fan for the summer time i've got this little usb fan that works great after i'm done uh troy camp and i just i just pack everything up i kind of just take the whole bed roll and roll it up in there and then just slide the extension in and uh it's good to go i've got solar up here so i've got 100 watts here it's a renegy 100 watt panel and then i've also got a folding panel here that's like their suitcase panel from renegy and all that goes inside to a lithium-ion battery it's from max oak it's called the eb150 so it's real tall and it fits behind this little seat that i did for for sierra because i ripped out the back seats here this whole section where like the fridges and then my paneling on stuff all this is ripped out so i could have additional storage underneath here this is a dometic cfx28 it's a great fridge perfect for one person i keep tons of canned goods with me at all time just in case i want to stay off for for extended periods of time when i set up at camp when i'm truck camping you know i have like my stove and my kitchen area here the awning makes it great too because it covers this area for uh for cooking i'll show you sierra's setup for her bed so i made her bed huge because i want to have a bigger area for her to hang out in especially when we're on long road trips and so this whole area here i've got my my my dirty clothes hamper underneath here and then her storage area then a few items for sierra in the back here and then her dog food and some additional dog food storage and then like my laundry gear and that's that's pretty much it and then on the passenger side here i'll show you what i have up front i've got a pressure cooker my buddy craig told me to get one so i'm gonna start learning how to cook with that i'm excited to do that i've got my drone i always keep an additional shirt and then a sweatshirt up front and then you know i'll have some extra propane here's my water purifier and then i've got my my backpack here my day pack set up for fly fishing and so i've got my fly fishing gear here and then i've got my tenkara fly rod which that's how i i like to fly fish and that's pretty much the entire setup like i roll real minimal i like to use renewable resources for everything when i'm back here because the last thing i want to do is drive back into town to do stuff like get water or power up a battery or something like that and so logistics back here it's it's pretty simple with the way i've set up things now because i've got a high volume water purifier it's the msr guardian it's got a pump on it so you just pump out water and i'm able to go to any stream and just jam out water and i've got a water container that's seven gallon for energy i use solar and so i've got 200 watts of solar panels that i carry that's the way i'm able to power up my lithium ion battery that battery is 101 amp hours for wi-fi i use a company called netbuddy and it's just an unlimited data plan through at t i do get capped at about 800 gigs of data a month but it's great for doing content creation back here because i don't have to drive into town like i used to as far as like hygiene and stuff like that i've got a shower on the side of my truck so it's the road shower it's a five gallon just metal container that i can pressurize since i'm back here in the middle of nowhere i can take showers outside it's no big deal as far as the restroom goes you know you just dig cat holes you dig six to eight inches deep you know you want to make sure you're about 200 feet away from the water sources pack out all of your toilet paper don't don't put it in the ground because it'll it won't degrade especially in really dry climates and in the winter time it's a little bit more difficult with that what i do for the bathroom is in the tent is there's these bags that are called pet bags it's p-e-t-t and it's a type of solution that you can use the restroom in it and then it encases everything in a gel to where it doesn't have any odor those are actually approved by leave no trace to be able to throw into like the dump the challenges of living this way i think the biggest challenge that i've run into is you just wear out as far as energy levels i'm a pretty energetic person as is and so i think that uh i could handle truck camping year-round with with little to no issue but the winter time i mean you know you're you're working with your stove you're chopping your wood you're making sure your food doesn't freeze you're working with a limited amount of daylight to harvest energy for your for your batteries you've got to be working pretty much all day long until you're just operating your camp and in the summer time you don't have near the amount of camp responsibilities to keep things going [Music] a lot of people think that if you want to come live this way you gotta have a ton of cash and you have to buy a massive rig that's fully decked out and you have to have everything dialed in and you don't like you just gotta just hit the road and i i would say for those who are looking the first thing you gotta do is you gotta sell all your stuff you gotta get rid of everything so start to do that start to go out and test out your systems and see you know do little short trips while you still have a house do like a week here or two weeks there and just work on the road and see if you can make things happen and see if you can get into a flow and if you can then you can do it you know and you can do odd jobs while you're on the road i did that for the first three and a half years before i started doing content full-time and i would do things i was i was a ranch hand and then i would do landscaping jobs and you know i had sierra with me so i was limited as far as what i could do i couldn't go leave her in my truck for eight hours a day because it'd be too hot so i had to pick jobs that were outside i did trail work for the forest service a bunch of different things and you know the thing about living this way is it doesn't cost as much as being in a house and so you can really pare down your expenses where it's next to nothing to be out here and travel around and you can make it happen instead of chasing things i'm chasing experiences and that perspective change has been so refreshing because if you constantly identify yourself with what you have like that that's a never-ending battle like you'll always think like okay i gotta get something new and i gotta get the latest and greatest stuff and the whole keeping up with the joneses thing i mean that just doesn't make anybody happy and it didn't make me happy and so making this change to this new perspective which is basically rooted in minimalism and just the simple life has taught me more in the past five years than i learned in the previous 40 living on this planet and that's what i'm most thankful for i i could not be more pleased with the unexpected change in perspective that has happened in my life and i just i couldn't be more thankful for it [Music] subscribe to exploring alternatives and check out our playlists for more stories like this you can also follow brian on youtube at off grid backcountry adventures thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 1,319,134

Rating: 4.9475923 out of 5

Keywords: off, grid, backcountry, adventures, truck, 4x4, pickup, living, lifestyle, tent, living in a truck, living in a tent, truck camper, DIY, self, built, build, simple, wood, stove, woodstove, dog, Brian, Galyon, Exploring, Alternatives, Colorado, solar, power, Renogy, Dometic, fridge, kitchen, camp, camping, full, time, minimalist, minimalism, extreme, nomad, nomadic, travel, boondocking, crown land, overland, overlanding, toyota, tacoma, tiny, tour, winter, 4 season tent, winterized, cold, weather, snow, snowstorm, survival, freezing, blm, land

Id: Vdr4_JnUBYc

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020