Oregon Overland Jeep Camping Adventure - 100 Miles Off Road in the Oregon Desert

[Music] how's it going guys Casey here with the coyote works Channel well I just pulled out it Riley and I talked to the gal that runs the store there and she said there's a flash flood warnings and thundershower warnings in effect for the next two days so I'll have to pay attention make sure I don't camp on the bottom of dry wash or something but we might get some cool weather on this trip it's a little tip for any of you guys that do get out here / landing in this part of the country there is gas in Riley but the last time I checked there was no gas in brothers or Hampton so when you leave been going east on highway 20 Riley is the first gas stop Riley is also the last gas stopped if he turned right on highway 95 and head south on 395 Riley is the last gas stop until you get to Valley Falls [Music] all right I am off the pavement and looks like these Thunder heads are continuing to build up here and I'm just starting to get a first couple of drops of rain hitting my windshield so I'm gonna go about oh eight or ten miles or so on this pretty well-maintained fairly major gravel road and then I'm going to turn off to the east but it looks like I'm heading into the storm eater so if it's not raining real hard I'm gonna make a little stop up here and clean off my windshield a little bit it's a little corral up here I'm going to pull over out so I'm heading out into some new country out there but it looks like there's thunder heads building pretty much all around me so there's just a few drops of rain starting to come down now that's interesting I see the grounds a little damp in places out here so it must have been getting a decent amount of rains so what I've got in store for us on this trip is I've got about a half a dozen historic sites that I want to find and what I'm going to do is I'm going to be following the route of it was one of the old main routes that goes back and forth in between it actually crossed oh probably a hundred and twenty miles of this country and I'm going to be follow on a part of it and it connected a series of communities in the series of ranches right now I'm heading down Hogback Road so some of you that are more astute out there can probably figure out where Hogback Road is off of 395 I'm gonna head down hog back aways and then I'll turn off to the east and I'll be on kind of secondary roads this little bit of rain is kind of nice because it's keeping the dust down which is a welcome reprieve out in this country so just to give you guys an idea of how far I am out here so I've drove a hundred and seventy two miles from my house on pavement on kind of secondary highways and I'll probably end up this loop will probably be about 80 miles ish or so off pavement and then I'll make a big loop and I'll come back out on the pavement up near the town Riley I don't really know the roads through there so I'm not a hundred percent sure exactly where I'll come out but I'm just gonna try to find a route through here I did a little bit of research and there was actually a good number of kind of homestead era settlements out here a good number of homesteads now this is really harsh country down here so they were scattered few and far between and they were concentrated around where the resources were it looks like they've got some water out in this country this road is muddy so I'm kind of looking for traces of the old road I should cross it at some point on this road that I'm on but that reminds me you know one of the most underrated pieces of over landing gear I think out there are a good pair of binoculars I feel like it's something a lot of guys just don't think to throw in their gear but man it's such a huge help and even just a really nice luxury if you see some wildlife some antelope something like that but having a good pair of binoculars in the rig with you and my book is absolutely critical all right I've got a lot of miles on these pretty bumpy roads about 32 psi I don't really need traction I just want to soften my ride just a little bit take take some of the shock out of all these little tiny bumps on this road so I'm using this ARB titer deflator it works pretty good [Music] all right that softened up the ride a little bit so I've got about Oh probably five or six more miles down this road before I turn off it onto some more secondary roads and and right around that five six mile mark will be the first spot where I've think there might be a potential homestead so we'll do some looking around and see what we can find there all right got a little bit of water running down the road here I don't think it should be a problem boy I really was not anticipating this much mud and this much water out here these uh these rains that they've been getting in the afternoon must have been really dumping some water I was talking to the lady at the Riley store and she said they've been getting some pretty serious thundershowers every afternoon and that the area is under flash flood warnings but this is crazy this time of year to have this much water and mud out here like there's places when I can just see it standing out in the fields and honestly it's gonna make it a bit problematic and it might even prevent me from getting where I was hoping to go on this trip all right this one looks like it could be a deep one get up a little momentum this is just amazing area out here wide open and I don't think that this is a fairly decent road that I'm on but I don't think anybody's been traveling it this year I don't see any sign of any tracks not even any tracks in the mud or anything like this so I think I'm probably you know getting to be quite a few miles beyond the reach of the average person at this point which makes me a happy boy and well I'm walking around this spot here I found a couple of old pieces of metal but that Thunder is storms coming towards me so I'm going to start working my way north and I'm gonna have to try to find someplace with a little bit of cover to camp tonight all right well striking out so far around finding any super cool historic sights but it's around six o'clock it's actually about ten minutes till 6:00 and not the head of me I got a big view and it looks like there's quite a few juniper trees growing off on the side of it so I'm gonna try to make it up into that Butte and see if I can find me a spot to camp I'd like to get into camp just a little bit early tonight for once in my life so we'll see if that actually happens I've got one more potential Historic Site that I'm gonna try to make before camp and I think just looking at the train around me that I think there's a possibility that I might be able to camp somewhat near it Wow guys I'm pushing it for dark and finding a spot to camp but I just saw this really neat little Canyon that I wanted to take a little hike up and it's just very interesting the rock formations in here it's just such a beautiful time of year with all the wildflowers and everything this is this is just a short window in time when it looks like this out here in a another couple weeks of warm weather this will be dry and turning yellow and really just a harsh environment but right now it's just lush and green and beautiful alright so I got to be kind of careful in here because of the rattlesnakes but right down here in front of me I've got just this beautiful little pool that collects water and then those rocks up behind me they're slightly over hung and there might have even been a cave back in there at one time we're gonna go up and take a look at it but those rocks are blackened by fire so at some point in the past people camped up underneath those rocks and built fires underneath them look at this just a little bit of a rock shelter behind me would have been just enough for a couple of the ancient ones out here to bed down back up in there set up a cooking fire yeah I don't never dig or anything but I bet it'd be pretty amazing what you could find if you sifted around the dirt on the floor of this thing it looked like there was another level of it up there so I'm gonna hike up and check it out a little bit too years and years worth of a fire right there somebody's cooking finer blacken to that wall look at this that's a crude scraper today we're definitely in here all right well after that little walk now it's 7:00 so that gives me about an hour and a half left of light and I'm looking over there and I'm hoping that I'm just about a quarter of a mile from the spot where I wanted to check out and see if there was another piece old history number one and number two that I might be able to camp all right so it's definitely not the most epic camp spot I've ever had but there's wood here a flat spot and it's along the route of where I want to go tomorrow and there are a couple of historic sites here that we can check out in the morning well one maybe not so historic but definitely pretty interesting so let's get camp set up and get some dinner all right the ticks and the mosquitoes are out in force I've already pulled one tick off me so I'm gonna get a fire going that smoke will kind of keep the area right around my camp clear but first I'm gonna build a little bit of a fire reflective wall here I always like to have that just to kind of keep the wind off of the fire and it helps me control the smoke this time of year I don't really need the heat from the fire it's just a cook off of and the smoke is nice because it helps keep the insects away there we go that'll work now I'm going to get a little fire going so I can be burning while I'm setting up the rest of my camp all right see if we can get this fire started with this bundle [Applause] [Music] so one piece of gear that's really handy especially for the rooftop tent where I want everything compact as this climate inflatable pillow and this thing is really comfortable alright and that's that my bed is all set up it takes me about five minutes or maybe ten minutes if I mess around with my bedding a little bit so one thing I did is I set up my camp on a little piece of high ground right here the it doesn't look like any of these storms are gonna hit me but you never know I've got a decent little view I can see a big area around me it's not the most epic spot I've ever camped in but it's got everything I need alright guys hi I'm getting hungry so I've got a nice chef level meal prepared for this evening or that I'm going to prepare so tonight's menu is going to be a gorgonzola and bacon stuffed burger served on an egg onion bun with jalapeno ketchup a little bit of mayonnaise some wilted spinach and some fresh organic tomato so we're just gonna make a really solid delicious burger and it's gonna be really easy the ingredients are really simple I've got some chopped bacon some gorgonzola cheese some fresh spinach some fresh sliced organic tomatoes here I've got the jalapeno ketchup and here I've got the onion egg buns and then inside this container I've got two burger patties so you guys are gonna see this is going to make a delicious meal and it's only gonna take me a couple of minutes to make it alright so I've got my pie irons just a little bit warm I'm just gonna kind of form a burger patty in each one since the burgers are round I'm just kind of pressing them into the corner a little bit all right now I'm one side I'm just gonna press in some gorgonzola then sprinkle in the bacon and they'll do just a little bit more of the gorgonzola on top in the bacon all right now we'll close this up stick this in the fire I'm going to let it go about one minute on one side then one minute on the other side and then I'm going to pull it out of the coals and let it sit and cook for a minute or two and then I'll put it back in for another another minute or two right well the burgers cooking I'm gonna prepare my bone okay it's going off in the distance a little bit of mayonnaise looks crafted me up a nice butter knife I'll put a little bit of spinach on there and then when I set that hot burger on the spinach it'll wilt it just a little bit and make it nice and soft throw a nice thick slice of organic tomato on there all right now that is gonna be the poem have me a little salad got another minute or two and that burger should be done all right guys look at that see how it looks so there you have it the bacon and gorgonzola stuffed burger with wilted spinach and organic tomatoes a little bit of mayonnaise and a little bit of spicy jalapeno ketchup all right my beverage of choice tonight is blue monkey coconut water man that is incredible that is one amazing burger guys man I know I say this a lot but this is just what it's all about coming out here doing some Explorer and having an amazing meal well guys I have to say that burger was amazing this is always such a nice time out here as after all the chores are done nice full belly in front of a campfire but one of the things that I really appreciate about being out in a lot of these places that I go is absolutely no noise no light pollution no as far as I can see there's not one artificial light that's not coming from my camp and there's probably not another person within probably at least 25 miles of me I haven't seen another person since I left the pavement and I've driven almost 40 miles since I left the pavement pretty much have all my camp buttoned up I'm just gonna finish my coconut water and enjoy the campfire and listen to the sounds of the night out here so tomorrow I've got about oh geez probably 40 or 50 miles of off road and I have no idea what condition the roads are in there just trails that I found on the old US yes maps that roughly follow the route of that old wagon road so I'm gonna be following that and we'll see what tomorrow brings but I think I'm gonna crawl up into the tent catch a little sleep the fire is burning down it's been a good day today my belly's full and I'm ready for a nap all right I think that's gonna be really warm tonight I didn't even bring my heater up in my tent cuz I just don't think I'm gonna need it got my trusty Glock 34 chamber is clear I think I'm gonna have a pretty comfortable night tonight there's no breeze out there hopefully the wind won't pick up but I'm right down at the base of this kind of a ridge over here and that Ridge is the direction that the wind is coming from so hopefully that Ridge will give me just a little bit of protection if the wind does pick up tonight I'll probably wake up whenever I wake up which is usually fairly early out here and then I'll just do a quick breakfast break camp and get on the road because we've got a lot of miles to cover tomorrow and a lot of places I want to make sure I have plenty of time to explore so for now caddy works out I'll see you guys in the morning for coffee 20 minutes after 6:00 Suns already rising over there the birds are singing it's just amazing out here not the most amazing campsite I've ever had but still still pretty epic waking up out here in the morning my light pods back on the charger get this thing turned around facing the Sun so it starts charging up this morning first things first I'm gonna get some water going for some coffee [Laughter] I went ahead and started a little fire just to keep the mosquitoes down once the heat of the day hits probably within the next hour or so the mosquitoes will be gone but for now while it's still a little bit cool in the morning and there's a lot of doing the grass they're out so I'm just enjoying my cup of coffee this morning one mnf for breakfast is a couple of mountain house meals I don't want to spend a lot of time in camp so that's just a quick breakfast but one thing I like to do to make it a little bit special as I take the scrambled eggs I make your hatch into the scrambled eggs and I make it a packet of the biscuits and gravy and then I put the two together so I have eggs and biscuits and gravy so that just adds a little bit of protein to the biscuits and gravy breakfast by the way the mountain house biscuits and gravy meal is actually some pretty darn good biscuits and gravy the scrambled eggs yeah not so much but they are protein and they do help fill the void all right let's see our breakfast is coming out all right so it's not an amazing breakfast sandwich made in the pie iron but it is a breakfast that'll fill the void keep my stomach full and give me some energy for the next couple hours so I'm gonna go ahead and dump some extra gas in the Jeep now for a couple of reasons one I can get that weight off of my gas can mount in the back and it just rides better when it's in the tank so I'm gonna go ahead and do that and I'm gonna need every drop of fuel I've got before I get out of here nice things about these Renault packs Kansas so far I've never had one leak and that's pretty impressive because all my life I've dealt with a lot of different gas cans and almost all the different ones I've worked with have leaked so I know there's other ones besides the roto pack skins that don't leak but these have just been really dependable you don't need to really crank down the caps to keep them from leaking they're one of the well they're actually so far the only cam that I trust to put inside my Jeep so I'm just getting my kitchen stuff packed up here real quick but this little Optimus crock stove has just been perfect it's just a little single burner butane stove and this is the entire thing with the butane canister so it uses up hardly any room of my kit and almost everything that I do out here I can do with one burner and this is about the most compact one burner style stove that I've come up with now sometimes it is nice to throw in a two burner stove but that is a little bit bigger and it's quite a bit heavier so it adds more bulk and more weight to your loadout 90% of the time this little guy is just perfect for me alright I'm gonna fire off a few rounds real quick cuz usually in the mornings I do dry practice but when I'm out here like this there's no reason to do dry practice I'll do some live practice oh yeah the last class I went through and I'm gonna have some video up on that contact front I went up to Hogwarts outside of Portland and I trained with James Markham of Nahum syndicate so today is really the first kind of actual firing practice I've done since then so we'll see how this goes all right it's about 10 o'clock so as you guys can see I didn't really get out of camp early but I do a little shooting and took my time this morning it's just such a beautiful morning but now I'm going to get on the road and we've got about I'm gonna say about five miles or so until the next historic site alright the first stop is really close to camp we're just gonna run up here and check out there's this old bus here and I'm not really sure why so we're gonna go check it out real quick hey little guy hey what's going on it's just beautiful [Applause] pretty interesting the random stuff you find out here in the middle of the desert so this bus right here I don't know how it ended up here but it's a pretty rough road down in here so it must have been quite a feat to get it here it's a pretty old one but it looks like it's been converted to some kind of a living quarters I can see like a old refrigerator what looks like an old refrigerator and some cabinets and things like that so it looks like it's been converted to camp in or live in so I don't know if this was some RV from way back in the day somebody got out here and then it broke down or if maybe some it's some little bit of Rancher ingenuity where they utilize the bus to make a little cow camp or sheep camp out of but anyway it's pretty interesting so we're gonna head up the road just a little bit and we're gonna see if we can find another site all right so on a old 1960s map that shows somewhere right in here is the site of an old cabin so I'm just gonna keep kicking around here and see if I can find evidence of this old trappers cabin that was in here well it's gonna be really hard for you guys to see but right here where I'm sitting there's the stone perimeter what I'm reasonably certain is the foundation of that old cabin we've got some wire right here part of an old mattress spring over there and then a rusty it looks like a rusty some kind of a bucket or something then right here in the ground and finding some chunks of old old iron so I'm thinking right here was that cabin from what I read that was basically an old hermit that lived in it and I think just sustained himself off a trapping and hunting out here but man we are way out in the middle of nowhere this would have been a tough life right here on this spot there's a little bit of a spring right back up in that little draw that maybe in wetter years ran more and then we've got some shelter from these cliffs right here from these rocks right here that would have actually broken the wind the prevailing wind comes from that direction so it would have been kind of a sheltered spot here and actually all things considered not too bad nice view of the valley out there all right so the roads aren't bad up here well they're not bad as in I'm not gonna make it bad they're bad is in there just rocky and faint and I don't think very many people go on this road every year and there certainly hasn't been anybody on it this year so I've got a couple more miles of this but now I'm up on these high plateaus and the wildflowers up here are just incredible and this is such a unique thing in this area up here like this is literally just a couple week period of time when these wildflowers are out like this it just takes a week or two of hot weather and then they'll all be dried up and gone but right now in these first couple weeks of the spring when we've get been getting some afternoon rain still they sure are gorgeous that big ole range Bowl kind of just exploring this awesome little Canyon in here and somewhere in here there's a canyon it's got some pictographs on it but I'm looking for that an old guy that I work with well actually he's not that old he probably wouldn't be happy if I called him an old guy but a guy that I work with told me about one of these canyons in here has some pictographs so I thought I'd come in here and see if I could find it but so far nothing but it is a really neat Canyon in here very cool driving through it and it's tight in here though and scraping sagebrush on both sides give me that what we call out in this country that desert pinstriping you get dust on your rig out here and then you drive through these tight roads where the sagebrush of the juniper tree scrape against your rig and it makes these pinstripes and the wax coating on your paint call it desert pinstriping all right so I saw this thing on the map and there's a mile and a half or so off of the route that I was going on but it was called hole in the ground but the marking that it had on it was like the marking for a ruins or an old building site so I'm gonna head out here and see if I can find it [Applause] [Applause] Wow guys that is crazy that's exactly what this is a hole in the ground it's a it's really just like the collapsed roof of the cave and it looks like potentially the cave goes back both directions from it you can't even see it until you get right up next to it everything just looks perfectly flat out across here and then all of a sudden you come up on this thing god I can't even imagine how many animals and things have fallen in that over the years but and that would lay odds at the Native Americans use that out here there's no road to it it was just this random map map marking about and if you didn't have this old USGS map with a marking on it like it's not on any newer map so it's one of those cool little things that you find with those old maps used yeah there's a lot of flakes of obsidian all over the ground here so the Native Americans definitely definitely did something around this site I don't know if they sheltered up in there it would have been a little bit of a climb down in there and out of there but man 4 out here in this wide-open country that would have been some of the best shelter around all right hop to the next site the next site is gonna be a little homestead so we've got a couple of miles to get there and at this rate these roads are pretty rocky so I'm just gonna concentrate on the driving and I'll bring you guys back when we get there all right well I arrived at the site of this next homestead and there's actually quite a bit here but I'm gonna have a little snack salami and cheese tray I found a concentration of cams right in here but no I've been kind of gritting back and forth and I haven't found a root cellar or a foundation so nothing conclusive it could have been a really major cow camp but I just have a feeling that it was a homestead here all right so this looks like the barn area over here this was definitely a pretty extensive homestead this thing's been collapsed for probably five or ten years at least but it was actually a pretty decent size and for the fact that it had the homestead itself and then a separate barn a couple of structures is another maybe kind of a carriage shed or something like that over there god this is remote out here just freakin incredible that people lived out here and made a life of it Wow guys theoretically this should have been a shortcut but this road is just like hammering crap and I've got about four or so more miles to go on it so I am just going along at a crawl it's not so much that it's questionable whether it's passable or not it's just there is not a smooth stretch on this entire road you just don't get a break from it then I'm rolling along about five miles an hour try not to beat the heck out of my rig too much and even at that it is just a rough son of a gun well I'm now on my last stretch of pavement driving I've got about five or six miles of this fairly well traveled somewhat maintained dirt road and then I'll be back on pavement so it looks like on this trip I am sitting at about 289 miles right now total trip miles so far I'll have to go back and look but I think I left the pavement around 170 miles in yesterday so that means I'm right around a hundred off-road miles on this trip saw some great new country again country had never been through before had a great meal around camp really enjoyed the camp spot last night few historic spots and ultimately just really enjoyed getting out of town for a few days so I've still got a couple hours to drive to get back home so I'm gonna sign off guys really appreciated having you along on this trip I always appreciate your support in your comments hope you guys enjoyed tagging along on this adventure and I'll catch you all in the next one coyote works out [Music] you

Channel: Coyote Works

Views: 61,688

Rating: 4.9396 out of 5

Keywords: Jeep, overland, camping, oregon, outback, rubicon, desert, offroad, 4x4

Id: nDboM-Mkrd4

Length: 41min 18sec (2478 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2019