Search engines and the Internet have made finding out-of-the-way Moroccan Restaurants and hand-carved Native American flutes as easy as clicking a few keys. Unfortunately, finding a great boondocking campsite to commune with Mother Nature is not. Sure, you can find “boondocking” campsites, but often this simply means “no hook-ups.”
Depending on what you are looking for, the term boondocking can be ambiguous and unhelpful, referring to everything from a campsite in a busy national or state park, where you can hear your neighbor’s TV or electric toothbrush, to the opposite extreme, what western desert rats call “coyote” camping, where few if any campers are within sight.
Once you have learned the tricks of camping without hookups and a readily available support system (dump station, potable water supply), you can expect to get bitten by the “deep woods” or “open desert” bug. You can tell when you’ve been bitten when you start dreaming of quiet leafy glades by babbling brooks with two-foot rainbow trout leaping merrily from dark pools. Or maybe you visualize a lone desert campsite under a milky way crammed with stars as bright as lasers and a coyote serenade just up the arroyo.
Until you’ve ventured out into the nether reaches of our natural lands, you will be among those asking, “Why do you boondock when there are nice campgrounds?” After you discover your first few hidden campsites, you will be among those answering that question.
Don’t bother Googling for those perfect spots. We boondockers love to talk about out secret hidden campsites, deep into a national forest over old logging roads or parked on the banks of a seasonal wash filled with screwbean mesquite, catclaw acacia, and a carpet of desert wildflowers–with views that stretch forever. Yes we love to talk about them, and we’ll tell you everything but where they are and how to get there.
But you can find your own—just don’t expect to accumulate these perfect sites like you would download a list from the “secret boondocking campsites” Web page. What you will do is start your own ongoing collection of discoveries, gathered over your years of RVing, places that you return to as you wander the nation’s two-lane backroads and hidden byways. My collection started when I found out how many nifty campsites were scattered about once off the highways, places to spend one or a few nights with only the sounds of a stream splashing down a canyon and the afternoon wind rustling the pine boughs like whispers from the forest creatures. I began looking for private, isolated nests away from the flow of commerce and busy highways where I could stop whenever I was traveling and retraced my routes.
With GPS it’s easy to plot all your secret campsites and to find them again years later. But first you have to find them. There are several methods. Next Saturday I will show you how I find good back-to-nature spots in whatever part of the country I roam.