Episode 2: Ready for Overlanding? How to find the Best Campsites
Welcome back to the Blue Yonder Overland Podcast! Ready to try overlanding but not sure where to start in finding great campsites outside of campgrounds? Join host, Jen, as she walks through how to trip plan, free and paid resources for finding campsites, and stories from putting all these tools to use on her adventures. Message us at blueyonderjen@ Instagram or Threads to suggest topics, guests or ask questions!
Show Notes and Links:
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USFS dispersed camping rules (each area may have its own policies: Pike-San Isabel National Forest (CO) site; Olympic National Forest (WA) site)
BLM dispersed camping policies (BLM website)
GPS mapping software:
Titus Adventures: winter camping guide to CO
cross-US bike trail: Great American Rail-Trail
Health studies demonstrating benefits of being in nature each week
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Episode 2, January 30, 2025. Lightly edited for clarity.
Jen: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Blue Yonder Overland podcast. I'm your main host, Jen, and I'm so excited to welcome you back for our second episode. Thanks to those of you that listened to our launch episode last week, we're now available on Spotify and Apple, and I'm getting us listed anywhere else that you might listen to podcasts as well. And thanks to those of you that engage with questions or comments @BlueYonderJen at Instagram or Threads.One of the questions is one we're going to dive in today that I heard from you and that is simply,” OK, overlanding sounds great. Getting outside the campground sounds awesome. But how do you even get started? Where do you look? How do you find these sites?” And that is exactly the topic that we're going to cover today with both practical tips as well as mindset and things to kind of keep in mind as you think about your very first overland trip.
I also just had the perfect example from the universe fall into my lap last week of exactly why we had gotten into overlanding. And if you follow me on Instagram you may have already seen this. So apologies. But on the morning of Friday, January 24th, I had an event saved in my Google calendar that this was the day that the Banff campgrounds up in Canada opened for reservations. I had forgotten all about it, but luckily I woke up just a little bit before they were set to open and got logged in to the website. And about 10 minutes till 8 a.m. Mountain Time, which is when they were officially set to open, is when I tried to click reserve and it puts you into a waiting queue. It told me that, you know, they would update me when the queue opened at 8 a.m. Mountain Time with what my place was in line. And then once I had reached the front of the line, then it would automatically redirect me to the booking site in order to be able to reserve a campsite. So I thought, okay, great. I'm, you know, happy that I happened to make it here before the 8 a.m. open time. Let's see what this looks like as eight hits and I circled back to the page to see, you know, where I was going to land in terms of the line. I was shocked to see that I was about 41,000 people back in the line. And this is despite, you know, being on the page 10 minutes before it opened. And so what I realized was that I didn't need to save the opening date in time of the campgrounds. What I needed to save was whenever this waiting room magically opened, which I haven't done research on yet, but I'm going to find out. I'm sure it's in an online forum somewhere. But, you know, here I am, it's 8 a.m. and I've got 41,537 people ahead of me in line to try to book a site for Banff. And this is just exactly why we got into overloading, because this is ridiculous. And even with all this technology to make these processes seamless and easier, it still just feels like you're playing the lottery to try to get a campsite at some of these places. And that's not to say we're not going to, you know, try to get a campsite at Banff. We are we you know, some of these campgrounds and places are just so iconic and you want that easy access to places. So we're going to keep trying for those. But it's nice to know that we can fall back on overland, need to find sites at any time and don't have to plan, you know, 6 to 9 months ahead of time and, you know, go up against 40,000 other people for these sites. And I thought that just perfectly illustrated one of the reasons why we've really embraced overlanding.
Before we jump into today's topic of finding campsites, I want to invite you to reflect for just a moment on how you might embrace an adventurous mindset which I think is really necessary for overlanding, but also can help us more fully enjoy life in any situation. One reason why I deliberately want to release new episodes of this podcast on Thursdays is because I like to think that you might have time to listen maybe on your Friday morning commute, or maybe as you're tidying up or doing laundry Thursday night, prepping for the weekend and starting to think about your plans. No Mater what plans you have for the weekend, even if you don't have time to get out camping, I encourage you to see where it might be possible to build in a little bit of adventure. Growing up, I feel like my mom was really good at encouraging us to explore our surroundings or think about them in new ways. We would do a lot of walks in our neighborhoods and sometimes we'd bring a penny along and we'd just flip a coin at each intersection we came to in order to decide our route. And it was so simple, but it would shake up what otherwise would have been a normal routine and often introduce us to new things. Maybe we noticed a different flower garden or met a new neighbor, or found a new favorite neighborhood dog.
So as I'm sometimes feeling in a rut, especially as winter days drag on in January, I try to remind myself that it's worth taking the time to build in some moments of exploration, no Mater what that might look like. We have a ton of packing we have to get done this weekend as we prepare to move out of our apartment. But in the midst of that, my sister's been telling us about this delicious biscuit place near her. So we're going to build in a quick brunch break where we'll get to take a walk from her place to this new biscuit place. And I'm excited not just to get time in an area of the city I'm less familiar with, but also to discover a new place. So that's an example of how our building in just a little bit of adventure into our weekend.
Okay. So for today's episode on finding campsites, we're going to look at the basic types of land in the U.S. resources for scouting sites on that land, as well as free and paid resources that you might want to check out. And all of this is really timely for me as I'm thinking about planning several different spring expeditions that we’ll be participating in, mostly across the southwest United States. But I realized also there's a difference between zooming in to the nitty gritty of finding spots and sort of the 30,000 foot view of trip planning. So I'll probably save most of the trip planning for a whole other episode and for today's purposes will assume that you've already got your trip parameters in mind. For me, this often means just kind of plugging in the basic route into Google and kind of identifying, you know, how far I think we're going to get each day roughly what areas I'm going to need to look for a campsite in and then also being aware of what things I might cross paths with, like a national park or a National Forest Service area. But I've got kind of a rough idea of where I'll need to camp.
So at this point in trip planning, it's useful to have a rough idea of what types of land and areas you're looking for on a map. So it's helpful for me to think about it similarly to how government is broken down at various levels. We're going to start at the top with all the land that is owned or managed by the U.S. federal government, national. So this would be things like national parks, national monuments, U.S. National Forest, as well as any other land that's managed by either U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management. And this also includes areas like National Wilderness, although we found that those tend to have very high restrictions on camping because they're really aimed at preserving a specific habitat.
Next, we'd have state land. And so this might go by different names in different states. Colorado, it's BLM, Washington, it's the Department of Natural Resources, DNR. So might look a little bit different from state to state. And then, of course, we would have county or even more locally owned land.
So circling back to federally managed land, this is our favorite type of land to find dispersed camping sites on because we generally find it has the least restrictions on camping and where you can go. The least restrictive land type we have found in general is U.S. Forest Service managed land. You'll find similar rules, however, with BLM managed land. Most of these both types of land sites allows up to 14 days of camping in a single site before you would need to move, although you will need to double check the area where you're going because every area has its own specific policies governing it. We found that that's kind of the common denominator, though. Unless they say otherwise, you're generally allowed to camp anywhere on these lands. Usually, you know, you need to stay beyond a certain amount from water and you do need to be off the road. But they actually recommend you stay, you know, within I think it's 150 feet in a lot of cases from the road so as not to disturb the wild environment that you're camping in. And then the other resource that we'll often check out when we're looking at these lands is the U.S. Forest Service motor vehicle use maps and the um, and so I'll talk a little bit more about mapping and the tools that you'll want to look at later. But that's just kind of where we zero in as a rule is U.S. Forest Service land and BLM land because they tend to allow dispersed camping in most places.
Then with national parks and national monuments, what we've tended to find is that national parks, while they often have amazing designated full service amenity campgrounds, they usually are very restrictive on dispersed camping within the park boundaries simply because they have already gone through the trouble of setting up these campsites. And so they're trying to preserve, you know, the wild aspect of the rest of the park. One interesting twist that we've found in this is national monuments. And when you hear the word national monument, you might be a little bit thrown because you think monument, you know, like the Washington Monument, usually, you know, just a very small place or a physical structure. However, there are some national monuments like Bears Ears or Grand Staircase Escalante in Utah, which actually encompass thousands of acres of public land and where you are able to disperse camp. So we were exploring Grand Staircase-Escalante back in November of 2023 and found while they have markers where you're not allowed to camp past- not allowed to camp further into the wild, to try to protect vegetation and and wildlife, there was still a lot of areas where you could just pull over and dispersed camp and a lot of amazing, amazing views. So we were really happy to explore that and feel like we just touched the surface. There's so many more roads to explore there, so don't discount national monuments. Just take a look at the policies on their website.
We've also had some, I would say, rude awakenings with U.S. Forest Service land in Colorado. And it's been interesting to see the differences between that and Washington. These are the two states where we have the most expertise and experience in over landing. And while in Washington, most of the U.S. Forest Service land was open for dispersed camping pretty much anywhere, and we kind of had already mapped that out and knew that so were very comfortable any time we were on U.S. Forest Service land in most of the areas we were going, we knew that we were good to go. However, in Colorado, we found several areas within the National Forest Service areas which are right outside and kind of surrounding the Rocky Mountain National Park areas- a lot of these did have some restrictions on camping or designated sites. And at first, I was a little bit annoyed when I was looking at their websites to find this out. However, as soon as we got up to the actual area, it was in Pike-San Isabel National Forest, I quickly discovered why they only let you camp at designated sites, and it was because the road was incredibly narrow in some places and also featured sheer kind of exposed cliffs and overlooks of the area you were driving into. And there literally would not have been a safe way to pull over in pretty much any other spot other than the ones that were marked with a designated camp post with a little tent on a brown stick. And so as soon as I realized that it was a lot less salty about the fact that we were limited to only these marked sites, and we were able to find a place not too far from there. It was getting pretty late that night, and so it was already after dark and we took the first spot we could find and then we did a lot more exploring the next day and found, you know, a wealth of additional spots further in. But it was just such a wake up call from what we'd been used to in Washington, where really most of the national forest areas we were exploring was you could camp anywhere and there wasn't a lot of natural, you know, land features that would have prevented you from pulling over. You had the biggest thing you had to contend with in Washington was trees. And, you know, whether you could physically access a spot that way. But it left you, you know, a lot of potential little turnouts and clearings to pull over in. And so it was an interesting difference and worth keeping in mind as you're looking at National Forest Land.
At this point in your trip planning, you're aware of the different types of land. Maybe kind of the general area that you want to go and any restrictions that apply there. But you still haven't found exact sites you're going to camp at. And there's really kind of two paths you could pursue from here, depending on how much of a challenge you want. So the first is either asking people or finding people, online guides, or online resources I'll point to for specific coordinates of places that you know are going to be a campsite. You can, you know, whatever parameters you need- whether it needs to fit a large group, whether you want it to have a view or be, you know, maybe by water because it's really hot out- there is, you know this option of finding sites that others have found. The other general route you could go is just continuing to do more research on what promising road networks you might find on this land and having an idea of a promising route to explore where it's pretty likely that you would find dispersed camping sites. And again, this might vary based on how much time you got for this trip. You know, who's going to be if someone's going to be along with you or if you've got, you know, family members along where you might not have the luxury of some exploration time. And then there's no shame in trying to find coordinates that are already kind of vetted.
However, I would give this big caveat: The topic of sharing coordinates, especially publicly, is pretty hot topic within the overlapping community. And it kind of goes back to this idea of self-sufficiency, but also just the spirit of really enjoying the wilderness that we're all chasing. And so there is, you know, if you're getting coordinates from somebody, it kind of takes away some of that sense of discovery and exploration. But, you know, it's also that there are going to be times when you just don't have that luxury of the time needed to explore. I will say, though, to please always refrain from posting exact coordinates on any sort of publicly available information that you put out there about your trip. You might see it, you know, within private forums or private paywalled sites or paid guides that you might be able to download from different places. And I think that's a little bit different than just being full on out there publicly. Oftentimes this can lead to just especially if something goes viral, just a huge increase in traffic in that area as people kind of chase, you know, the photograph or, you know, whatever it is that you've shared about the experience, chasing that same experience, especially if the road to get to the spot isn't very difficult, then it can quickly just get overrun, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of why we are trying to disperse camp and really just get out of the wilderness away from people.
It could also lead to bigger impacts, so it could lead to trash being left at the site. It could lead to, you know, wildfires, it could lead to Forest Service or whoever's managing the public land, deciding to shut access to it. We've seen that a lot in Washington, especially in wildfire season, where they'll shut gates to a lot of public forest service roads just because, you know, trying to reduce the danger of manmade fires in the area. But you'll see the same thing happen. If they find an area you know, is overrun or there's a lot of trash, they might just shut access to it. And so the best way to preserve that is not to publicly announce what the best spots are. And a lot of overlanders, I think, kind of it's kind of fun secrets to have like your favorite places. And you might, you know, choose to share them with close family or friends, which is a little bit different than posting about them publicly.
We've tried if we're going to a completely new state and we're trying to stick to a pretty fast timeline where we're just not going to have a lot of time to explore- we have accessed some paid resources, some that are available, maybe with a subscription that'll let you have access to a lot of different coordinates that people have found. And that also provided us honestly with just great peace of mind to know that we had a couple of options in our back pocket and we still try to build in the time to explore, but knew that we had a few coordinates to kind of fall back on in that general area if we didn't find anything.
But this kind of leads us into, you know, how we keep track of those coordinates. And at this point, you're probably going to need some sort of off road GPS software access. So Google Maps often just isn't going to cut it. And there's a few different options out there that are pretty popular with overlanders, one of which is OnX, and another one is Gaia. We use Gaia and so I'll spend probably the most time talking about that, but I'm also going to dig into a free trial of OnX. So you get a little bit of taste of what that's like as well. And these software, they usually come with an app and so often we’ll download it to a phone or an iPad. The thing that's really critical is you need to be able to download offline maps. And so whatever research you do ahead of time, that's awesome. But once you get out on these roads are often very remote, often no cell service. So you'll need to be sure that you've downloaded the area on some sort of offline map that has a greater level of detail than what you're going to find on Google as well. Not to say that Google is not a fantastic research, and especially if you look at the the satellite view, oftentimes you can do some really good pre-vetting of areas and kind of see, you know, like, oh, looks like there might be some clearings along this road that might signal some great places for dispersed camping site.
So I still heavily use Google as much as I can, but we've just found that, you know, the off road mapping software like Gaia or OnX is going to give you more up to date road information. It also both of those come with different layers that you can download. So for instance, Gaia, we always download an overlay of the U.S. Forest Service motor vehicle use maps (MVUMs). We also always have some sort of topographical layer downloaded because that gives us a lot of hints as to whether we're going to climb to some sort of spot that has maybe vista views overlooking a valley or whether they're going to be descending maybe into a valley and maybe be able to find a riverside campsite. So we always do the topographical and and the MVUM maps and the other layer we always have downloaded on Gaia is a public land layer, which just shows a distinction between privately owned lands and then any public lands it'll show in a different shaded color. They'll use different colors depending on if it's U.S. National Forest Service or state lands. But it'll give you a quick visual cue as to, you know, what sort of land you're camping on. And then if you kind of have those general policies in mind, you can kind of then research further from there, depending on specifically where you're at.
So one example where we used a combination of resources and strategies for approaching how to find campsites was the trip that we did in November of 2023 down into Utah and Arizona. We knew we wanted to devote a few days to exploring Grand Staircase Escalante, and so we allotted ourselves several days and didn't look for any sites specifically because we knew we'd have time to explore. We built that into the itinerary, and then our plan was we'd find a site, stay there for a couple of days, be able to do some remote work before exploring sort of half days around there to find additional sites. However, we had a couple of days where we then needed to transit. And so after Grand Staircase-Escalante, the main place we were going to spend time in was near Sedona in the Coconino National Forest was one of the areas that we were going to look at. But to get down there, we anticipated taking at least a day to transit because again, we were trying to fit in some remote work around the edges. And so we were looking between the two in terms of mapping it out on Google and, you know, seeing that, oh, we could maybe see the Grand Canyon on our way. And while obviously there's a lot of camping options around, you know, official campgrounds there, we thought we would also check some paid resources to see if there was anything available on the north side for dispersed camping.
And so my husband had paid for, I think, a partial membership or maybe a limited time membership in Overlandbound.com. And they have both a free and a paid tier, but access to a lot of different prevetted sites. Community members can share sites and details and notes, trip reports, things like that. And so he was able to find a fantastic site kind of on the north side of the Colorado River and sort of the entrance to the northern plateau. And it ended up being one of our favorite campsites of the entire trip. And, you know, the only reason we had even decided to jot that down was just because we would need a place to stay in between kind of this more freewheeling exploration up in Utah and then the more dedicated time we knew we were going to have around Sedona. So but it ended up being just this wonderful hidden gem and some of our favorite views of the entire trip. So that was just an example where it worked really well, I think to have some time for exploration built in, but then not being ashamed to rely on those paid resources or, you know, community resources for the days where your main goal isn't necessarily exploration. It's just to help you get from one spot to another.
I mentioned that we had used Overlandbound.com to find some sites, but there are other paid tiers of various resources that you might be able to find specific sites in areas. And so I wanted to mention those. One is OnX itself. We have found, you know, we tend to use Gaia a lot, like I mentioned, for our trip tracking and just keeping track of the sites that we find. And you can choose to make your trips public in Gaia, but we don't tend to find that a lot of people do. I think a lot of people use it like we do just to kind of keep track of their own, their own routes. But one thing I've noticed in doing a free trial of OnX the last week or so is that they seem to place more of an emphasis on the community aspects of over landing within their, their app. And so it really is a wealth of resources for both finding routes and suggested sites on those routes including trip reports, you know, on whatever the latest weather or conditions or type of vehicles or maybe tire conditions that you need to pay attention to you. And so that would be one where if you really are wanting a little bit more help finding sites, you might find that one to be a more helpful sort of baseline software to use than Gaia.
Other resources that I've looked at online or used in the past would be iOverlander.com. This one also has, you know, an online version, but also an app. And it is incredibly extensive in terms of the sites that it includes internationally as well. So you might find some of these resources a little bit more focused on North America than others. But iOverlander.com is one that includes sites just all over the place. I'm just looking- I mean, there's 233 points of interest noted in Iceland, just as an example. And you can kind of zoom in and see, you know, not all of these are specifically campsites. Maybe they're just things to see along the way or suggested route, suggested landmarks, places to check out. But it's really crowdsourced and extensive in terms of the types of places that it offers. So that's a really cool option to check out: iOverlander.com. A couple of other options would be Overland Trail Guides, which I believe is just overlandtrailguides.com. They offer different routes and trails that you can pay for and download. So they've got different plans and pricing depending on whether you want all access or not. And I do believe they have some free resources as well. So it's always worth checking out these sites that I mentioned and just to kind of see what's available even on their free tier, even in their free resources section.
In addition to these global resources that I just mentioned, like Overlandbound.com or iOverlander.com, I would also recommend if you're looking for a specific area and looking to go deeper in that area, check out any rental overland or sort of adventure companies that are operating out of that area specifically. So I did this when we were looking at trip ideas for British Columbia. Revelstoke in particular has a lot of rental companies, so I was checking out what things they had available on their website in terms of resources, advice, planning, whether they pointed to local guides or not.
One resource we found here in Colorado- a friend of a friend who operates Titus Adventures, which rents out four by fours and vehicle and vans to go overlanding with. And they have a fantastic resource section full of kind of information around camping in Colorado and Utah. And they also include some paid resources that you could download. And one of which we downloaded was their guide to winter camping in Colorado, which included not only sort of an e-book about, you know, advice on what to look for and finding locations around ski areas or hot springs, other sites of interest that people might want to check out specifically in winter. But they also included a Gaia GPS map with the pins marking everything that they talked about. So it was really, really easy to kind of connect the resources and put it to use. And it was only $15. And so it gave us a great idea of kind of where to start looking for winter campsites when we were thinking about how we might try to find campsites near cross-country ski areas this winter. So just don't forget about those local adventure companies operating in whatever area and check out their websites for what they might post for free, as well as the paid resources that might be available there.
For your first time out overlanding, if you can go with friends who have gone before, highly recommend that. Or if you can snag the coordinates for a site that they know you'll love along with some backups, that's another great option as well. Or use one of the resources that I mentioned to look for a pre-vetted spot. However, if you're in the mood for a little more adventure, you want to up the ante on the discovery side of things and start looking for your own spots, the best advice I can give you is to be sure to give yourself the time. So don't do it on a night where maybe you were late getting off work on Friday and packing up took longer than you thought. And you're getting on the road and you only have an hour before dark. You know that's not the time to go exploring a brand new network of roads that you're unfamiliar with and trying to find a site, especially for your first time. Maybe work your way up to that level of adventure.
I would say, you know, for as a good example, in my very first episode, I shared the story of Mat taking me out for my first overlanding experience and how he took me to a spot that he already had camped at before. He knew there were backup spots along the road. You know, he really took a lot of the variables out of the way to make sure that I would have a fantastic first overlanding trip. But it's funny for our very second trip, which ended up being almost a month later, I think because we were so busy that summer, he asked me if I wanted to go to a spot that he was familiar with, or if I wanted to go out and try and find new spots. And I said, Let's go for it. Let's go find some new spots. Like, why not? That sounds fun. And so we had a three day weekend and I highly recommend, if you're going to start exploring, doing it on, you know, in a situation like that where you've got three days to explore. It really took the pressure off because we knew even if we couldn’t get very far the first night, we were going into it with the mindset of intentionally using those other two days of the weekend to look for spots. It didn't Mater if that was really all we did on that Saturday because that, you know, we went into it expecting that and that was really, really helpful.
We ended up heading out along the Olympic Peninsula, and Mat had a site that he knew was kind of on the north side of Highway 112. So this would be kind of right along the Strait of Juan de Fuca looking out over the water. That was a site he knew about. However, when we got there, they had gates down, like I mentioned, especially in Washington. Every year it seems like wildfire season grows longer and you know, they start shutting more and more access to public land, trying to protect from manmade fires and make it easier to manage any fires that do get started. And so that one was closed. We knew there was an entire network of public land kind of in between Highway 112 and Highway 101, which is the main highway most folks used to kind of circle around Olympic National Park. So we did some exploring there, and I think we had managed to do a half day on Friday. So we got a pretty early start, you know, found the one road closed and were like, no problem. We’ve still got several hours before dark. So we're going to go explore, you know, this new area between these two highways. However, we just kept striking out- we weren't finding anything either. We'd find additional gates that were closed or you might find, you know, a small turn off from the main road and think, “Oh, I can camp here!”. But then it would be overgrown, you know, within feet or a tree would be down or there would already be somebody camped there. So we basically just kept going on this forest road that cut all the way through over to Highway 101 and kind of spit us out on this main busier highway right before Lake Crescent.
And then we knew there was going to be this stretch where there was only going to be the established campgrounds around Lake Crescent. And at that point, I believe we were approaching sunset by the time we got over to the west side of Lake Crescent. And so we actually did pull through the campgrounds down at that end just to see if there was anything available. And it was like, I think one spot was available, you know, and it was the spot that was like right by the dumpsters and the showers and where everyone in the campground would have to drive past like multiple times if they were pulling in or coming out. And I just couldn't bring myself to say yes to it. I was just like, “Let's keep going further down Highway 101 and take our chances, like there has to be something better.” So we kept driving down Highway 101, and of course, another mistake that we made at this point was it was definitely past dinnertime. So I was getting a little bit hangry. This was an important lesson learned for Mat that packing snacks, eating early and often was the best way to ensure that I was a pleasant travel companion for him. So it was a learning experience for us on this trip, too.
But it was approaching sunset when we saw a sign for Littleton Horse Camp. And so intrigued we pulled off the highway to see what the deal was with this camp. And essentially it's a camp allowing, you know, folks that are going to trailer horses and take them on some of the multi-use trails around there to be able to camp for the night. They had things like stock tanks and corrals for horses, as well as a number of campsites. And it turns out that after 6 p.m., if the sites are not occupied by people needing it for their stock like horses, then it opens up to anybody who wants to use them. And so, of course at that point it was after 6 p.m., I think only one other spot within the whole campground was taken by what looked like a motorcycle tent camper. And so we had our pick of, nice, shady spots at this point. It was August, so we were, you know, wanted to stay as cool as we could. Nice, shady spot with a little breeze into our rooftop tent. And we're able to get set up and cooking there very quickly to kind of get back on track. And I think, you know, Mat was a little bit disappointed that we hadn't managed to find a dispersed camping site on this, you know, first night out together.
But as it turned out, the camp was also right across the highway from an entry point for part of the Olympic Discovery Trail, which is this awesome multi-use trail that they've been trying to finish across the whole Olympic Peninsula to connect with the Puget Sound to Olympics Trail Network, which itself is actually part of a much broader national effort, Rails to Trails, which is trying to ensure an entire contiguous trail system stretches from Maryland all the way across to the Pacific Ocean in Washington. And so there's only a few other links of the trail that are still needed and some of them are actually in our area near Kingston. But this part of the trail, that is the Olympic Discovery Trail is fantastic. So we were able to get out for a bike ride the next morning on this trail that was just right across from the campground. And it ended up being just such a lucky find for us and kind of allowed us to reset and then go looking for more off the beaten trail campsites the next day.
And so the next day, you know, Saturday, other than doing this bike ride in the morning and having some breakfast, we really had the whole day to explore. And so at that point, then we went further down Highway 101. We found some more national forest land out along the coast. And there's a lot of designated campgrounds along the coast, along 101 there. But there were also open gates to some of this national forest land that bordered the national park. And so we were able to then kind of take our time and do a lot more exploring that day and find some additional dispersed campsites outside of campgrounds, which was really fun. But again, you know, just to stress how much it helped to have that three day weekend available and to not put pressure on ourselves that first night to kind of admit when we'd run up against some of our own limitations. For me, that's getting hangry and just, you know, we need to find a place where we can just stop and cook dinner and kind of reassess things and and, you know, maybe take the easy way out that first night with, okay, here's a campsite. It's not exactly what we thought, but it's going to get us closer to our goal of another area where we can further explore in the morning.
And I think, you know, that's the other thing to mention in addition to time and having the time to explore, if you're if you're going to go out looking for sites that are brand new to you, the other thing really is just mindset and ensuring that everybody in the car with you or that's on this exploration with you is motivated and bought into that same mindset of discovery. Because if you've got one person who you know is, thinking or imagining a different outcome for the weekend, you know, maybe what they're looking forward to is actually being at the campsite and just spending a lot of time relaxing at the campsite or doing activities nearby. And, you know, if that's the case, you really have to have that frank discussion with the people you're traveling with about what your goal is for the day or for the weekend. And I think it's totally fine to have, you know, a couple of different goals for that weekend, and maybe you devote one day to like okay, this is the day that we're going to just go explore and try and find some sites. And then our goal for the next day is maybe just to relax and enjoy wherever it is we do find or or the activities that are available nearby.
So this is another thing, you know, me and Mat did on that trip was Saturday was a big day of exploration and we mapped a bunch of different roads and a bunch of different sites. And then Sunday we were pretty near the beach and so we just drove to one of the day use areas and actually went for a long walk on the beach and got to dip our feet in the ocean a bit and cool off. And that was just such a nice balance to have. You know, here's a day we're really going to be focused on route finding and exploring sites, and then another day to like, okay, let's actually appreciate what is right around us and this beautiful area and really make sure we relax and take advantage of it. Not to say that we couldn't have spent both days, you know, route finding and finding additional sites. But for us, it was a good balance of, you know, we got some activities in, we got some route finding in, and it was just a good mix and kind of a sense of accomplishment as well that like, okay, we found some sites and now we're going to relax and and just kind of enjoy ourselves as well.
Even if you don't have a three day weekend to devote to finding new overlanding sites, maybe you only have 30 minutes to go out and explore in your home. I wouldn't underestimate just the power of being able to get out in nature, even close to home and exploring near you. One of the things that I got interested in during the lockdowns in 2020 around the pandemic was the idea of forest bathing. And this comes from a Japanese practice, but there is a couple of different medical journals that published studies around that time just showing the very real benefits of getting out into nature and specifically forests for even as little as 120 minutes a week. They found benefits across different health outcomes. So that's just, you know, 20 minutes a day, six days a week or maybe it's four days a week for 30 minutes. But that's enough time to just get out to the local park or garden near your house or explore. Maybe there's a county park not far. I know there's one that's only, you know, a five minute drive from us. There's a beautiful county park where you can just kind of go immerse yourself in in the forest. And I often find that, you know, even making an effort to just get out there for 20 or 30 minutes can really reset my whole day. And that's kind of the same impact that we find from these longer trips as well, is just really a chance to kind of reset our relationship to the outdoors, to breathe deeply and really notice the beautiful surroundings and get a chance to kind of breathe in that fresh air and and just notice what happens when you sit with that silence and sit with that wonder of the nature around you.
So hopefully some of these suggestions that we covered in this episode will help you if you do want to take the leap into more overlapping campsites. And I'll include links of all the resources that I talked about on our podcast web page at BlueYonder-Adventures.com- all the links to the paid and free resources that I mentioned. And then I didn't get to talk too much about how I love to geek out making our Gaia maps kind of our own, complete with color coded symbols and photos of the places we find and any notes about the campsites, like whether you know, how many vehicles we could fit there or specific things like that. So I'll include a few photos on the web page for this podcast as well, just showing an example of some of the routes we've mapped in the notes that I've taken. And then if you do have any follow up questions, feel free to post those to me.
Direct message your comment @BlueYonderJen at Threads or Instagram as well as if you have any questions for our next episode next week. Me and my sister are going to be talking about just the very basics of over landing. Just what do you need to get started? You've got a site in mind you want to go to, but what do you need to bring with you to kind of make sure all of your bases are covered and you can have a good time and be safe overlanding. So join us next week for overlanding 101: What to bring with you on your first overland trip!
Sharing above examples of how we use Gaia to keep track of spots and noting where high clearance is needed, where gates might be closed, where a road no longer exists, etc. I’ve also started added notes and photos to campsites when I remember to, adding in parameters that might be helpful for us to know if we came back with friends or shared the spot with a friend.
