Here is a quick recap of our November 2022 SW trip;
Some of the best places to camp dispersed in the US are at National Wildlife Refuges.
We found two great ones.
Desert National Wildlife Refuge just north of Las Vegas NV. Largest refuge in the lower 48 states coming in at 1.5 million acres. This place is worth exploring, when we were there a storm front had moved into the South West causing high winds that sustained at 30 and gusted to ?.
Desert National Wildlife Refuge
Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in southern AZ just north of Yuma AZ. Spent two nights on the way to TX and one night on the way back. Very diverse and interesting rock formations. Worth a couple of days to investigate.
Kofa National Wildlife Refuge
Day two; we had our Snow Master Frig start to freeze on both sides, tried lots of things but in the end we lost all our fresh food. Todd at Snow Master USA overnighted a new temp controller to a buddy of mine in AZ and after a couple of hours with the new one in it worked. Snow Master's US customer service was awesome.
Made it to Las Cruces NM and stayed in a KOA to do laundry and take a real shower also got to use shore power for our electric heater. We hosted a meet-up at the local brewery ;-) and recruited a new SW Member Rep. Turns out the owner of the expansive brewery and event grounds was a huge fan of the rigs and offered up his 13 acres behind the grounds for a regional meet up.
Home - Picacho Peak Brewing Company
Checked out White Sands NP and the Museum of Space History in Alamogordo. White Sands was OK, basically a drive through but the space museum was really great.
Home - New Mexico Museum of Space History
Arrived at Big Bend NP on the seventh day, a very different type of NP. All camping is by reservation including dispersed, at first I thought this was a pain but afterward I found it to be very efficient. Several of the areas are available to reserve in advance on the Recreation.gov web site and the others are available by permit issued at the visitor center no more than 24 hours in advance of the date you want to reserve.
Camping - Big Bend National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
We had one great camp site that I had reserved and one that we got a permit for. The reserved spot was close to the Rio Grande Village and the border crossing to Boquillas del Carmen or just Boquillas. The village had a visitors center and a store with fuel, perfect place to resupply and to get internet.
Bring a passport and take the boat ride to Mexico you won't regret it, Boquillas is a great place to take it easy and enjoy some great food and drink.
Visiting Boquillas - Big Bend National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
The entire park would take about 5-6 days to explore, there were lots of trails closed due to washouts and several trails rated for high clearance 4x4 only. I am sure we missed something but nothing really got in our way.
We were starting to have some electrical issues in the camper, so our electric heater was not working as we had designed. We cut our time short in Big Bend at four days and headed back NW.
Stopped in Carlsbad NM to cheek out Carlsbad Caverns NP and did a drive by of Guadalupe NP. Carlsbad was exciting mostly due to the 750’ elevator ride down to the cavern, I would say its a must see if you are in the area. Guadalupe NP is not a 4x4 friendly park, 95% of it is hiking.
We kept pushing west, the last two days of the trip we didn't have any heat in the camper so we treated ourselves to two nights in a hotel on the water in Oceanside CA. Spent about 4-5 hours in a park in San Diego watching all the Navy action. We had done this before but its hard to remember how cool it was so I am glad we went back.
Overall it was a great trip. I found some issues with our electrical system that we had designed and built but otherwise our OVRLND Camper and Jeep Gladiator worked flawlessly.
If you have any questions about our trip just message me on the forum @ Kent R or my wife Lucy @ Lucy R. I have added all our campsites and POI’s have been put on the OB1 app.
