![]() They wandered through or camped out in the tall pines of the Coconino National Forest to check out all the new gear and to swap stories with one another. While the first Overland Expo hosted 320 attendees and 20 vendors, this year’s show saw 22,000 practiced and potential overlanders from across the globe. The Overland Expo just celebrated its 10th year with a gathering of fans and faithful in Flagstaff. Overlanding is where camping ends and real adventure begins!Īnd however you define it, overlanding is getting big. And also: getting lost, having to improvise or MacGyver-fix problems you run into and, ultimately, having to figure out just exactly how you’re going to get out of this mess without calling for a high-priced Life Flight chopper extraction. ![]() Or at least the risk of great inconvenience. ![]() Suffice it to say that overlanding provides one major component our cave-dwelling ancestors enjoyed that is painfully missing from most of our modern, coddled lives: DANGER! Or the possibility of danger. We could argue about the definition for weeks, but that is what the internet is for. Self-reliance in unfamiliar territories for multiple days, weeks, months or even years.” Under-explored or under-documented areas and 4. overlanding has two of these four things: 1. “Four-wheeling in and of itself is not necessarily overlanding, camping is not overlanding, a short weekend trip is not overlanding. “What is not overlanding?” asked seminar leader Mark Carrara rhetorically, drawing on his experience as a lifelong overlander and amateur archeologist. What is overlanding? I went to a seminar by that exact name at Overland Expo West in Flagstaff, Arizona, last weekend to find out. In overlanding, you are your own boss, the rig you drive has torque at all four wheels and if something breaks, there ain’t no AAA to come save your skinny carcass - you fix it yourself or you become part of the food chain muy pronto. government-funded semicircular amphitheaters. There are no fancy, comfortable toilets, no 25-cents-for-two-minutes warm showers and no ranger-led singalongs around U.S. “Overlanding” is all about self-sufficiency and rugged adventure to just about anywhere you want to go. Even though you may have a higher than average mosquito bite total, you’re still a slave to civilization. “Camping” can be done in a station wagon, always takes place in a well-marked campground with fancy bathrooms and marked camping spaces and you have to put $6 per night into one of those little brown National Forest Service envelopes and clip it to the post at your site. Stop saying it’s just camping! It’s “overlanding,” gol dang it! There is a difference!
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