A question I never know how to answer about van life is: how do you plan where to sleep at night?
The trouble with planning too much is that you run the risk of speeding through somewhere that may feel more exciting or enjoyable than you had imagined, but you have to be off to the next planned stop. And of course, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry; it doesn’t matter how well you plan because ultimately, inevitably, something will throw you off. On the road, you simply cannot predict and plan for every mishap.
On the other hand, not planning anything can leave you oscillating between last-minute stress and periods of stagnation. You’re most likely to end up in a Cracker Barrel parking lot if you are someone who does not plan. However, if you can learn to handle the uncertainty and trust that you’ll luck out, the rewards always outweigh the risks.
I had no plans on where to stay in Glacier National Park, but I knew I was headed there next. There are three primary ways to secure a place to sleep the day of: booking in advance, boondocking, and first-come, first-served, each requiring more luck than the last. And each with a more satisfying reward. I tried out each method, in sequence, when I finally got to Montana.
Booking in Advance
My first nights in Montana and the northwest, in general, were discomforting. Very few places in the country are as beautiful as Montana, but I found the vast, dark forests and misty grey air to feel alienating. I didn’t feel comfortable yet merely pulling off to the side of the road in a place that felt so foreign to me, so I turned to an app instead.
I would never recommend paying $40 for a place to park your van and take an outdoor shower, but poor planning will leave you with the campsites deemed not worthy for the early crowd. I picked a campsite at a working farm with the promise of getting to hold a baby goat.
Driving north from Missoula, just before I made it to the farm for the night, I found something I did not expect to see in the middle of Montana: a massive garden of full of Buddhas. From the road, you can see atop a small hill a teepee-like structure made from Tibetian prayer flags. The Garden of One Thousand Buddhas was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist master who chose the location immediately upon seeing it. I walked around the gardens quietly and alone, taking even, soft steps in a circle around the center Buddha. I bought a bundle of lavender grown in the garden and left a few offerings for the Buddhas I liked the most based on nothing more than how I felt when I stood in front of one.
I continued on to the farm and was shown where to park. It was nice to have a hot shower and hang out with some goats, but $40 to essentially park somewhere overnight is rarely worth it. Finding campsites like this feel like the interim step one must take before feeling really comfortable and ready to boondock.
Boondocking
Continuing north to Glacier National Park, I found a boondocking site along the Flathead River. Boondocking - or dry camping, or dispersed camping - is simply a free campsite with no hookups to electricity or water, generally on public land. These are much easier to find the further west you go. Many of these sites are relatively well maintained, though not monitored. I was following coordinates to a somewhat hidden site off of the main highway. I spotted the turnoff and had to pull over to assess the intensity of the dirt road before continuing on.
Massive holes mounded along every possible path down the road. Even if you got through the divots, the mud would surely keep you stuck. Most of these roads won’t be repaired partially to keep people in silly little city vans off of the rugged terrain, saved instead for the four-by-fours. It was working; I was deterred. I was met on the side of the road by another van that stopped to assess how bad the drive would be.
A girl a bit younger than me hopped out of her white Nissan van. She had an air of confidence about her and the way she moved around her van. Being barely three whole weeks into living on the road, I was ecstatic to find another solo woman and one who clearly knew what she was doing. She looked at me and smiled “I think we can handle it.”
I definitely could not handle it. “Yeah… no totally, but also, just curious, what path are you seeing here?” I felt like such a nerd for not knowing how to handle a little mud.
“My friend is staying on the beach and she told me just to gun it and keep momentum to the righthand side. Do you want to follow me and watch?”
“I guess I’m in if you’re in.” We exchanged names and she assured me it would be fine. I didn’t believe her, but I followed her anyway.
Despite my refrigerator door popping open and every single food item spilling onto the floor, every other part of the van made it through the mud in one piece. She offered for me to stay near her and her friend, but for some reason, I declined. I didn’t want to feel like I was intruding on their time together, though looking back, I would now always recommend staying near other women when it’s offered. Honestly, less for safety and more to socialize with people who get what you’re going through.
I sat with them for a bit and I asked all of the embarrassing van questions I’d always wanted to ask other women about. When I asked them what their biggest piece of advice was, the girl in the Nissan answered: “make your van look as weird as possible. It keeps weird people away. Because they look at your weird van and think ‘man, that person’s weird, I don’t wanna mess with them.’”
“Like… how weird?” I asked
She pointed to the bones stacked up on her front hood antenna. It looked like pieces of a spine being held together with a spire down the center. “Like, that weird.”
This interaction would inspire me to zip tie deer antlers to the hood of my own van, gifted to me by my stepdad and absolutely not professionally taxidermied. I catch people taking pictures of it all the time and am certain it’s what keeps people from approaching me in the van.
I parked as close to the river as possible and opened the side door to sit and faced the water. Even though the pebbly, colorful beach was dotted with other boondockers on either side, the sound of the Flathead River drowned out any indication of other campers. The sun had already set behind the mountains, but the warm glow of the sky lingered long enough to enjoy the quiet evening. Once the sun set, I closed the door immediately. I still have trouble keeping the door open past dark without some source of exterior light.
The wind coming off the river in the morning cut through my DIY insulation effortlessly. This wouldn’t be the absolute coldest night in the van, but it was my first coldest night. Even with wool socks, a beanie, and fleece-lined leggings on, I knew I had to get out of bed to open my vent fan before turning on my propane heater. Few things in life feel as miserable as needing to get out of a warm bed and step into a freezing room.
There are a lot of reasons why you should plan your trips when you live in a van. One reason is the weather: always travel with the weather. Yes, you can insulate your van incredibly well and maybe even install an air conditioning unit if you’re feeling rich, but you can never regulate the temperature as much as you can by simply driving a few miles in one direction.
When you don’t plan and want to rely on boondocking, you leave an uncomfortable amount up to chance. It’s incredible, really, how much of our lives are shaped by complete luck. Whether divine and conscious or meaningless and chaotic, we truly have no control over any external factor around us. I used to think that my anxiety was caused by a need to troubleshoot any problem that could possibly occur in my life before it happened to avoid future pain; I now recognize this, instead, as a lack of faith and confidence in my own ability to handle whatever uncontrollable thing that happens to me. It’s incredibly freeing to let go of the idea that you can stress your way into an expected version of life.
Freezing your ass off is completely worth it to be in Glacier the week before it closes for the season. In fact, thanks to this incredibly poor planning and sheer dumb luck, I got to enjoy the Park with significantly fewer guests who don’t dare to plan a family vacation that late in the season, anxious that it may be canceled due to snow. 2021 was the first year in five years that the Park did not close early due to snow.
Once I’d warmed up for the morning and made myself some coffee and oatmeal, I drove into the park, and luck would find me again.
First Come, First Served
There was only one campground still open with available spots for the weekend. To get there, you first drive along the western border of the park, turning off about 20 miles south of Canada. In late September, the drive is shaded by large evergreen pine trees and yellowing birch trees, just at the crest of autumn. The turnoff from the main road towards the campground presented another opportunity for food to fly off of every shelf.
Just before I started down the janky road, I sent texts to my dad, mom, brother, and a small cohort of friends:
Camping in Bowman Lake this weekend and will not have cell service between now and late Sunday night. If you do not hear from me by Monday morning, I was last hiking in the Numa Ridge area. Love you very much!
I turned off my phone before I had time to see messages of worry from my family. This would be the first time truly going without cell service for a whole weekend and I was honestly more afraid of being alone in the woods with no streaming or internet to keep me distracted than I was of bears or weirdos in the woods.
The campsite was surprisingly open for a first-come, first-serve spot in a National Park, but I’d still have to park near at least one other van. I pulled up to a spot next to a couple in their 50s setting up a campfire for the night. They waited for me to say hi first, and then walked over to see the van.
They asked me the basics, but I reserved giving away too many details. I didn’t feel particularly skeptical of them, but it felt like good practice to keep a fair distance from new neighbors. Nevertheless, I accepted their invitation to sit by their fire and have a beer.
The man’s friendliness helped to balance out the litany of condescending dad questions about being a young woman alone in a van.
“I think what you’re doing is so great,” he started, followed immediately by “but it just seems like there are a lot of crazy people out there. Are you being safe?”
I hate having to justify to someone I don’t even know if or why I’m safe. I know why people ask, and I want to appreciate their concern, but something about this middle-aged man in a rented $1200 a week Mercades camper tells me he doesn’t have anything new to tell me that I don’t already know.
I smiled anyway, “yeah, I’m safe. I can take care of myself.”
He asked me if I was planning to go hiking alone in the morning. When I reluctantly told him that yes, I was hiking the peak alone tomorrow, he stopped me before I could even finish: “you should take my wife with you, you two girls can go together and I can just hang out here!”
I couldn’t quite catch the subtext of the look she gave him, but I could tell it was well understood between the two of them. Then she turned to smile at me. “You don’t have to say yes to that,” she assured me. “He just wants a reason to not do this hike but thinks I can’t do it alone. I hike alone all the time, honey!”
“Yes, well, she should say yes, because two women going alone just makes no sense. Just go together, maybe just be together for the way up. And I’ll see you when you get back. I’ll cook you both dinner!”
I hesitated as long as I could before it became awkward. “Can I let you know in the morning?”
“Of course, no pressure at all. I’ll be out on the lake just through the woods there at 6:30 tomorrow morning if you want to join me.”
She was incredibly nice - they both were, really - but I knew it would be a full-day event with a woman that I did not know. But when I woke up the next morning freezing and alone, I remembered how I wish I’d connected more with the woman by the river, so I packed up my gear at met her at the lake at 6:30 am.
I learned about how she met her husband when he was teaching English in Thailand as a grad student. I told her about the summer I spent teaching English in Thailand in college, though we couldn’t reconcile on the exact location either of us had spent time. She told me she liked living in north Georgia now because the climate reminded her of Thailand. But they were looking to relocate for the first time since they got married.
“I think I would love to do what you’re doing if my husband were on board. But we’re looking at small houses here in Montana and Idaho now.”
I asked her if she was excited to move this far north. She listed off a number of hikes and mountains she was eager to be closer to, but ultimately, she wasn’t sure if she was excited. “The summers have been feeling hotter lately, and most of the friends we have our age, who also don’t have kids, are hard to find. It kind of doesn’t matter where we go. Just that we’re together.”
I approached the next question cautiously: “is it hard to find childless friends in their 50’s?”
She answered, “not really. But having kids was never an interest to me anyway, and I have lots of friends from hiking meetups. People have kids, don’t have kids; live there, live over there; you just make room for everybody, you know?”
I think I may have lost the thread on this one, but I nodded along. “Totally. Make room for everybody.” A lot of our day-long conversation didn’t totally make sense, but it didn’t need to.
“And plus, if you don’t have kids, your husband can buy you horses. I have three horses now.”
“Damn, I gotta get me one of those.”
“A horse or a husband?” She asked. “Because if I were you, I’d just take the horse.”
I was glad to have gone with her. We talked about our families, our favorite National Parks, our pets, and our most effective method for peeing on a hike. Just before reaching the crest, I realized: this is one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever done in my life. If I hadn’t gone with her, I definitely could not have kept a good pace; I’m not even sure I would have finished it at all. We took a picture together to commemorate our summit before trekking back down, totaling 16 miles and 5,000 feet of elevation gain.
Back at the campsite, I was ready to pass out for the night around 5 pm. Just as I was about to slip into an unplanned nap still fully clothed, I heard a knock at the door. Shit, please leave me alone, we talked all day today. I poked my head out and the man was standing a respectful distance away.
“Hey! Just wanted to let you know, you’re welcome to use the shower in our van if you want. It’s heated and I can just leave the van keys inside with you.”
The little voice of skepticism popped back up in my head. People aren’t this fucking nice, what’s this guy’s deal? Are they gonna film me or something? Trap me in there and drive away?
He added, in my indecisive silence: “and, hey, if you’d rather sleep first and then take a shower later, just come on by. We’ll be just cooking dinner.”
I quickly shook my reluctance off. “No, that sounds amazing, I’ll grab my stuff and take one now if that’s okay?”
Of course, he didn’t have a “deal.” Nor did she. They were just a nice older couple looking out for a young woman alone. You can try to be alone on the road all you want, but everyone needs the support of their community once in a while. And pushing away help when it’s offered because you assume the worst in everyone is such an exhausting way to live.
The next day, I did a 12-mile hike alone. I blame the “we’re only ever going to be here once so we need to do it all now” gene I inherited from my mother. The hike was nice to do in solitude after a day of socializing, though it felt eerie to not see another person the entire time there or back. I talked to myself out loud for almost the entire hike to keep making noise as a way to deter bears and maybe, also, to feel like I was having a conversation with someone. You’d be surprised how much of the script of Legally Blonde I can recite from the beginning. Having the flexibility to balance social and stoic hikes is key to not feeling too burnt out in either direction.
Boondocking, again
By Sunday, I was back in the southern section of Glacier with enough cell service to get hit with a backlog of anxious texts. I spent the day driving the entire Going-to-the-Sun Road and back, nearly 50 miles one way through views of glaciers, mountain peaks, rivers, and pine trees. With so few visitors risking their vacations to be in the Park that late in the season, there was no rush to speed through everything or lack of parking to hop out and take a short hike. I didn’t get a chance to the most glacier-dense section of the park due to road closures - and my lack of planning.
I stayed two more nights at the same spot on the Flathead River, two nights longer than my original “plan.” On my last day there, I opened the door to find a perfect rainbow cascading across the late afternoon sky and made a few friends by a campfire that night. Over the past few months, the van has slowly reframed my thinking away from “I don’t have a plan” to “I don’t know my plan yet, but it’ll be fine.” There is always a way to find a place to sleep at night regardless of how much planning you like to do. Even just one unscripted night on a river can have just enough uncertainty to let a little luck in if you’re willing to quiet the voice of skepticism in your head.
This past Christmas, the couple from the campsite sent me a holiday card of them, their dogs, and their horses. We have plans to meet up again the next time I’m in Montana.
literally laughed out loud at the legally blonde comment!
It’s amazing at how hard it can be to accept offerings of kindness. Receiving generosity from other travelers is something that I’ve really had to grow into on the road.
All of the above resonates!