Overlanding Life Is Live, and the Road Being There Does Not Mean You Can Drive It

We launched Overlanding Life this month, and I want to start with the thing that sank more of my own trips than weather, mechanical trouble and bad tires combined.

The road being there doesn't mean you're allowed to drive it.

Every season I meet people who picked a line off a paper atlas or a satellite view, drove three hours to the trailhead, and found a closure sign. Or worse, didn't find one, drove it anyway, and picked up a citation from a ranger who had every right to write it. The road existed. It was graded. It had tire tracks on it. None of that is the test.

The Document That Decides Whether Your Route Is Legal

On Forest Service land the test is the Motor Vehicle Use Map. Not the road, not the tracks, not what somebody posted in a group last summer. The MVUM is the legal instrument, it's published per forest, it changes, and a road that was open in 2023 can be closed now with nothing on the ground to tell you.

Colorado alone has seven Forest Service offices publishing them: the Arapaho and Roosevelt, the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison, the Medicine Bow-Routt, the Pike-San Isabel, the Rio Grande, the San Juan, and the White River. Seven separate documents. One state.

Check the MVUM for the specific forest, in the current year, before you commit to a route. Not the state. Not the region. The forest. I keep the PDFs downloaded because the places you most need them are the places with no signal, and a screenshot of a map you can't zoom is worth very little at a junction in the dark.

Know Who Holds the Ground You're Standing On

Public land isn't one thing. The agency managing it sets the rules for dispersed camping, stay limits, fires and whether a vehicle belongs there at all. Colorado's 24.1 million federal acres, that's 36.3 percent of the state, break down like this:

Those top two lines are where overlanders live. BLM ground in Colorado includes Browns Canyon and Canyons of the Ancients national monuments, plus the Dominguez-Escalante, Gunnison Gorge and McInnis Canyons conservation areas. Different agency, different rulebook, often a different answer to the same question about where you can put your rig for the night.

We put the whole thing on a public land map so you can see the pattern before you plan against it.

Why We Built Colorado First

I could have shipped fifty shallow state pages. Plenty of sites do. We built Colorado properly instead: who manages which acres, which roads and trails are open to vehicles, when the passes clear, the rules that actually get enforced, and 43 numbered sources at the bottom so you can check my work. The land figures above come from the Congressional Research Service and the Forest Service land area tables, not from somebody's blog.

The other states exist on the site and they are honest placeholders. They are marked noindex on purpose, because a page that just swaps the state name into the same sentences is not research and I'm not going to pretend otherwise by letting Google index it. They get built out the way Colorado did, one at a time, or they don't go live.

Colorado earned first position on the merits. Highest mean elevation of any state at roughly 6,800 feet. Mount Elbert at 14,433. Fifty-eight peaks above 14,000 feet.

What the Directory Does Today, and What It Does Not

Here's the honest state of it, because I'd rather you hear it from me than click and feel misled.

The directory is live as buyer's guides plus a quote request. Overland builders and Sprinter van builders both walk you through what the work involves, how to judge a shop, and what to have ready before you ask for a number. Then you describe the project once and we route it out for free quotes. Same for 4x4 shops, fabricators, suspension, tires, diesel specialists and roof tents.

What it isn't, yet, is a browsable list of companies. Listings are being added. So:

• If you want quotes on a build, use the quote form. That works now and it costs nothing.
• If you want to read up before spending money, the category guides are the useful part today.
• If you run a shop, get yourself listed. Early listings are how this becomes worth browsing.

The Bottom Line

Check the MVUM for your specific forest, in the current year, before you commit to a route. Know which of the five agencies holds the ground, because the camping rules change at the boundary and the boundary is rarely marked. Start with Colorado if you want to see what a properly researched state page looks like, and tell me which state should be next.

About the Author

Sean Hakes works in RV sales and finance and runs RVParks.us, RVBrokers.com and Overlanding Life.

Land ownership figures from the Congressional Research Service, Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data (R42346), Table 2, data as of September 30, 2024, and USDA Forest Service, Land Areas of the National Forest System, September 30, 2024. Elevation figures from the U.S. Geological Survey. Full source list is published on the Colorado page.