How I lived for free in the California desert this past winter
I spent the last four months living for free in the desert of southern California, just south of Joshua Tree National Park.
After months of traveling in my converted camper van up the California and Oregon coast last summer and spending a chilly fall in the green forests of Washington, I was ready to slow down and travel less once winter came around.
While my partner, Patrick, and my dog, Bodhi, and I were living in a motel in Bend waiting for the transmission on our camper van to be replaced this past November, we were researching places to spend the winter. Places where we could live for free or low cost without having to move around all the time because we were TIRED. We stumbled across something in Quartzsite, AZ called a long term visitor area (LTVA) where you could stay for 7 months for only $180. So we decided that was our best bet and, once our van was back up and running, headed south along the eastern Sierra Nevada.
Along the way, we stopped at a few different rest stops, motels, and campgrounds. We really enjoyed a campground we found in Lone Pine, CA near Alabama Hills, but it was $8/ night which adds up quickly so, after a week there, we moved to a dispersed camping spot on BLM land just south of Joshua Tree National Park.
And we loved it there, living for free in the California desert... less people, open spaces, stars at night, warm weather.
Oh, what a life to live! There was a 14-day limit as with most dispersed camping, but after about two weeks we made some friends who had been out there for a few months with no problems. This got us thinking, could we make this work for the entire winter?
After three weeks of living in the desert south of Joshua Tree, we decided to pick ourselves up and drive to Quartzsite, AZ for a "vanlife pride" meet up. While we were there we got a sense of what it was like to live in Quartzsite for the winter, so crowded and everyone seemed old and conservative. I can't even tell you how many Trump flags I saw flying from giant RVs parked super close together. It didn't really seem like our place so, when the weekend was over, we packed ourselves up and headed back to where our new friends were in the desert south of Joshua Tree.
And there we stayed for the next three months. Through talking with other people who were living out there, we learned that there is a boundary where the land is no longer managed by the BLM and it becomes just unincorporated land. There are still lots of camp sites and people camping past the boundary of the BLM land, but the BLM officers don't care about low long you have been there. It is out of their jurisdiction (I am definitely not saying this is 100% accurate but this was my experience). I don't know exactly who owns that land but there were lots of people camping past that boundary and in our three months out there no one gave us a second look.
So it is possible to live rent free in the California desert in the winter.
It would be possible to live longer, it just gets way too hot. That is what eventually drove us north- the intense heat of the desert. Also, I imagine if you did it for a very long time someone would eventually notice. I am not sure who, but probably someone.
It was hard to move on, but the hot weather eventually drove us north in the last few weeks of March. We are now at another free, dispersed site just outside of Bishop, CA. They do enforce a strict 14-day limit at all dispersed sites in the Bishop ranger district so we are leaving in a few days. But it has me remembering those beautiful months we spent living for free in the southern California desert.
Patrick surprised me when we were in Bend, OR with a SX-70 Polaroid camera that he found on eBay. We have both enjoyed trying a new (to us) film camera and Patrick particularly enjoyed taking photos of the desert landscapes when we were staying at Joshua Tree BLM South. All the photos in this post were taken by him.
Let’s be friends! Would you ever chose to live in the desert over the winter? What are some unique things you have done to save money?
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