ADVENTURE 001 - ALABAMA HILLS, CA
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My wife and I decided to get our Passport with the intent of using it to motivate our desire to get out in the wilderness more and to take it's adventuring spirit to heart. Our first adventure started with less than 1000 miles on the odometer as we headed out to Alabama Hills to get a taste of taking our new SUV off-road. Thanks to
@stevenD for the suggestion and for posting the video that inspired my confidence in the Passport's abilities.
The Passport is step one towards our plan for an adventure rig that can get us into camp sites that don't have numbered signs and marked parking spaces. We've been infrequent tent campers over the years and I'm finding that the ideas behind overland camping better suit our goals. Shortly after taking delivery of our Passport, I discovered
Outdoorsy.com and realized that we could test out our overland ideas by renting a variety of rigs to see what we actually liked before we jump into owning our own trailer. We started out with a 2016 AT Overland Chaser rooftop tent style trailer built by
GTFOverland in Glendale, CA.
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This is a complete turnkey trailer rental that included everything needed for a weekend adventure minus the marshmallows and hotdogs. Curt, the owner and builder really put a ton of thought and years of experience into designing this trailer and it was truly a pleasure to use. Over a long weekend we setup and struck camp a few times to get a feel for it and to try out the rig in a few different scenarios.
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The three hour drive from Burbank to Lone Pine was easy and comfortable. The Passport handled its towing duties flawlessly. There was more than enough power to make it easy to forget that the trailer was even there. I would estimate the trailer to weigh about a thousand pounds as loaded including water and extra fuel. The Passport was averaging 16.5 mpg on the 5000 ft. ascent and it gave us about 23 mpg on the descent as we headed home.
The Passport proved itself to be much more capable off-road than I was. Everything I dared to throw at it was handled with ease and with a sense of stability that gave me confidence to push slightly past my comfort zone. As we progress further and once I feel I have a better understanding of the vehicle's (
and more importantly, my own) capabilities, I'm confident that the Passport can take anything I'll need to throw at it.
Here's a quick video I threw together of a bit of our adventure...
... and a
360 tour of one of our camps.
