V20E18: Traversing Mount Graham by Van

Hey everyone, welcome to Venture Forward. It's early June 2023, and in this episode I'm out again in our Winnebago Revel in southeast Arizona, up on Mount Graham. Well, not Mount Graham specifically, at least not at the moment, but up on that range, and I'm very close to 9,000 feet in The drive up here was phenomenal. It was this paved road that wound its way up the mountain with switchbacks and amazing views to the east. Along the rim of this mountain, close to where I am now, you look down and it looks like the type of view you'd see from the window of an airplane. This dispersed campsite is the first one that I found because this mountain is an out-and-back. There's one way up and there's one way down. This campsite's great. It's got a primitive stone fire ring, it's tucked away in the trees, and it's just beyond this vacant group camping area that I passed. The only problem with this campsite is that it's not very level, but I made it level. I'm gonna call it a night and get some sleep, but adventure is afoot, so tomorrow we'll hit the ground running and do some exploring. I run 25 psi in the front and 30 psi in the back when ground. What I've found so far is that this mountaintop is heavily developed by the Forest Service for outdoor recreation. That means a lot of developed semi-primitive campgrounds with picnic tables, metal fire rings, vault toilets, and bear boxes. From what I've seen, most of them are first serve with a negligible nightly fee. $15, $25, and that's not that bad at all. I've also already seen a lot of campers in many of the dispersed sites. Now it's June in southern Arizona, so coming up onto the mountain and spending a few nights is a great way to beat the heat. I don't blame them. Despite all the people, you can still find really nice dispersed campsites to call your own down random forest roads. Like this one that I'm at now, this campsite is great. It's secluded, it's four-wheel drive access, there's a primitive stone fire ring, and just a short walk up the hill is an amazing view over the ridge and down into the valley to the southeast. This is a wonderful spot and I'm not spending the night here because it's still early in the day and I have a lot of down a forest road adjacent to a rock formation. I am really surprised that this spot isn't taken. This is great. I have to add, there were a lot of flies here, but they were buzzing around well above my head and they weren't any trouble at camp. forest roads as I could in a day and in a large vehicle. For the most part, I was able to negotiate the primitive roads in the van, but I did encounter a few instances where the branches were too low and I simply couldn't squeak by. There are abundant dispersed camping opportunities up here and I know what I said earlier, there are a lot of people camping in the area, but most of them seem to be at the front of the mountain when you first come up. People seem to gravitate to the easy campsites, but if you keep driving farther than anyone else, you'll definitely find a beautiful dispersed site to call your own. I marked a number of potential campsites on my GPS and a lot of them were stunning, but this was the one that I selected. It's a spacious clearing at the end of a forest road that requires four-wheel drive and it's right up against a tree line with a primitive stone fire ring. There's a little bit of cell service and up over that hill over there, just a hundred feet away, is a stunning view. The mountain drops off the face of the earth and you can see for miles sweeping views of the valley to the east. It's up here just past the fire circle. time outside, but I decided to take shelter inside the van. There's even a bit of a chill in the air, so I turned the heat on in the coach. Lately, since I've been posting all these Revel adventures, I've been asked how do I like the van? How do I like the Winnebago Revel? Shannon and I have owned it for two and a half years now and it has 43,000 miles on the odometer. Time flies. It still feels like the new van to me, but to answer the question, I like it even more today than I did when we first got it and I really loved it when we first got it. From what I understand, the first year of owning a new RV is a sort of hazing period. That's when the bugs with the chassis and the coach tend to surface and this was also true for us during the first year, but it really wasn't much fortunately. We had a couple of water leaks under the bench which are exacerbated by washboard roads and driving vibrations. We replaced a lot of the plastic fittings used in the plumbing with brass fittings and haven't had a leak since, knock on wood, and we had some issues with our Elwell Timberline diesel heater and we had Elwell look into the issues which included a fuel delivery fault and a glycol leak. Everything was still under warranty. Elwell dove in there and replaced components and again we haven't had a problem since and it's been almost two years now. My personal opinion about the Winnebago Revel is that it is very well thought out and well conceived. I'm not going to compare this to my Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. That's an unfair comparison. There are different tools in the toolbox for different purposes, but for what was engineered by Mercedes to be a cargo van, it is remarkably capable in its four-wheel drive form. So if you're interested in a van and four-wheel drive capability is paramount, then I'd get a custom Ford Econoline with a four-wheel drive conversion, stick axles front and rear, locking differentials, and an atlas transfer case. Something like that could drive to the top of a mountain, but if you want a van or a class B RV that's readily available, turnkey, and capable enough to explore, and will get you further than almost any other RV in the market, then I totally recommend this, the Winnebago Revel. You see where I go with it and it works. It works well and I love it. Not sponsored. I don't know how I managed to have a conversation with the camera and not burn my idea to wrap up this episode on a short and hopefully spectacular hike. The view does not disappoint, but the trail was overgrown from the get-go as if it's been seeing some neglect. In the end, on top of this mountain at 9,000 feet, there's just a pile of rubble and some bent steel. This summit probably had a lookout station at some point, but it must have been a long time ago. Right, so I'm going to head back to the van, air up, and head home, but this place, the Mount Graham area, is absolutely beautiful. I had a blast exploring it, and in the van I was able to make it from one end of the range to the other, so I saw a lot of it and I did record a lot of tracks and waypoints on my GPS. If you're interested in coming up here and retracing my steps, my detailed GPS data is available to Patreon subscribers and paid members of VentureForwardWD.com. Also, I have merch like this groovy t-shirt on OverlandStyle.com, and your purchases help support Venture Forward and keep the show going. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed exploring with me, and I'll see you next week.