Van Camping in -14 Degrees | Winter Van Life

Good morning. Got down to about negative 16 degrees fahrenheit last night which was somewhat unexpected. I was driving into this valley and just like it often is in the Great Basin the temperature, the lower you get the colder it gets at night and I watched that take all the way down to well negative 14 when I parked. Unfortunately my propane ran out at around 8 a.m but that's fine. I was gonna wake up anyways and hop right into this unbelievable hot spring here in the middle of the valley and by far the deepest hot spring I've ever seen. I have no idea where the bottom is. I love hot springs like this. They're just so peaceful. You can park right next to them and enjoy a negative temperature morning all by yourself. This one's quite warm too. It's perfect. I did kind of slice the top of my left toe on one of those rocks. That's what made it so hard to swim in there is you can tread water no problem with your legs but you're nervous about once you get to the edge kicking one of the sharp rocks and so kind of doing it with your arms at the same time to reach. It is still very very cold out here. I'm sure it's over zero now but maybe five degrees or something like that. So aside from this pool out in the rest of this valley it's hard to tell but there's other little steam chutes I see and I can tell in the satellite footage that there's definitely more geothermal things out here. So let's explore those real quick before heading out into those mountains. Here's a little pool. Oh it's much clearer. Yeah I bet that's a lot hotter. The main pool is about 100 degrees. This might be about 110 by the looks of it. Here's a tiny little pool. It's just the coolest thing that these are all over the place and the water is so clear you don't want to accidentally step in it. This one looks quite warm. That looks like a great one to swim in. Oh that is nice. That's exact hot tub temperature. Next time we come here this will be the pool to swim in and as long as there's not too much snow I could park right next to it. Here's the last little spring I can see with all the steam. Oh that is really steaming. That looks really hot. Oh yeah that's a good one. That is that is really nice. You can see where the water comes in and then of course some of the bubbles out there. What an insane natural wonder in these valleys to just have all these springs that bubble up nice hot water like this. It's unbelievable. You know it's cold when you're walking through the hot springs and then as soon as you get out your shoes freeze they're all super stiff. All right look at that it's three degrees. About what I expected. I've got to find my way out of here through these fairly undeveloped backcountry snow covered roads. All right I'm on to an easier to drive road where I can actually gain some speed and head straight towards those mountains and see what I find up there. I'm guessing that road is probably not an excellent condition. It's negative five degrees now that I've gotten some speed and the car's been able to adjust. It always overshoots the temperature when it sits in the sun but this sounds about right. So yeah I'm gonna head up into the mountains and see what see what I discovered. Look at those. That's really cool. Super old cars just pushed down near the ditch. I think just ahead here is where I've seen those that little abandoned ghost town back in the old ruby mining days. Yeah here we are. Oh look at this. That's totally worth checking out to see if there's a place to park. Driving past there's like a whole ghost town in here. I never realized how expensive it is. This is so cool. Definitely gonna have to put my boots on though. Since I don't have any propane left I can't make any real food unfortunately but I can bust out a quick bowl of cereal and that should do for this morning. I don't really know anything about this ghost town other than I know it is in some way affiliated with the Donner party that moved across the Great Basin all the way to California where most of them died in the snowstorm on Donner Path. But it looks like there's a lot going on there. It's pretty big. So we'll see what we find. All right let's go see what we find. It was hooked up to a modern two-phase 240 volt electricity so this must have been quite ahead of its time and not even that old. Smells pretty strongly of rat droppings. Yeah it's got motor outlets and everything. That one does not smell good. I'm always so cautious walking into these. Worried that there's wildlife that is taking over. This is actually held up very well. This is really recent. Yeah if you wanted to know how recent it is those hose clamps are barely rusty at all and there's a full-on modern water heater. Modern pvc fittings. It's actually pretty sad. Like they used to have a nice stream in their backyard. It's totally frozen now. Look at that frozen stream. I was hoping that I could maybe do some fishing up here but that is not the case here. That is totally frozen solid. This one's so nice I almost wondered if there was somebody still in there. Sure enough the entire roof is caved in from snow. You just wonder how this happens. How the whole community just ends up totally ransacked. And I guess it doesn't take long for nature to take back over. Just imagine how nice this would have been if everybody's got a little stream in their backyard. That's a shame. The last thing I want to check out is it looks like there was some kind of mine or something up this little road. There's something up there and I want to see what it is. It's not uncommon for these towns to be associated with mines. If you can see that road that climbs way up there I have no doubts that there is some kind of mine shaft way up there but there's no way I'm making it there so instead I'm going to check this out. That's what I was looking at from the bottom. I wonder what's in there. I guess it was just storage. This structure here is a lot older than the ones down there. I can tell by the fact that the nuts are all square which they used to be before they became hexagons. The wood is cut with mills rather than large electric standard machinery. This is an 1800s structure for sure. Not at all what I expected. The plan is simple. Head north on this little road until I get to something that takes me to Elko because that is the nearest town where I can fill up propane. And it should be snowing within a couple days. Oh and happy Thanksgiving guys. That is today as it turns out. I wouldn't have known if I didn't get a text from my dad. Nice. Alright well thank you guys so much for watching. I did not expect it to get that cold and after seeing all that steam in the valley I thought oh that's a great place to go camping. So hopefully you guys enjoyed that little negative 14 degree camping video. Of course the ghost town was also kind of a surprise to me. I only realized it was here the other day. If you're into this kind of Great Basin content, I love the Great Basin, so these types of desert landscapes with cool artifacts and hot springs, let me know because this winter maybe I'll spend a lot of time camping here if it's something you guys are into. If not let me know as well. I'm going to be heading farther west now where the big snows are coming for the season and it'll be a good test of how well the van handles getting out of a few feet of snow. See you guys next time. Thanks for watching.