The Ultimate Poach Camping App. Motorcycle vagabonding in the United States usually involves some camping, occasional couch surfing and a few cheap motels. The camping stuff divides between authorized and unauthorized campsites. Unauthorized means poach-camping. Stealth camping. Finding someplace to pull off the road for the night where nobody is likely to bother you, and hopefully also in an open-enough space so as not to be also appealing to hordes of mosquitos. Hard to find camping spots that are both open and hidden.
This app (onX Hunt, illustrated at left) is the ultimate tool for poach campers, and this story is all about poach-camping, which you need to know is illegal and scary. Just how scary and how illegal depends on the site’s particulars, some of which you can see directly, and some you can only see via this app.
Regardless of what you know about an illegal campsite, you always need to be ready to leave in a hurry, and stealthy equipment like an Aerostich black ultralight motorcycle cover can help conceal your bike. A blaze orange tent isn’t such a good idea (not to mention that inside such a highly visible structure the orange-colored light filtering through the fabric makes your skin look so cadaverously gray it will make you nauseous). A quiet-ish bike that is lightweight enough to be ridden into a completely undeveloped site is helpful, too. The quieter and lighter, the better.
Poach-camping sites will not have showers or pit toilets like an organized legal campground, but when you do find a nice site where nobody has ever camped before it will actually be cleaner than any paid campsite. Paid commercial campsites range from popular and heavily over-used, over-priced, and dirty to seldom used very remote sites with honor-system pay boxes administered by the Corps of Engineers which can be pristine, quiet, scenic and wonderful. There are apps, guide books and directories of all campgrounds to help you find and sort out the options.
Experience and common sense means you’ll need to start looking for a suitable poach-camp site with enough time before sundown. Noticing what you are riding past during the later part of the afternoon, and not focusing on squeezing every last possible mile out of the day. You’ll need to think about the story you may have to tell if anyone comes by with questions (hopefully not with an attitude and a shotgun). Once in a while that could happen. We are a well-armed citizenry these days with more tribal and risk-averse paranoid people than ever, thanks (in my opinion) to our near-universally consumed advanced technologies like digital media, digital social networks and enclosed air-conditioned automobiles. Blah, blah, blah.
In any encounter with a local you’ll either be asked to leave immediately, possibly angrily, or told to leave in the morning, or invited to their place for a home-made dinner. The outcome may be influenced by the story you tell. It can be helpful to travel with a GF or wife. Next best is to be with one other rider, and third best is to be alone. Three riders sometimes can be ok, too.
Once, after a long riding day and a failure to locate a non-existent campground indicated on a Garmin GPS, my riding partner and I decided to camp very late behind a small grove of pine trees on the side of an access road into a rural cemetery just off a country road in Montana. This fairly well hidden site was high on a bluff that overlooked the Platte (or Missouri?) river just outside of some small farm town. The location was deserted but had been recently mowed. We pitched our tent close behind three medium size pine trees, covered the bikes with black Aerostich stealth lightweight covers and fell asleep, thinking we were safe in a perfect poach-camping spot. At 5:30 AM the next morning we awoke when a car went by, heading into the cemetery. Fifteen minutes later, another car, then another two cars. By 6 AM half a dozen cars had driven past our secret spot right into this little cemetery. I looked at my watch, confused. My partner asked me what day this was. “Monday.” I replied. Uh-oh….it was Memorial Day! Yikes! We shook our heads. This place was about to become crowded with people. Of all the nights of the year to poach camp on the access road into a cemetery. We packed and loaded our gear up quickly and rode away before anyone saw us. Or if they did, before someone decided to stop and ask us what the F we were doing there.
There are all kinds of poach-campable places where one isn’t likely to be discovered, but poach camping will always be risky. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of app that told you who owned every plat of land in the country? You’d be able to see state and county owned land, parks, and everything else.
There is, About a month ago I was reading a story in an outdoor magazine written by a young couple living the modern wilderness life with a couple of mountain bikes and an off-road lifted Airstream travel trailer. The author mentioned an app that would exactly ID every parcel of land in the entire country, instantaneously. On the app store this app was $99 a year. Holy-c_ap! All my other apps were either free or $2.99. This one sure must be something to be worth a hundred dollars a year.
Guess what? It is. If you want to poach-camp, it can be game-changer. Look at this:
It’s the one in the lower right, ‘onX Hunt’. Designed for hunters who want to know ahead of time whose land they are walking across as they pursue their deer, partridge, or feral pig quarry. Every land owner is listed in the entire country, as is every piece of state, county, city land. Parks, abandoned lands. Everything.
It’s important to note that property owners living adjacent to vacant city, county and state lands often consider those places ‘theirs’ so be careful. There’s a couple of these kind of vacant lots next to my residence and if I noticed a tent and a bike in there for more than a day I’d probably call the police. Still, with common sense and this app you can greatly increase your chances for a successful poach-camping outcome. It comes down to being stealthy and unseen, and leaving your site clean. No open fires, burying your waste, being quiet, etc. Here’s a quick zoom-in set of screen shots from near our facility.
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Note the public and vacant land along the ‘North Shore Hiking Trail’. If you think like a homeless person, poach-camping is doable. In fact, when poach-camping in and near cities you may encounter a homeless person. They are not there willingly. Whenever you decide to poach-camp you become a traditional old school ‘motorcycle-bum’, or ‘poverty rider’. You are joining a long and not-particularly-noble tradition of homeless, vagabonds and hobos. Times change. Practice at your own risk.
I’ve only done “unauthorized camping” once, back in 1982 along California 1 south of Big Sur. It was one of those days when everything took longer than expected: I stopped at a swimming hole (dammed-up creek) near Ben Lomond; it was refreshing but I lost my keys on the bottom of the creek! Breaking into the fairing to reach the wires so I could hot-wire the bike took about an hour, during which the police went past twice, expressing no interest (evidently they figured nobody would steal a Suzuki Water Buffalo). An hour later, I spent another hour re-hot-wiring the bike after I discovered I hadn’t connected the charging system and had very nearly run down the battery (I had to kick-start it to get going). Despite this, I of course had to stop at Nepenthe for “lunch.” And so I found myself on the twistiest, prettiest stretch of Route 1 just as it was getting dark and the fog was starting to blow across the road. I started thinking about maybe just pitching my tent, but there were all these NO CAMPING signs along the road. Finally, I found a spit of land with several vehicles and tents already set up, decided the cops probably wouldn’t bust us all, and joined them. During the night I got up to pee, noticed I didn’t hear any splashing as I stood behind the tent. In the morning I discovered my tent had somehow gotten about five feet closer to the hundred-foot cliff above the Pacific. Uh… OK. As I was packing up, I was chatting with another squatter, and he told me the cops would roust you if you tried to set up camp while it was light, but after sundown they’d rather have you camping illegally than driving in the dark.
There are so many ways camping apps can entertain and assist us in our outdoor endeavours, especially if we are glamping and want to make our trip as relaxing as possible.
I’m kind of a pirate/stealth camping pro. I’ve found great spots all over the USA, even on the Blueridge Trail.
It’s an art, to be sure, but the challenge usually pays off well when you find that perfect spot, hidden from everyone but you.
Most National Forests also have dispersed camping access as well. Within150 yards from the road and 100 feet from water. Out west it is a no-brainer, out East it is a little tougher to find a National Forest… If the North shore Hiking Trail is within National Forest boundaries, let ‘er rip!
In the article you mention the ‘North Shore Hiking Trail’. The people that run the trail really frown on stealth camping along it. In MN though, all state forests allow “dispersed camping”, meaning that you can camp in pretty much any place that you find suitable.
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