American Adventurer
The truck, the camper, and what is bolted to it

Dave's Rig

This is the rig the rest of this site was built out of. A Toyota Tacoma with a pop-up camper on the back, four years lived out of it on public land, and a dish on the roof that kept the work going while it was parked in a national forest.

Everything below is either something Dave said or something you can see in the photograph next to it. Where a photo still carries its coordinates, the camp it was taken at is linked — those are pages on this site, and you can go stand in the same spot.

Dave Lalande's Toyota Tacoma with a pop-up camper and a Starlink dish on the roof, parked in a mountain meadow under a rainbow.
Dave's rig, August 2022.

Getting online

Dave has had Starlink since SpaceX introduced it and lived on it for four years on public land — several hundred nights out, and he can count on one hand the places he could not get connected.

The cable on his unit runs 150 feet. That is usually the whole trick: you do not need the sky above your camp, you need the sky somewhere within 150 feet of it, and you walk the dish out to it.

It runs off the batteries and the solar. No generator.

Starlink →

Referral link — Starlink pays Dave $100 in cash if you sign up through it, and that money funds this site and the next trip. It costs you nothing and does not change the recommendation.

Dave Lalande's post on X: a photo of his green Toyota Tacoma with a Starlink dish on the camper roof, parked in a mountain meadow under a rainbow, captioned 'Starlink works everywhere you want to be.' The post shows 3.1M views.
Dave's post on X — tap to open it →

Where it has been

Each photograph carries the coordinates the phone wrote into it. Where those land on a camp this site publishes, it is linked — 5 of these 6 do. The date is the file's own.

Dave's rig at Louis Lake, WY.

2022-08-06

Fee Louis Lake, WY — 0.12 mi from where this was taken

The dish on the camper roof, angled at a hole in the pine tops, with the roof solar panel alongside it. This is the whole argument about trees in one frame.

Dave's rig.

2022-08-19

Dave's rig at Frye Lake Dispersed Camping, WY.

2024-07-06

Fee Frye Lake Dispersed Camping, WY — 0.74 mi from where this was taken

A working day. Awning out, chair, laptop on the camp table. This is what the dish is for.

Dave's rig at Dumont Lake, CO.

2024-07-13

Fee Dumont Lake, CO — 2.83 mi from where this was taken

Camp set up: camper popped, both panels swung out off the roof, dish on its pole by the windshield. Power and connection are the same problem solved twice.

Dave's rig at Middle Fork Cimarron Dispersed, CO.

2024-08-04

Free Middle Fork Cimarron Dispersed, CO — 0.08 mi from where this was taken

Dave's rig at Pines, CO.

2024-09-05

Fee Pines, CO — 0.16 mi from where this was taken

The gear

This list is being filled in. It only carries what Dave has said or what is legible in a photograph — no guessed model numbers, no affiliate padding.

Why a camping site has a page about a truck

Because 248 of the camps on this site are field-verified, and this is what did the verifying. When a page here says somebody stood there, this is the thing they stood next to.