Our favorite night of van life yet (free camping in Colorado)

So it's.

There'S something going on here. I don't know what it is, but we certainly do have fun with it and that's what's important. You know.

We're Kara and Nate and we've spent the last four years traveling to a hundred countries. But 2020 brought us back to the US where we bought a converted spring our van to spend the summer exploring our own backyard. We drove 1400 miles across the United States to Colorado, where we've spent the last several weeks exploring only a fraction of what this incredible state has to offer. This episode begins in Montrose where we've been parked beside our friend's massive RV for the past week, catching up on some work and playing a little bit too.

So many crumbs and so, so little time.

Today we are going to be driving 4 hours east ish to spend the next few days exploring Great Sand Dunes National Park. The plan is to spend the next few nights free camping. So while we're here at the campground and we have all of the amenities of modern day camping, we're going to get everything ready to spend the next few days off the grid.

If you've watched any of our previous videos, you'll know that since buying this van, we've ran into quite a few power issues.

And I'm super excited to say that for the last three weeks we have been completely problem free and the van is charged up to 100% to start this trip, which feels good. Next, I need to fill up our 40 gallon fresh water tank.

And we're full. This starts the less fun part of emptying the gray tank. We don't have a hose that like properly connects us to the dump station. So this is the best alternative that I've come up with so far. It's not exactly fast, but it seems to work.

I'm also going to do the same thing with the pee from our composting toilet, but I'll spare you from that this time.

So we are by no means van life pros. We've only been doing this for about a month and we're still figuring a lot of things out. But we think we found an awesome free place to park for the night.

Stop and read regulations to bury human.

Waste in a cat hole 6 to 8 inches deep.

He should have got a shovel at Walmart.

It sounds to me like we just park wherever we want.

This is our first time staying on BLM land, which stands for Bureau of Land Management. And from what we understand, it's these areas of land mostly in the Western United States that the government owns where you can camp for free.

This is awesome. So there's just this dirt road and then on the side of the road there's just all these little pull off areas. And I guess you can just camp at any of them. So we just found one where no one else is. And this is home for the night.

I love everything about this. For some reason, it's so much better than being in a campground. To me, it's free and I'm a little cheap, so that's part of it. But there's something just cool about just like parking in the middle of nowhere with incredible views, being all alone. The temperature could not be more perfect. Like I've been looking forward to, to coming out west so that we could try this out. Like staying on BLM land. And this was everything that I dreamed it would be. Yeah. And we've been here for two minutes. Yay.

This is what we're gonna wake up.

To in the morning.

I can't wait.

Mine is goat cheese. It hates goat cheese.

I'm just like really happy right now and trying to decide how it gets better than this. We have pizza. Really, really good pizza. We have sparkling wine from a Colorado vineyard. We're sitting in our home and we have this view.

I feel like there's been like a lot of ups and downs in van life so far. And it's like little moments like these that have made it totally worth it.

I agree.

Cheer.

Just. Wow.

So we passed this unique looking place on the way to a campsite yesterday.

And even though this wasn't part of the original plan, after driving by all these aliens and this sign.

Curiosity got the best of us.

It's called the UFO Watchtower. And when we first passed it, I figured it was just another kitschy tourist attraction. But I decided to look it up and see what I could find online. And I think this should be pretty interesting.

The first thing that caught our attention was a bizarre junk garden filled with everything from alien statues to Barbie dolls. We later learned that this location is supposedly home to two spiritual vortexes and that visitors are encouraged to leave something in the garden to gain energy from these openings to parallel universes.

We eventually made our way into the quirky dome shaped museum shop where we met Judy, the owner who shared her story with us.

And what's the most interesting thing that you've seen since you've been here?

It was the one that was between here in the mountains and part way down. I call the cigar shape narrow, really long. And it Went zip like that. We had over a dozen people here. Everybody saw it. So what the heck was it? You know, you keep saying what the heck was that?

But we've had 240 sightings from just here since opening. And they can just keep happening. People have documented and those are the documented ones, but they're in this book. You're welcome to look at those.

She didn't come here looking for UFOs 20 years ago. She moved here with intentions of starting a cattle ranch. Apparently that turned out to be a little more difficult than she anticipated. And she's the first to admit that she built the UFO Watchtower as a tourist trap to make a little extra money since the area is known as a UFO hotspot. But what started as a way to make some extra money turned into an eye opening experience that has converted Judy into a believer.

You know, when you've had the experiences, have you ever seen anything?

I haven't personally.

Well, you need to get out and look more.

She now claims to have seen over 20 UFOs and encourages anyone who visits to keep an open mind.

Have you seen an alien or have you only seen flying objects?

I've just seen the flying objects. But others who have been here say that they have seen the aliens. We had a paranormal group come and stay in our bed and breakfast and at night they came over here and they said that there was a figure out the front that was illuminated with a green light and they thought I had put some something out there because I do fun things. I hadn't. And they came back the next morning and they still haven't figured out what it was that they saw. So it's.

There'S something going on here and I don't know what it is, but we certainly do have fun with it and that's what's important, you know.

The recent news made our visit even more interesting. Within the last month, the New York Times has published a couple different articles claiming that the Navy has a special task force called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, which is in charge of standardizing collection and reporting on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, which made what we saw next very intriguing.

The Navy visited back in 2015.

They were interesting. And while they were here, he pulled out his cell phone and showed me a picture of one coming out of the ocean.

No way. Yeah.

So they know more than what they're telling us. The following year, after they were here, they were awarded $20 million to investigate UFOs.

Wow.

With that said, the New York Times was very intentional to point out that UFOs don't mean aliens. Unidentified means we don't know what they are, only that they demonstrate capabilities that do not appear to be possible through currently available technology. So while we went into this experience very close minded, after learning more, we won't be as quick to dismiss the possibility of UFOs.

Do you think that it's alien related or that it's just other technology that we as Americans don't understand?

I think it's alien related, you know, I mean what we're seeing today is basically what they saw back in the 1500s. We didn't have all of that stuff then, you know, Interesting.

So I always figured if I met somebody who I was having a serious conversation with about UFOs that I would just think they were completely wacky. But Judy was not what I expected. She didn't come here looking for aliens. She just kind of ended up here. And she's just presenting what she's seen and what others have told her. And she's not trying to convince you of anything. You can just take it or leave it. And in some ways I think that's, that's the most convincing kind of argument. I'm not saying I believe in aliens, but.

Hole right there.

Believe it or not, this place also has a small, small campground. There are about 20 spots and they're only $15 a night. So if you wanted to you could stay up all night and look for UFOs. But I'll probably be asleep by 10.

So we're not going to be staying up all night. But we are going to try to set our alarms between 3 and 4am not to look for UFOs. But we're not not looking for UFOs.

That is the spiciest ramen I've ever had. The real reason we're getting up is because this is supposed to be one of the best places in the entire country to see the stars and UFOs. The reason we're waiting till three is because the moon's super bright right now and it sets after three. So we've got about like this two hour window of black darkness miss where we may spot.

I like really getting into this.

We're going to do this.

Wow, the stars are so bright.

Well there weren't any of us that we could see but the stars are really pretty.

We also had like a 30 minute window where we could really see the stars. I Woke up at 3, looked outside, the moon was still super bright by the time we got up at 4, the sun was starting to rise. Thirty minutes later.

Disappearing so quickly just from that tiny bit of light.

Right, we're going back to sleep.

We're by no means experts at star photography, but getting to play around with the aliens in the foreground last night was a lot of fun. Also, it's. It's 11.

Somehow we justified sleeping in way too late. Even though we were only up for like an hour last night.

We got the permit. Tonight we are sleeping in the dunes. I think this is going to be one of the most unique experiences we've ever had. This is crazy.

10% chance of rain, they said.

Wow.

The ground is so hard. 300 yards from where we slept last night. And look at this. Cat tracks. I think that has to be a mountain lion.

Get off me.

Unfortunately.

It slipped off.

This is our first time camping on what's called B&8BNH. BLH. BLM.

How did I get that so wrong?

It's a good thing about cameras.

Too much. I watched it on B and H's website. Okay.

I never heard of there being aliens 5,000 years ago.

Surprise.

This is all a surprise to me.

Surprise.

The energy from the vortex is really strong right now.

It's like the Roswell crash. Before the crash, it took an entire building to house a computer. After the crash, shortly after, we had them sitting on our desks. Now how did we get so smart so quick? The same with Velcro.

Velcro?

Velcro came from the Roswell crash.

Huh.

So they have back engineered a lot of stuff. And thank God they did because we got some good things out.

Sam.