The Overlanding Purity Police Need to Calm the Hell Down - Let's Just Call It Adventure Travel

There's a particular flavor of sanctimonious bullshit that's infected the overlanding community, and honestly, I'm tired of pretending it's not ridiculous. You know the type - the adventure purists who've appointed themselves the Supreme Court of What Counts, complete with arbitrary rules, minimum requirements, and a smugness that could fuel a small power grid.

According to these self-appointed judges, your week-long backcountry trip through the Rockies doesn't qualify. Your carefully planned trip across the Southwest? Just glorified car camping. That remote forest service road that led you to three days of solitude by an alpine lake? Sorry, friend - you didn't cross an international border, so it's basically a Walmart parking lot sleepover with better views.

The audacity is almost impressive.

The legendary Mojave Road. One of North America's most celebrated overland tracks. But to the overlanding elitists, it's basically just glorified car camping because you didn't spend six months getting here from Patagonia.

The Purity Test Is Absurd

Let me break down the various ways these folks will inform you that you're doing adventure wrong:

You must cross international borders (because apparently political boundaries are what legitimize exploration). You need to log thousands of miles minimum (weekend warriors can fuck right off). Your trip must span months or years (your measly vacation days are adorable). You can't use maintained roads (gravel is for posers, apparently). And my personal favorite bit of elitist nonsense: certain countries are simply too developed to allow for "real" overlanding.

This last one is where the whole thing careens into self-parody.

Meet Your New Favorite Hypocrite

Let me introduce you to Andrew St Pierre White, whose credentials include legitimate expeditions across Africa and Australia, and whose hot takes include the spectacularly pompous opinion that you can't authentically overland in the United States because it's not remote enough. According to him, true overlanding demands international borders, massive distances, and presumably some sort of adventure baptism administered by a council of overland elders.

Now here's where this transforms from annoying to absolutely hilarious: this same guy dropped roughly $200,000 to custom build a 70 Series Land Cruiser with a Tommy Camper, only to discover it didn't work for him.

Two. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. Custom built.

On a rig he then decided wasn't right for his needs.

After tens of thousands of miles across Africa, Australia, and North America, plus multiple six-figure custom builds, Andrew still hasn't figured out what works for him. But hey, at least he's absolutely certain you're doing overlanding wrong.

The sheer audacity of lecturing Americans about doing overlanding wrong while making quarter-million-dollar mistakes on your own setup is the kind of hypocrisy that makes my eye twitch. It's the perfect encapsulation of overlanding's purity problem - people with more opinions than sense, more credentials than self-awareness, dictating what counts as legitimate adventure.

Why should anyone take this seriously?

The Geography Argument Is Laughable

Let's demolish this international border fetish, because the numbers are genuinely hilarious. The United States sprawls across 3.8 million square miles. Canada clocks in at 3.9 million. Russia? A casual 6.6 million square miles of vastness.

Meanwhile, you can drive across Luxembourg in about an hour. Belgium takes roughly two hours north to south. You could probably throw a decent fastball across Liechtenstein.

So someone hopping from Belgium into France for a weekend trip earns their overlanding merit badge, but an American spending a week traversing the remote backcountry of Nevada, Oregon, and Idaho is just... what exactly? A weekend hobbyist playing dress-up in the wilderness?

Remote is remote. It doesn't matter if you cross some invisible line that politicians drew on a map centuries ago. If you're three hours from cell service and two hours from the nearest gas station, you're legitimately in the wilderness regardless of which passport you're carrying.

Northern Nevada. Population density that rivals the most remote parts of Africa. But sure, tell me again how Americans can't experience 'real' remoteness without crossing an international border. I'll wait.

The "Authentic Experience" Police

I've watched this attitude metastasize throughout the overlanding community, and it's exhausting. People dismiss domestic adventure travel as "just car camping," as if spending a week exploring Utah's backcountry somehow doesn't count because you didn't briefly pop into Baja for Instagram content.

This kind of adventure snobbery is exactly what I've ranted about before - the compulsive need to make everything sound more extreme and exclusive than reality warrants. We've transformed exploration into a competition about who can check the most arbitrary boxes on some purist's manufactured checklist.

Weekend Warriors Are Valid, Actually

Here's an uncomfortable truth for the purity patrol: not everyone has the bank account, job flexibility, or life circumstances to abandon everything for a 12-month Pan American Highway trip. Many of us are lucky to scrape together a few extended weekends per year between work, family obligations, and the general chaos of modern existence.

Our adventures might not match the scale of full-time overlanders circumnavigating the globe, but pretending that makes them illegitimate is absurd.

Multiple remote destinations over long weekends - Eastern Oregon in spring, the Rockies in summer, the Southwest in fall - that's still adventure travel. It's just on a different scale than Silk Road journeys, and that's perfectly fucking fine. As I've written about the escalating costs of this hobby, we should be lowering barriers to entry, not constructing new ones.

Most of us started with car camping, progressed to multi-day trips, then week-long adventures, and if we're incredibly lucky, maybe someday multi-month or year-long expeditions. Sneering at this natural progression is toxic elitism that actively discourages people from getting outdoors in the first place.

You Don't Need to Conquer Moab

Let me take a moment to irritate the wheeling bros who think you need to tackle trails rated 7+ on OnX Offroad to earn your adventure credentials. Overlanding is about reaching remote places, not auditioning for a Monster Energy sponsorship or proving your rig can defy physics.

Gravel roads work perfectly well. Graded dirt roads are completely legitimate. Some of the best overlanding I've experienced involved boring-ass Forest Service roads that led to pristine alpine lakes where I didn't see another human for three days. No rock sliders required, no lift kit necessary - just a reliable vehicle and the willingness to get away from civilization.

Peak irony: The guys who spend 8 hours crawling 10 miles over technical obstacles like this are the same ones telling you your 500-mile remote backcountry loop isn't 'real overlanding' because the roads were too maintained. Missing the forest for the boulders, boys.

The Arbitrary Metrics Crowd

Then there's the faction insisting on specific mileage or time thresholds, as if adventure operates on some sort of frequent flyer program. A week-long loop through the backcountry of Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah - sleeping in your rig, cooking your own meals, navigating unmaintained roads, completely self-sufficient - is absolutely legitimate adventure travel.

Duration doesn't determine authenticity. A poorly planned two-month trip hitting every developed campground and tourist trap along the way isn't automatically more "overland" than a meticulously planned five-day backcountry expedition.

Can We Just Stop?

If we keep being insufferably dogmatic about what overlanding "is" and "isn't," we're going to accomplish exactly one thing: turning people off from getting outdoors and exploring. And in an era where we're all guilty of bringing too much civilization into the wilderness anyway, maybe we should focus less on policing definitions and more on encouraging disconnection and exploration.

The spirit of adventure travel is about exploration, self-sufficiency, and experiencing remote places - not checking boxes on arbitrary checklists dreamed up by people who've apparently never looked at a map of North America. Whether you're crossing borders in a $200K custom-built rig or spending a long weekend in the Sierras in your slightly modified 4Runner, if you're getting out there, you're doing it right.

So let's abandon the purity tests, embrace adventure travel as the inclusive term it deserves to be, and stop being insufferable snobs about other people's journeys. The outdoors belong to everyone, not just the people with the right stamps in their passport or the fattest bank accounts.