In the sprawling camping fields of Overland Expo PNW and MW, we found dozens upon dozens of truck camper rigs—from battle-tested pop-ups, to off-road ready hard sides, to wild one-offs. Think you’ve seen Overland Expo this year? Think again!
Saturday at an Overland Expo is always a zoo. By mid-morning, the show aisles are shoulder-to-shoulder, the booths jammed, and the displays all but swallowed by the human tide. It’s great for the companies selling their wares, but for anyone hoping to take a decent photo or video without someone’s elbow in the frame, it’s hopeless.
That’s why we skip the madness. While the crowds surge into the commercial zone, we head the opposite way, out into the camping fields. Out there, the only traffic jam is a line of dusty rigs baking in the sun. Scattered between ground tents, rooftop tents, and mega-buck chassis-mounts are the machines we came to see: truck campers. Dozens of them. Hundreds, even. Oh yes, they were everywhere!
This year, at both Overland Expo Pacific Northwest (PNW) in Oregon and Mountain West (MW) in Colorado, Angela and I split up like kids on an Easter egg hunt. She zigged, I zagged, and together we scoured the fields for every demountable truck camper we could find. The campers in the fields are the real thing—rigs owned by actual truck campers, being used for what they were built for: camping.
The result? Everything from compact pop-ups and hard sides to ingenious one-off builds. And because this is Overland Expo, we also stumbled across a few wildcards.
So come take a walk with us, past the crowds and the chaos, into the wide-open fields. Here’s what real-world truck camping looks like at Overland Expo 2025.
