Preparing For Future All-Electric Journeys

On our last long trip, we went over 4200 miles. Along the way, we visited two national parks (Hot Springs and Great Smoky Mountains), traveled along about half of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and attended an important EV event in North Carolina. It was a great trip, and something I’d do again given the time and the chance.

But, we played in hard mode on that trip. Most people wouldn’t consider an EV at all for towing because even the best electric tow vehicles still have to spend a lot more time charging while getting half of the EPA range or less. Of those who would consider an EV, most want something with a big battery and great charging speeds, like a Cybertruck, Rivian, or Silverado EV. We took our trip in a Bolt EUV and pulled a small trailer to carry glamping supplies.

This was especially painful because the Bolt EUV would only get around 120 miles of range when towing a 1700-pound trailer (loaded), When we did hit a fast charger, we’d only get 55 kilowatts. This made for long, long days trying to make any kind of time crossing the continent. As you can probably imagine, we were thoroughly sick of traveling this way after 4200 miles.

Since then, we’ve been working on improving our setup, which is something that requires a lot more money than we felt right about asking readers to donate. So, we had to round up the money ourselves, which took months. But, instead of signing up for a bigger car payment and going into RV debt up to our eyeballs, we’re instead going to do something even cooler.

Step 1: Take Our New (To Us) Travel Trailer All-Electric

Instead of trying to keep tent glamping, we decided to go with a travel trailer we could sleep inside of. So, we bought a used 24-foot travel trailer. It’s not the most luxurious of campers, and it needs some work. It was also designed in a time when RV manufacturers assumed that everyone would use propane for almost everything (something we aren’t going to do).

So far, we’ve picked up a far more efficient compressor fridge, some small space heaters, a power station with 8 kWh of storage that we can upgrade to 12 kWh later, and a composting toilet to eliminate the need for dumping a black tank or relying on sewer systems that harm both the environment and human health. Once we have all of this put in, we’ll need to upgrade to a heat pump, get an electric water heater, and put in an electric stove to eliminate propane from the rig entirely. We may ask fans and followers to help with these last few things in a few weeks.

We also got 1200 watts of folding solar panels we can set up during longer camping stops, and we’re setting the power station up to charge from the tow vehicle as needed.

Step 2: Build An Electric Chevy Suburban

As you can probably guess, the Bolt EUV is not going to be able to tow a 24-foot trailer loaded with batteries and solar. Fully loaded with water and supplies, it’s going to be about 3500 pounds too heavy. Even if we somehow solved that issue, the Bolt’s battery pack would probably provide 50 miles of range towing such a big load on level ground.

It’s not within our budget to go out and buy a Silverado EV, F-150 Lightning with large pack, or a large pack Rivian R1S. Plus, we’re not the biggest fans of most new EVs. Call us old fogeys if you must, but we really like trucks and SUVs from 20+ years ago a lot more. But, they didn’t make EV trucks in those days.

To get exactly what we want, we’re about to start converting an early 2000s Chevy Suburban to electric power. This may sound expensive and like it would provide a bad EV experience, but we are already part of a family EV conversion business. This will allow us to build our tow vehicle without breaking the bank, even if it’s going to take a while to accomplish.

When we’re all done, the Suburban will have:

  • 150+ kWh of batteries from wrecked Teslas
  • One or two Tesla drive units (we haven’t decided whether to power the front wheels yet)
  • An android head unit that can control most EV functions, provide backup cameras, etc
  • An otherwise stock interior and exterior that doesn’t stand out much

While We Build The Truck

Getting our Suburban built will take around a year, and we don’t want to stop all camping and traveling during that time. It would drive us crazy, and we think it’s still important to show the advantages of an all-electric camper, even if we aren’t towing it with an EV yet. So, we’re going to temporarily pull it around with an ICE 2001 Suburban we recently picked up.

During this time, posts at this website will focus on both building the Electroburban and taking the all-electric camping trailer on trips in the Southwest. When we camp, we’ll explore how well our mostly solar-powered setup works, come up with ideas to improve it, and hopefully help other people do similar in the future.

We’ll also be telling other people’s EV travel stories during this time. The goal will be to fill up our map with links to social media posts describing trips to national and state parks, and when there’s a cool story, share a post here. As I said before, we want this to be a community effort and not just us telling our travel stories. It makes sense to minimize our impacts to nature when we’re out enjoying it!

If you’re interested in following this story over the next year, be sure to follow us on social media or subscribe to e-mail updates. Links to X/Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Threads, and Instagram are all at the top of the page. You can also follow us on Mastodon and the Fediverse (jennifer@chargetotheparks.com), and provide your e-mail address when prompted by popups.

Featured image: a picture from an old Chevrolet Suburban advertisement (fair use).

The Next Stage Of The Charge to the Parks Journey

Since taking a long trip in May and June, I’ve had to focus on some household things. This has been sad for me because I was haven’t been able to keep up the pace of travel I had hoped for, and I haven’t been able to keep working on the EV travel guides or much of anything else. So, I’ve been thinking about how to make this project a success while life keeps happening!

Giving up on this project is not an option. Not only is it something I want to do, but it’s also something that the world needs. Those of us with EVs know that they’re up to the task, but the rest of the industry and automotive buyers in North America seem to be dragging their feet. We need to be sharing stories of visiting places like national parks, state parks, and more as much as we can.

So, to make sure I’m contributing to a better world with this project, I’m going to make some changes.

First off, I’m going to be replacing travel guides with collections of stories of real people traveling to the parks. Some of these stories will be mine, but many will be from other people as I find them. This will be better because the information can’t go out of date. As for the navigational value of the guides, I’m going to be improving a general travel guide that helps people get the latest information before their own trips.

The other thing I’m going to do is spend less time worrying about taking trips and more time finding useful news and information about the parks. This will involve following the rollout of EV charging networks, gathering up other people’s stories, and reviewing products that we’d all find useful on our EV journeys.

Finally, I’m going to make my trips more meaningful. I plan to still do frequent regional trips, but I’ll probably only do 2-3 long trips every year. On each of these visits, I’m going to try to spend a lot more time at each park to get better information, better photos, and just better quality. Doing it this way will take years longer, but it will mean doing a better job.

The other thing about staying longer and doing more repeat visits will mean better opportunities for videos, scenic photography (prints will be available), and much more interesting content both here and on social media.

More posts will be coming soon!

Bottom Ten Parks Now Covered

With the addition of the Great Basin National Park’s EV Travel Guide, we’ve now covered both the top ten most and least visited national parks! Sadly, a number of the parks in the bottom ten are in remote areas of Alaska and are simply not reachable by car, so they all got put together in one placeholder guide. But, there are guides for the rest.

The next step will be to make sure every state has at least one park in each state with a guide written. After that, parks will be added by reader demand and by our own interests. If there’s a park you’d like a guide written for sooner, be sure to reach out in the comments or on social media!

 

 

Updated Guides For New Mexico Available!

After taking some time to visit two national parks and one recreation area in an EV over the last few days, I made some updates and improvements!

First off, I updated Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains national parks with new information and updated photos from my visit. There’s no much more information about attractions nearby, especially on the backroads behind both parks. I have more trips planned for that area in the fall and will be adding more and updating. An important thing I added to both pages was information about the Guadalupe Rim, a great but rugged path into the area.

An image from my recent drive into the area near both parks via Guadalupe Rim Road.

 

Another important thing I did was add a page for a very underrated recreation area near Socorro, New Mexico: San Lorenzo Canyon. There, you’ll find a very nice set of sandstone canyons that almost any EV can not only get to, but drive in the bottom of!

EV Travel Guides For Top Ten Parks Now Available

We’re chugging along with EV travel guides, and now we have the top ten national parks (by 2023 visitor numbers) covered. These parks (among others with guides) are:

  1. Great Smoky Mountains National Park
  2. Grand Canyon National Park
    1. North Rim
    2. South Rim
  3. Zion National Park
  4. Yellowstone National Park
  5. Rocky Mountain National Park
  6. Yosemite National Park
  7. Acadia National Park
  8. Grand Teton National Park
  9. Joshua Tree National Park
  10. Olympic National Park

Our next steps will be to cover some of the least visited national parks, and then try to seek your input on what parks to cover next. Also, we’ll be starting on the first trip logs to the national parks in just a few days, where we’ll link to trips we’ve taken and work to improve the guides.

Featured image by NPS (Public Domain).

11 Parks, One Page For Unreachable Alaskan Parks, Mission & Purpose up!

I’ve been busy adding more EV travel guides to the website, including one that isn’t really a guide.

Let’s talk about the guides, first! We’re now up to 11 parks covered, now including the top 5 most visited parks. These parks so far are:

You’ll notice that I split Grand Canyon into two pages, largely because the north and south rims are so different from each other. Sure, they’re only 10-20 miles apart, but the drive from one to the other is over 200 miles and takes several hours. So, it made sense to make sure it’s clear that one is easy to reach while the other can be reached only with some extra work.

Another page I added was for the least popular national parks, and most of them are in Alaska. It’s not that these parks aren’t amazing as much as that they’re super tough to get to. ICE cars can’t even get to them, even if they’re the best four wheel drive off-roading machines. So, it made sense to cover these all at the same time so that people can see why we skipped over so many parks and monuments in that state.

The good news? Three of them can be reached by EV, so I’ll cover those soon.

Right now, I’m working on covering the rest of the top 10 visited parks, and then I’ll start working on the 10 least visited parks. After that, I’ll work on getting the rest of the national parks covered!

I also added a page describing the mission and purpose of Charge to the Parks. You can read that here.

 

Featured image by the National Park Service (Public Domain).

Four Parks and EV Travel Tips Added!

So far, four parks’ worth of information for EV drivers has been added to the map and list, and the basics of EV backroad driving is now live!

Parks added so far:

Next up is Saguaro National Park, followed by some parks further away from this cluster of parks to spread things out a bit. This project will take several months to finish, along with other plans for this site. Stay tuned!

Featured image on this post: White Sands National Park from the nearby Sacramento Mountains. Image by Jennifer Sensiba.