Three Bucket-List Trips
Three Different Worlds
Every overlander keeps a mental list. The routes you swear you will get to. The places that stick with you long after the dust settles.
We run a lot of different trips, and a few of them land squarely in bucket-list territory. Here are three of them. Three expeditions that could not be more different from one another, each worth every mile.
Which one calls to you? Or is there another trip on your bucket list? Hit reply and tell us. Your answer shapes where we go next.
1. Black Rock Desert, Nevada
Some places make you feel small in the best way. Black Rock is one of them.
This is a vast, cracked playa in the remote northwest corner of Nevada, the dry bed of an ancient lake that vanished thousands of years ago. It is one of the largest playas in the country, flat enough that you can point your rig in almost any direction and drive. Vistas stretch for miles. Mirages rise off the desert floor. There is no cell signal, few services, and a real sense that you are somewhere the modern world forgot.
That emptiness is the appeal, and it is also what demands respect. Weather turns fast out here. A dry playa can go soft after rain. This is remote, real country that rewards preparation and gives you something in return that crowded trails never will: total solitude, huge skies, and some of the best stargazing in the country.
This is the trip for the driver who wants distance, isolation, and a landscape that feels closer to another planet than to anywhere they have been.
2. San Rafael Swell, Utah
If Black Rock is empty and endless, the Swell is the opposite kind of desert. This is Utah at its most iconic.
The San Rafael Swell is a massive dome of rock that was pushed up out of the earth tens of millions of years ago, then carved by water into canyons, gorges, buttes, mesas, and badlands. The rock here is the deep orange and red sandstone the Southwest is famous for, layered and glowing against a dusty desert floor. It is dramatic enough that filmmakers have used it to stand in for alien worlds, and remote enough that it still flies under the radar while nearby Moab draws the crowds.
There is history written into this place too. Ancient rock art panels, old homestead and mining remnants, and geology so well exposed it has been called a land of naked rocks. You move through terrain that tells a story at every turn.
3. Garnet Range, Montana
Our Montana route trades desert for something quieter and more intimate. This is backcountry Montana, tucked into timbered mountains and river valleys, far from anything busy.
We run north through the Garnet Range, home to one of the best-preserved ghost towns in Montana, a gold mining settlement left much the way it stood over a century ago. From there the route moves through forest and backroads toward the Bison Range, a wildlife area of grasslands and foothills stewarded by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, where hundreds of bison still roam alongside elk, pronghorn, and more than two hundred species of birds.
It is a smaller, more secluded feel than the wide-open deserts. Fewer miles of nothing, more moments of stumbling into something. Timbered passes, quiet camps, water and wildlife, and the sense that you have the country mostly to yourself.
This is the trip for the traveler who wants wilderness over expanse, and connection over distance.
Which one is calling you?
Three trips. Three completely different kinds of adventure.
We want to hear from you. Shoot me an email at joel@fernwehguidedexpeditions.com and let me know which destination you would most want to run, Black Rock, San Rafael Swell, or Montana. And if there is another place you have been dreaming about for 2027, tell us that too. We are always scouting what is next, and your input shapes where we go.
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We will see you out there.
Joel Hempel
