The Sketchiest Places I’ve Stayed as a Dirtbag Digital Nomad

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I’ve been traveling full-time as a digital nomad for years. Half of the time I live out of my car and use a power station and wifi hotspot to work remotely from free Bureau of Land Management campsites, and half the time I rent AirBnBs for a month or longer in order to get extended stay discounts. I usually base myself near national parks and have a hiking focus on this blog, though I used to write more about being a rubbertramp and a hitchhiker. I would work seasonal gigs at hostels, ski resorts, and national parks which came with free employee housing, or do some kind of work exchange. I tend to identify with climbers, vanlifers, and other outdoor enthusiasts who welcome the term “dirtbag” to describe themselves.

As you can imagine, throughout all of this I have had some rather…interesting experiences, and stayed in some sketchy “accommodations.”

Most of the time my lifestyle feels safe. It has allowed me to stay in charming places too, so I don’t want this post to turn prospective dirtbags off from pursuing their dreams. However, there’s certainly a less glamorous side. The following places I’ve stayed, either overnight while in transit or for an extended period of multiple weeks, always make me chuckle when I think back.

A polygamist Mormon cult compound

Last spring I was looking for an affordable place to base myself near the southern Utah national parks as a digital nomad. I wanted to be somewhere equidistant from Grand Staircase-Escalante, Zion, Bryce, Snow Canyon, St. George, and Kanab. If I stayed within St. George or Kanab, things were pricey and I’d be strapped for time on day trips or weekend trips. If I stayed within the parks, I couldn’t rely on cell service for working remotely. This is how I landed on the Arizona Strip.

The Arizona Strip is on the border of northern Arizona and southern Utah, a vast swath of land where surprisingly little is going on. You’d think being the perfect triangulation point between heavily touristed national and state parks would have encouraged more industry here, but it’s still desolate. I really enjoyed this environment and was able to go petroglyph and pictograph hunting.

However, I started to get a weird vibe. At the grocery store in Colorado City, it seemed like people were staring at me. The pharmacist was cagey with me. A few times when the wifi was down at my AirBnB (before I switched to a really rad free BLM campsite location), I worked from my car with a wifi hotspot while parked on the side of the road in a good cell signal area, and people who passed by seemed to take more notice of me than I’ve experienced in other locales. Even though I’m a nomad, normally I’m not made to feel like some kind of outsider.

I had a Zoom call with my employer one day and he asked where I was staying at the moment. When I said on the Arizona Strip, he asked “isn’t that where Colorado City is….” in an odd tone of voice. I confirmed yes and thought nothing of it at first, but later after the call I wondered, “why did he say it like that?”

I Googled Colorado City and learned it was the location of felon Warren Jeffs’ polygamist cult sect. Oh.

It all started to make sense. I had noticed some of the outfits…but originally I just thought, well, it’s Utah. Mormons live throughout Utah and there’s no reason to be judgemental. 

Later when I was washing clothes at a local laundromat, I overheard a conversation between two other customers, a woman who said she runs a vanlife campground and a young man who said he escaped the cult, but not all of his 13 brothers and sisters had. The Arizona Strip is quite the clash of cultures.

An off-grid ex-cult member’s treehouse

When I was hiking in the North Cascades for a month in the summer of 2021, I struggled to find somewhere affordable to stay that would also have good wifi near the park. I ended up having to rent an AirBnB in Bellingham for the weekdays and would camp out at the park on weekends. One of those campsites was a HipCamp on some guy’s land near Marblemount. 

The campsite had cool advertising; it included a treehouse that you could raise and lower from the trees with a pulley system! Since my truck is outfitted for car camping, I didn’t plan on sleeping in the treehouse, but it was still fun to play in. 

When I arrived, the owner gave me a tour of the property and all seemed ok at first. He showed me fruits he had farmed from the land and his process for making them into homemade jam. He showed me the different types of plants that grow on the property, which was kind of interesting until he insisted I touch some stinging nettles, not knowing what they are. I found out real f’ing quick…He rubbed some other plant on the sting in an effort to impress me with the “cure” for nettles but it didn’t help enough to make me stop thinking, “wtf you a-hole.”

Then he insisted I join him for dinner, which is my greatest fear. I hate getting roped into these situations when I travel. You often feel like you can’t say no to friendly invitations, especially depending on the culture of the place you’re visiting or the personality of the host. People can get seriously offended if you decline their hospitality. I know everyone says this is how you dive into the local beat and get to know people, which can be one of the most rewarding aspects of travel, but in my experience it always ends creepily for some reason. Unless I was already friends with the invitee, I want to avoid getting invited to dinner like the plague. 

I also couldn’t come up with an excuse, because I was going to be sleeping in my truck right there on his property. There was nowhere else to go, so I couldn’t have pretended I had other plans.

During dinner, this dude proceeds to open up about how his parents were members of a cult run by some Japanese guru leader. They had all moved onto a compound on the West Coast at some point. He was no longer a member of the cult, but he now runs this off-grid homestead. I got the feeling he learned a lot of his homesteading skills from the cult community. He then proceeded to hit on me and touch my arm too much while trying to create meaningful eye contact and I knew I’d be picking a different campground for each subsequent weekend.

Urban Los Angeles sheep farm covered in feces 

Early on in my days of hitchhiking and taking different work exchange positions, I hadn’t done enough trial and error to figure things out yet. While standing on a train platform once, a girl noticed my massive backpack and told me she’s a backpacker too. She said she finds most of her opportunities on WWOOF or Workaway. Any serious traveler these days knows about these services, but that was the first time I’d heard of them.

Workaway ended up providing me with lots of cool opportunities over the years, mainly at hostels, but I’ve been reluctant to try WWOOFing again after my first experience with it. After I met that girl, I logged onto WWOOF while riding the train towards Los Angeles and I found a posting for an urban sheep and goat farm right in the center of LA! I had no idea that was even possible. I had lived in Los Angeles while working in the music industry for a few years, and I never noticed any urban farms. I messaged the host and agreed to meet up when I arrived in the city.

I never ended up staying there overnight, thank god, because when she showed me around I was appalled. Her entire backyard where she keeps the sheep and goats was coated with poop pellets from the animals. There was so much of it that it was starting to cover patio surfaces and some indoor spaces. The animals were crawling with fleas, poor things. The backyard was decorated all hippy-like with little buddha statues and rock gardens, and she said she had goals of building other structures like a stage for performances and a bunkhouse for more volunteers. The animals were supposed to live amongst it all, rather than the yard being tailored to them first and foremost. 

At one point I rode along as she drove her truck to the nearest feed store. On the way, she pulled over to talk to a bunch of men on the side of the street and it seemed like one of those situations where day laborers will jump in the back and be taken home with you to do under-the-table work. There’s nothing wrong with hiring hardworking people who want the work, but knowing she also uses WWOOF to hire people for free labor, I wondered if there could be an ethical implication where she underpays these folks or exposes them to unsafe working conditions.

This woman also had crazy eyes. You know what I mean. I hate to judge a book by its cover, but she had that unsettling gaze that’s created by trauma. I’d seen it before on the NYC subway when schizophrenics would stare at me for the entire ride, or in the eyes of a friend of mine who would sometimes “go somewhere else” in her head for a moment, or the odd glare of a woman walking by me on the street in Flagstaff who randomly punched me in the tit for no reason and kept walking. There is a certain look.

When we got back to the house, another WWOOFer who had already been staying with this woman for a few weeks was there. She relied on him to tell me what a great time he was having and to hype up the experience; she said I should ask him questions about what the living arrangements are like. I think we were supposed to sleep on mattresses on the floor in the sunroom. When she was in another room, I made some sort of comment to him that I was honestly feeling pretty repelled by the entire situation. He nodded and quietly replied, “I know,” as if to say, “yes, your instinct is correct.” He said he needed to be there because he didn’t have anywhere to stay in the United States and was low on money (if memory serves I think he was from Italy). I understood that this woman was using WWOOF to exploit and take advantage of people who don’t have many other options, and not providing much return value to them in terms of amenities or a learning experience.

I didn’t take that position and I think I reported it to animal services.

An outhouse along the Kerry Way

I think this experience is actually quite common among thru-hikers. 

In 2019 I hiked The Kerry Way in Ireland, a 9-day 133-mile walking route around the Ring of Kerry. It was a fantastic experience and I long to return to Ireland for more outdoor adventures in the future.

One night I pitched my tent near Lough Acoose. Little did I know, this valley was the absolute worst place to be during strong winds, and boy were they strong that night! The wind tore through the valley with such violence that my tent collapsed again and again; every time I managed to snap the poles back into alignment, in came another gust to blow the house down. There was no hope of sleep.

I broke down the tent, packed all of my gear up, and wandered over to an outhouse in the dark. This toilet shack would be my accommodation for the rest of the night. I can’t remember if I slept at all; instead of laying flat on the floor I believe I was curled up in the corner. I probably just stayed awake and waited for the dawn to break so I could begin the next day’s walk, but at least I wasn’t being whipped and scratched by a wayward tent.

Parking lot of coworking space in Tennessee

When I based myself near the Smoky Mountains in 2021, I found an awesome RV storage facility that allowed me to park and sleep there in a safe environment for a very affordable rate. It was super close to the hiking trails I wanted to do in the Smokies, but unfortunately it didn’t have great wifi, so I rented a coworking space in Knoxville for my work days.

It was kind of a long drive to get from the coworking space back to the place where I’d park and sleep every night, so one time after working late, I decided I would try to sleep in my car in the office parking lot instead of driving all the way over to Sevierville just to sleep. I was just going to have to return to the office in the morning anyway.

At one point during the night, someone started trying to open my car doors. When I heard the handles being pulled, I snuck a peek out the window from behind my curtains (which I always close at night for privacy) and saw the large, shadowy figure of a man. The car was locked, but I waited to see if he was going to try harder to break in anyway. Thankfully, he didn’t. He was clearly just hoping he had luckily stumbled across an unlocked car and easy target. He ambled slowly away, with a limp. Once he had gotten far across the parking lot, I hopped out, got in the driver’s seat, and drove all the way back to my safe parking space at the RV facility.

I remember he was standing on the corner when I got to the stop sign where I had to wait for traffic to pass before pulling out of the office parking lot. He must have noticed it was the same truck he’d just been messing with, and calmly watched as I drove away.

Various Walmart parking lots

Back in the golden days of road trips and vanlife, Walmart parking lots were a go-to overnight car camping location. They didn’t care if you stayed, were open 24/7, and because of all the streetlights, truckers, and occasional roving cop cars, you could feel relatively safe. Too many witnesses.

In the past few years, many Walmarts have started mounting signs saying “no overnight parking,” which is such a stab in the back. I’ve also started to feel less safe at them.

I more frequently use The Dyrt or freecampsites.net to find free overnight parking/camping spots. Read about more helpful vanlife apps here.

One night after settling into the back of my truck and dozing for a couple of hours, I heard car alarms going off somewhere else in the parking lot. I chalked it up to someone having trouble with their keys; car alarms go off constantly in places like this. I even slept overnight in a parking garage once and the alarms were incessant. But then I heard a commotion, and when I peeked out of my windows, I saw the silhouettes of a group of figures scattering from that car. Somehow the alarm stopped, and then they reconvened and walked to other cars instead, one by one, surveilling, but they weren’t splitting up in order to get inside the cars to drive home. Then, they were slowly making their way towards my car.

This was a middle-of-nowhere Walmart in the sticks and there weren’t as many people milling about as usual, except for this group. The lot had felt particularly dead before this ruckus began. It might not have been anything to be paranoid about; maybe these were just bored kids hanging out in a parking lot, like every generation of young Americans has done for decades. But something about it raised the hair on my arms and I drove to the nearest KOA instead. Since it was already like 3am, they didn’t even make me pay to stay a few hours.

Bonus: Weird hostel guests

While the hostels I worked at were incredible in terms of how nice the actual accommodations were and how wonderful my coworkers were, we had sketchy guests coming and going all the time and I sometimes reminisce on my hostel days as being pretty f’ing weird.

One guy called in advance to book (always their tactic, so you can’t see with your own eyes what kind of batshit ridiculousness they’re rolling in with) and said he had a service dog. We didn’t accept animals otherwise, and according to ADA law there are only two questions you’re allowed to ask in order to confirm the validity of a service dog, mainly “what task is this animal trained to perform?”. After you ask the question, there aren’t really any guidelines about how to respond to whatever answer they give you. This man with face tatts arrived with a very young, rambunctious pit bull. He offered me a document with a confirmation number on it, which I entered into a service dog database online, but it didn’t pull anything up. Now that I’m older and wiser, I know there is no official national online service dog registry. And again, you’re not even allowed to ask to see a service dog’s papers to begin with. There is pretty much nothing hotels or hospitality companies can do in this situation, except worry about getting sued.

I wasn’t sure what to do and ended up letting this guy and his dog stay at the hostel since he booked in advance. The dog chewed on everyone’s shoes. The guy was nice enough, but when we were outside smoking cigarettes and having a chat, he told me he works for Roc Nation. Little did he know, I spent my entire life up until that point working in the music industry and one of my best friends worked at Roc Nation. I said her name to him and he said, “I love that girl!” I texted her about the coincidence of having met one of her homies, and she said she’d never heard of him. Dude was a pathological liar. After he left, we somehow found his picture on a website of “wanted” convicts and another website where women were complaining about him spreading STDs.

Then there was this guy we referred to as Maserati Scott. The other people who had been working at the hostel longer than me had already dealt with him enough to bestow a nickname. I was warned that he was blacklisted and not allowed to stay because he always made a huge mess, stumbled around drunk or high, and didn’t pay. He always had a different story as to his identity, usually making himself out to be super rich. “My Maserati broke down on the side of the road in the snow and they said they can’t come help me tow it until tomorrow, so I need a place to stay.”

One night when it was my shift, an old lady (or someone putting on the voice of an old lady) called asking to make a reservation on behalf of her son. When the son showed up, guess who it was. Maserati Scott. Of course, I hadn’t been there for any of his previous stays, so I didn’t know what he looked like and didn’t catch on at first. It wasn’t until he pissed himself and then tried to climb into the wrong bunk with some poor solo female traveler that I started to understand what I had allowed to happen.

Another guy stole a girl’s laptop and leggings and we caught it on the security camera. The footage showed him creepily stalking the hallway and peering into rooms to see when they were empty, then going in and taking the loot. We called him and said we wouldn’t get the police involved if he’d bring it back. He brought back the laptop but not the leggings.

One guy from South Africa came to stay for a couple months in exchange for “helping out” (I don’t remember much of what he contributed) and was trying to make every woman at the hostel fall in love with him so he could get a Green Card to stay in America. He straight up told us he would be arrested if he ever stepped foot off the plane back home, so I guess he was some kind of fugitive. He also said he was a surfer, an ex porn star, and addicted to muscle relaxants.

Being a young woman with an actual steady in-person job can often be sketchier than being a solo female traveler with a remote job, I’ll tell you that much.

I’ve also met some really incredible, fascinating people on my travels. I’ve been hosted by kind, amazing homeowners, picked up as a hitchhiker by people who just wanted to be helpful and who taught me the kindness of strangers, and made lifelong friends at hostels. Those stories just aren’t quite as fun though, are they?

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