Inside his tent he has a standup shower and changing room for privacy

 Inside his tent he has a standup shower and changing room for privacy

he’s even laid a mat down, like at a real outdoor basecamp. He whips me up a breakfast burrito with all the fixings on a propane-powered wok called a “scottle.” I’ll see more of them throughout the weekend.

Chris is actually leaving first thing the following morning—he camps for the quiet and the solitude, and the expo has too many people and too much noise for his PTSD. His thing is finding other vets dealing with trauma in the Hot Springs area and taking them on overlanding expeditions. He gives them a free tent on one condition: They come on a trip with him. “It’s about community,” he says. “About family. Getting folks that are really hurting out there back on track—this saves lives,” he says, downing the handful of pills his wife hands him. “Saved my life, anyway.”

Early in the expo I also meet Mark, a retired NBA referee in his fifties who drove here from Phoenix in his custom-painted steel gray Jeep Rubicon towing his Expedition 2.0 Off-Grid Trailer. He’s dripped out head to toe in RealTree, his headlamp perched over the snakeskin “A” on his Arizona Diamondbacks hat. When I come upon him, he’s posted up solo in a camping chair, sipping a Coors Light, staring into a propane-powered fire.

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