You can forget the instagram ‘Van-Life’ influencers, so called hippies with $100,000 Mercedes Sprinter vans, on this site I’ll take you through the dirtbag lifestyle without the sugarcoating, from greasy kitchens and old bunkhouses, to dream jobs, once in a life time views, and every mile in between. Raw.
Hey there! My name is Matt, I committed to a lifestyle of travel at the age of 19 in June of 2024. I grew up in a small-ish town on the Central Coast of California. Upon graduating high school I felt pressure from parents and peers to pursue a higher education, eager to leave my hometown behind I enrolled in a community college 100 miles South which unsurprisingly turned out to be very similar to my hometown.
After a year of failing my classes, battling addiction, and feeling stuck in toxic relationships, the realization hit me; we’re all just living on borrowed time, and tomorrow is never a guarantee. From a young age I had dreamt of a life on the road, living town to town seeing the big beautiful world and meeting all the beautiful people in it. When the realization hit me that I could continue to stumble through college with no direction or clue of what I wanted to study, with tomorrow never being a guarantee, I found no reason to stay, I had to follow my passion, I knew I had to make a change.
So at the end of May 2024 I quit my job at the coffee shop I worked at, said my farewell to the town and the friends I had made, and headed back home to prepare for my grand escape. 2 weeks later I left heading North in my old 4Runner, driving to chase the sun, and of course my dirtbag dream.
The establishment of this website is after I have spent a year on the road, in the last year I have travelled through the entire Western half of the United States, I’ve lived amongst the Cascade mountains in Washington, in Utah’s Zion national park, in Death Valley national park, and now in Southeastern Alaska I work as a hiking guide. In the last year I’ve learned a lot, from the ins and outs of seasonal work, to cheap and hearty camp meals, to your next free campsite. So this website is meant not just to be entertaining but also as a tool for anyone who has a dirtbag dream of their own.
This is real documentation of the dirtbag experience.
The Dirtbag Database 