How I've Funded 7 years of Adventure Travel Without Working Traditional Jobs

In the last seven years I've spent 28 months living out of a backpack in the wilderness. I hiked ~15,000 miles and walked across the US five times. In 2019 and 2020 I lived in a van and fought raging wildfires across the west. Last year I spent 8 months traveling through SE Asia.

"How do you afford to do all this" is probably the most common question I get asked, just edging out "what do you eat" and "aren't you scared of bears".

“The Pinnacles” a 3 day adventure in the jungles of Borneo.

Appalachian Trail 2016

My first big solo adventure was in 2016. Prior to that I'd had a few failed business ventures and my goal was to make a bunch of money so that I could have freedom to travel. I had a lightbulb moment in 2016 after I read about the Appalachian Trail that I could go hike this trail and fulfill my dreams of travel and adventure without needing to be a millionaire.

I set off on the Appalachian Trail the first time using savings. I'd joined the Army while I was in college which allowed me to graduate with a Master's degree debt free. After graduating I worked various jobs and had a few mostly failed business ventures and ended up with about 10k saved when I set off to hike. That hike was 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine and took me 6.5 months. I don't have exact numbers but I spent around $2,000 on gear and then another $6,000 on expenses over the course of the trip.

After that trip I worked some accounting jobs and managed to start selling a study guide for a online personal training test(long story but just lucked into a few of my webpages ranking high in Google) which brought in about $1,000/month. The best job I held was accounting for a local company that sold climbing equipment online, the salary was 40k/year and I worked that job about 3 months before I quit. This is a pattern of mine. I just can't stand office jobs and every accounting job I've held I last about 3 months before I get so depressed I just have to quit. I shared an apartment with my girlfriend at the time, our total rent was $650 for a 2br apartment in Missouri. Drove a little old Honda civic.

Continental Divide Trail 2018

My next trip was 2018. Between my jobs and my online income(which had dropped significantly to about $300/month) I had about 12k saved. This time I planned to ride a bicycle from Mexico to Canada and then hike the Continental Divide Trail from Canada back down to Mexico.

I was able to secure some gear sponsors on this trip. There was a thing called the "thru-hike syndicate" which was a conglomerate of brands and I submitted my trip idea, my Instagram and YouTube where I'd documented my 2016 AT thru-hike and got picked. So all my gear was paid for that year. Spent 3 months biking up Arizona and the west coast and then 3 months hiking. Came out to about 9k including buying a bike. Having that little bit of online income from selling my online guide and YouTube revenue was nice, it added up to probably about 2k in the 6 months I was gone.

After this trip I tried working for the same climbing company again and again only lasted 3 months. That was when I got an e-mail from the Montana Conservation Corps looking for crew members for their vet wildland firefighting crew. I moved up to Montana that summer of 2019 with like 8k in my bank account. Even though I wasn't making a high salary my expenses were so low that I could reliably put away $1,500-2,000 a month when you factored in my online side income as well.

The conservation corps paid absolute shit. It was $325/week and they told us day 1 to get on food stamps. I was lucky and a kind old couple I'd met when I hiked the CDT the year before let me stay in their basement rent free. After that job ended I got a job in Colorado working for their conservation corps as a crew leader, that bumped my pay up to $600/week.

When my Montana job was ending I bought a van, a little Nissan NV200, and converted it out to live in. It was a tiny little thing but got 25mpg as opposed to the 8mpg most cargo vans got. The van cost $9k and I put in a ceiling fan, solar power, insulation, a plywood floor and bed. The conversion took me a week and cost about $1k in supplies. Sold my little Honda for 3.5k and that helped offset the van expense.

Didn’t even have enough room to sit inside.

I lived out of that van for the next 2 years. The Colorado job was in Durango, CO and no way I could've afforded to rent a place down there. That winter I spent a month living and volunteering at a meditation retreat center in California, so had room and board covered the whole time I was there.

Wildland Firefighting 2020

In 2020 I got a job on a hotshot wildland firefighting crew. This was a federal USFS crew and you had the chance to earn tons of overtime. It was crazy grueling work, 16+ hour days fighting fire in the mountains while it's 100 degrees out and you're carrying a 50lb pack on your back. I made a documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6CP5SKQjzg

We worked 2,200 hours in 6 months and earned over 1,000 hours of overtime. I think ended up making 47k from that job. Not great pay considering we worked 14-16 days on, got two days off, then went right back out and that we encountered life threatening situations on a daily basis.

Business and More Hiking 2021

That winter I identified an eCommerce opportunity and went hard at it. Maxed out my credit cards and spent about every penny I'd made that summer buying inventory and then sold it all online. I was working 12 hour days, 7 days a week, I'd spend all day packing up orders, drop them off at UPS before they closed, then I'd spend the evenings opening up packages of inventory I ordered and list it online. Weekends I'd catch up on fulfilling orders and listing everything.

The opportunity lasted about 6 months and I was honestly pretty glad when it went away. I'd completely burned out working so hard. But I'd made more money than I'd ever had in my life and had enough saved now to fund 5+ years of travel if I lived frugally.

So I took the rest of that summer in 2021 and hiked another 2,100 miles. Ran a 106 miler ultra 2 days after finishing the hike and won it! A week after the 100 miler ran the rim to rim to rim in the Grand Canyon for the 2nd time.

CYTC 2022

Since I had so much success with the hikes and ultras I decided to try something crazy in 2022, and hike a Calendar Year Triple Crown. And that's what I did in 2022. I secured sponsorships and was able to get enough money to cover the cost of the hike in addition to getting all of my gear sponsored. In total it was 7,400 miles over 290 days, had to fly across the country multiple times, it cost about $15k out of pocket to not include any of my free gear or free shoes(12 pairs of shoes!!) See the documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ammy0tBBalQ

By this time I'd taken enough trips with my DSLR to be a pretty good photographer and videographer and was able to produce high quality content from my hike as I hiked. I think that's the more impressive part than being the 14th or 15th person to ever complete a CYTC, I carried a heavy camera and documented the whole thing in real time. Because a CYTC was a big deal and no one else had documented one before my social media platforms all exploded.

To the point that I saw a real potential in making a full-time living by making travel content. After the CYTC I spent a few months being completely exhausted and depressed as my body recovered from that immense strain, then went and traveled through SE Asia. The idea was I would live somewhere with a low cost of living and get work done on my online projects while getting to see these places that I'd always wanted to see.

SE Asia Travels 2023

Spent the bulk of my time in Thailand, learned a lot of Muay Thai, visited Borneo and hiked in the jungles there with native headhunter tribes, ate at the Bun Cha restaurant that Anthony Bourdain took President Obama to in Hanoi and finished the trip off with a few days in Tokyo gawking at all the weirdness and eating the most amazing sushi. In that time traveling and working I built up a online coaching business coaching thru-hikers that brought in $1,000/month, my YouTube ad revenue brought in about $800/month, affiliate links another few hundred a month, and I'd get an odd sponsorship deal to talk about a product on social media for $4-500.

It's enough for me to live on as long as I live frugally in these lower cost of living countries.

My Advice

I wrote out all that story to show a few things. One, there's a lot of elements of luck and privilege involved. I got lucky with opportunities. If I'd grown up in Thailand or Vietnam I wouldn't be in this same position. I also wanted to show that I didn't have it all figured out when I started. I started hiking in 2016, it's only in 2024 now that I'm really have a solid plan on how to make money going into the future from hiking and adventures.

You don't have to have it all figured out from day 1 before you start traveling.

When I started off it was just from savings, without a plan for what I'd do after. I think it's okay to not have it figured out, if you have the means to do something you've been dreaming about, go do that thing and then you can figure out what comes after, after. Because doing the thing will give you perspective and teach you truths about yourself, about what you truly want out of life and what you won't tolerate and open your eyes to possibilities you never knew existed and that will help guide your next steps.

Like wildland firefighting, I didn't know that job was a thing until 2018 when I got a hitch from the superintendent of the Zuni hotshot crew in New Mexico. He told me about his job on our drive and I thought "that sounds badass, I want to do that."

Intention is the key.

I've had a dream since I was 18, watching Anthony Bourdain shows in my dorm room, that I want to travel the world and make documentaries and write about my travels. I'm 37 now and only have gained this ultimate kind of freedom in the last few years. Having that dream and intention shaped my decisions over the years which is what got me to this point now.

It's easier to live frugally than to make more money

I never took on debt. I opted to spend 6 years in the Army rather than take on student loan debt. I always drove shitty cars that I could pay for with cash. Never took on a mortgage and then just cut out rent entirely by living in a van.

I've always lived frugally and to this day if I spend more than $1,500 a month I feel like I've way overspent. This frugal lifestyle affords me to work less and thus have more freedom and more time.

2021 I got a real lucky break with my business, but even if that opportunity hadn't arrived I'd likely be in a similar place. My savings from working fire was enough for me to travel on for 1-2 years, and in that time I would have been able to develop my online income, so I'd likely be in a similar spot just with a lot less safety net savings. And the frugal living is the key to all of that.

I also was only able to take advantage of that opportunity because of all the work I’d done leading up to it. Getting a Master’s in Accounting paid for by the Army gave me the business fundamentals. Having various online businesses since 2012 taught me a lot about how to conduct business online. Working as an accountant for the climbing eCommerce company taught me the importance of shipping ASAP and how to do it efficiently. Working on a hotshot crew and hiking long trails taught me how to grind away relentlessly and to not be intimidated by tough jobs. Like they say luck is when opportunity meets preparedness.

Living frugally means I can explore my ideas and have time for me to develop my skills. When I started hiking my photography and videography skills sucked. Now, those skills are pretty good. Good enough to live on. But if I'd had higher expenses and needed to work more rather than focus on my creative projects I would've never had the time to develop my skills to the point now where I can earn a living off of them.

Most people can't replicate what I did

You're most likely not going to be able to replicate what I did. I have a lucky confluence of desire, talent, and opportunity. But I'm certain that if your dream is to travel and to create freedom for yourself you CAN do that.

You just need to be willing to take risks. You need to be willing to step into the unknown. Imagine if I'd never hiked the AT in 2016, and thought I had to have all my finances in order and have enough money to retire on before I could stop working to hike. I would've never discovered this convoluted path which is now allowing me to make a full time living off of my adventures.

You need to be okay with not seeing what step number two is and trusting in yourself and in the universe that if you are following your heart you will figure it out.

I have not met one single thru-hiker who has become homeless and destitute after their hike. I have not met a single thru-hiker that hasn't been able to find work after their hike. The opposite happens. These hikers are following their dreams and living in alignment with your heart and your dreams opens up doors and opportunities you never could have imagined.

You need to be creative, and be willing to make sacrifices

One of our good friends from Te Araroa trail, Boom Boom worked for a year in Australia living on a remote farm. It was pretty isolated, but he made good money and that remote work qualified him for an additional year’s work visa. He hiked the Te Araroa trail in between those two work visas and now he is working on a cowboy farm again in Australia. If you’re under 35 you can get working holiday visas to New Zealand and Australia and if you work at more remote places they’ll provide housing in addition to decent pay.

Your options to make money will depend on your skills, experience, and interests. Some people work seasonally like I did with wildfire. Or people work at ski resorts. I have friends that bartend in tourist areas in the summer. I know hikers who were software engineers and they saved for a few years with their high paying job, take a year or two off, then go back to work.

The options to make money are endless. The key is to live frugally so that you can save as much money as you can.

If you're entrepreneurial like me then you can build businesses that give you more freedom. I've gotta be honest though not a lot of people can make a living from hiking. But there's a lot of seasonal type jobs in the outdoors. Trail crews, ranger jobs, guiding jobs. All of these it's easy to take time off or to skip seasons.

So this is how I'm specifically able to afford to travel so much. The common denominator isn't how you make money, it's how you can reduce your lifestyle in order to save money so that you're not having to trade away all of your time for money. Control your expenses, reduce your lifestyle, and then the idea of taking 6 months to go hike becomes a lot more manageable.