USA Westcoast Roadtrip

This is the American West at its most complete. The route doesn't start in Hollywood or Las Vegas - it starts where America is still genuinely wild: on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, in a temperate rainforest so green and moss-covered that it feels like another world. From there, it moves south along the Pacific coast through the towering redwood forests of Northern California, across the Golden Gate into San Francisco, deep into Yosemite, and then into one of the most extreme landscapes on earth: Death Valley. You can't drive any lower in North America.

What comes after is the classic Southwest loop that elevates this trip above any other: Historic Route 66, the Grand Canyon South Rim, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, the Grand Staircase-Escalante wilderness, Arches National Park, Canyonlands, Monument Valley - and back through Flagstaff, Joshua Tree, and the San Bernardino National Forest to San Diego. Seventy-six stops. Ten national parks. Three climate zones. One camper. This isn't a vacation - it's America experienced the way it's meant to be.

What makes this route so extraordinary is the range. You can wake up in a temperate rainforest that receives 140 inches of rain per year, and three days later fall asleep in the driest, hottest desert in North America. From an 85-meter coastal redwood to the 86-meter-below-sea-level salt flats of Badwater Basin, it's not a long journey on this route - just a few hundred miles through the most astonishing piece of land on the planet.

Camper bucket list

• Walk the Hall of Mosses in the Hoh Rainforest - ancient maple trees whose branches hang entirely in emerald-green moss

• Sit at Ruby Beach on the Olympic Coast at sunset, sea stacks dissolving into coastal fog

• Drive the Avenue of the Giants - redwoods so tall the sky disappears and you feel the size of an insect

• Cross the Golden Gate Bridge in your camper and have breakfast in Sausalito on the other side

• Stand at Tunnel View in Yosemite at sunrise - El Capitan, Half Dome, and Bridalveil Fall all at once

• Walk out onto the salt flats at Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level, surrounded by white salt and surreal silence

• Drive the old Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman - pure American road trip nostalgia at 45 mph

• Watch sunrise fill the Grand Canyon with orange light from the South Rim

• Wade The Narrows in Zion - knee-deep in the Virgin River between 300-meter sandstone walls

• Hike Bryce Canyon under a full moon when the hoodoos glow silver

• Watch the sun set behind Delicate Arch in Arches - the image on every Utah license plate

• Drive through Monument Valley and understand why every Western was filmed here

• Camp in Joshua Tree under one of the darkest and most star-filled skies in the American Southwest