What’s a rooftop tent? It’s quite simply a tent that mounts to your vehicle’s roof rack and pops up to provide a comfy place to sleep for the night. To most people it’s a fun way to go camping on the weekend or travel about for a week or two in the summer. To me, it was that, but it was also home for several months this past winter. After my seasonal employment ended at the National Park Service’s Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, I needed something to do and somewhere to be for the six months I was off. A gig at an outdoor store in rural California beckoned and a Craigslist deal on a Roofnest Sparrow in a Boston suburb was too good to pass up so I headed west with a plan.
Leaving St. Louis, Missouri a few days after Thanksgiving with the Roofnest on top of the Subaru, I drove west across the plains of Kansas, over the snowy mountains of Colorado, through Utah’s red rock country, and entered the Great Basin desert of Nevada. I stopped driving some 2,100 miles later on the western edge of the Great Basin in a small town at the base of the Sierra Nevada. The town is called Bishop and it’s the largest town in Inyo County. Given that there’s only 18,000 people total in a county that can take four hours to drive across, that isn’t saying too much, but ten months in, I’m still here. While the Roofnest got retired to weekend duty in March as a full time job loomed and an affordable room to rent was found, it provided a serviceable home for the coldest months of the winter.
Instead of being surrounded by four walls of brick or plaster, I lived in a collapsible tent with 29 square feet surrounded by woven nylon and quilted down insulation. My four windows could look out to the jagged snow-covered peaks of the Sierra Nevada or the dusty, wrinkled canyons that made up the base of the White Mountains. Alternatively (and more frequently), they could all be closed to keep out the cold, cold wind that blew unimpeded up the long, sagebrush-filled trench of the Owens' Valley 10,000 ft below the snowy mountain peaks on either side.