You Can Always Crash on My Couch

I left Breckenridge on July 3 and headed west without a plan. I’d crashed the night before with my friend Sorrel, at the mountainside condo she was renting full-time. I was on a seat-of-my-pants road trip around Colorado without a place to sleep on the eve of one of the biggest camping holidays of the year. At a highway rest stop in the early afternoon, I sent a hail-mary DM to a college acquaintance named Emily who lived in Crested Butte to see if she was around and would let me crash.

“Come through!!” she responded. “We can go skiing!”

We’d seen each other once or twice since graduation, but we were mostly internet friends who both loved nerding out on skiing, social justice, and reading. Two hours later, I pulled up in front of her house. Emily outfitted me with a cutoff Canadian tuxedo and we set off for Paradise Divide. We bootpacked up a 300-vertical-foot snowfield and made the most of what remained of winter’s snowpack. I laughed to myself as slush hit my bare legs with each turn, marveling at how much less interesting my day would have been if I’d just tried to find a dispersed spot to sleep on my own.

I took off for my cousin Julie’s house in Salt Lake City, Utah, the next day, exhilarated by connecting the dots across the West—without dropping a penny on lodging. I’d started to travel this way in my early twenties, plotting destinations based on where I had someone to crash with for free.

It’s a natural dirtbag urge to eliminate the cost of lodging from travel. To drive your truck down a Forest Service road and sleep in the back, to nestle under a throw blanket on your friend’s couch, to lay your sleeping pad in the dirt on BLM land. In the U.S, a small Air BnB for two adults typically costs $125, according to NerdWallet. On average, a hotel room will run you about $150, so staying for free can save up to $1000 for a weeklong trip. It can also put an otherwise financially out-of-reach tourist destination on the table. Lindsay, a renewable energy policy director friend of mine based in Rockport, Maine, admits that visiting Tahoe during peak ski season was only possible for her and her family because they house-sat for a friend who was away.

I worked in outdoor education leading trips for four summers, which meant I ended up with connections in exactly the type of places I wanted to go: a friend in Gunnison, Colorado, to crash with when it was a powder day, a place to stay in Jackson, Wyoming, when it was primetime to see wildflowers and float the Snake, folks to visit in Bend, Oregon, when it came time to recertify my Wilderness First Responder and ride bikes.

The savings on lodging are just the beginning. On previous visits to Crested Butte, a friend got me buddy passes at the resort and free slices during his shifts at the pizza place in town. When I crashed on my friend Eddie’s couch in Jackson Hole, he punched out my touring boots for free during one of his shifts at the shop. The rich get richer, as they say.

It’s a natural dirtbag urge to eliminate the cost of lodging from travel.

Saving money isn’t the only benefit of traveling this way. Crashing with friends may be a frugal way to travel, but having a network of people to stay with is indicative of social wealth. Being connected to folks in expensive mountain towns  can open up the list of accessible destinations, and in turn, grow the network even more. I reconnected with Emily in Crested Butte while visiting my friend Colt who lived there, and when he moved away, I still had a place to crash.

More importantly, when I’m staying with locals, I get to tap into the heart of each place in a way I wouldn’t if I came on my own—following friends around the mountain and finding hidden stashes, tagging along to house parties, learning which pullouts along the river have fewer crowds.

For those without an established network of friends in mountain towns, there is CouchSurfing, a service that connects budget travelers to a global community of “friends they haven’t met yet,”  according to their website. When I was traveling in Argentina in 2013 with my college roommate, we met an American on an overnight bus who put us in touch with two couch surfing hosts in Bariloche–where she had just left and where we were headed. A few days later, we huffed it up a winding dirt road to meet Julián and Alejandra, who not only let us blow up our sleeping pads on their tile floor, but cooked and played music with us, showed us around the city, and gave us priceless insider trail recommendations. We were supposed to stay for two days, but four days later, we were still there, soaking it all in.

In my mid-twenties, I lived alone in a three-bedroom house on the side of North Table Mountain that had absurdly low rent in Golden, Colorado. It was a thrill to be able to open my doors to others like they’d opened theirs to me. I’d pile friends in sleeping bags on the living room floor after karaoke nights at the dive bar in town, or unfold the futon in the gear room for visitors passing through to ski.

It was big enough that friends began offering it to their friends. My friend Emma was living in a tiny studio and had a friend visiting for a few days to take the Single Pitch Instructor course required to be a rock guide–could she possibly stay with me instead?

I’d only met Betsy once, but it seemed like a no-brainer. This had something to do with having the space, and something to do with the way I wanted to be in the world. I wanted to be open to experiences and people and the ways we can mutually support each other. I wanted to leave room for magic.

Crashing with friends may be a frugal way to travel, but having a network of people to stay with is indicative of social wealth.

Over the next few days, Betsy slept on the futon in my gear room, we split meals, and got to connect one-on-one in a way we wouldn’t have otherwise. Extended time in a shared space leads to a depth of conversation that just doesn’t happen grabbing a beer at a brewery or on a bike ride. She passed her course, hugged me goodbye, and headed back to Jackson. Betsy wasn’t just Emma’s friend now, she was my friend, too.

A while later, my college roommate Natalie called me and asked if her new boyfriend could crash with me on his way back to Temple University, where they were both in med school. I hadn’t met Mark, and had just gone through a breakup. I didn’t exactly feel like making conversation with a stranger.

When he pulled up, I summoned everything inside me to get to know someone who mattered to someone who mattered to me. We hung out on my back deck, drank beers, and chatted and laughed for hours—it turned out that having a favorite person in common made it easy for us to get along.

I went to bed that night reminded that I could still laugh, that there were still good people in the world, and that there might be joy and experiences I couldn’t possibly predict ahead.

When you live with your arms open to others, you never know when the karma might come back your way. Four years after Betsy slept on my futon, she became an editor at Backcountry Magazine. I got a text from her out of the blue saying, “Pitch me some ideas! We’d love to publish your writing.”

Five years after Mark stayed with me in Golden, he married Natalie. When I fell trail running and tore my shin open, I FaceTimed Mark, now an ER doctor, from the parking lot to see if he thought I needed stitches.

I invite you all to join the church of You Can Always Crash on My Couch, where the belief in karma is strong, and the latchstring is always out.

Crashing with friends turns hard goodbyes with people you love into a glorious network of landing pads all over the world. It converts people you’ve never met into people you’ve shared coffee and conversation with. It turns the mountain towns of the world into accessible and affordable destinations. It is personal and intimate in a way that hotels and Airbnbs and sleeping alone in your truck are not.

This form of travel may seem best suited to unattached dirtbags in their twenties, but it doesn’t have to be confined to that demographic. If you’re down to get creative with sleep solutions, you can keep your arms open to visitors and your mind open to visiting others. My 65-year-old dad parked his camper in our driveway when he came through Truckee, California, on a ski trip. I slept in Lindsay’s ancient van in her driveway when she was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Boulder with her husband and two-year-old. I stayed with Natatlie’s parents after my lodging fell through for her wedding, feeling like the fifth Taylor sister by the end of the weekend. We might all pass through moments of life where it’s easier for us to host or be hosted for a variety of reasons. I invite you all to join the church of You Can Always Crash on My Couch, where the belief in karma is strong, and the latchstring is always out.

A year ago, my partner, Andy, and I moved to Anchorage, Alaska. In some ways, it would fundamentally change the way we traveled–no longer would we spontaneously crash with folks on a multi-state road trip or have folks crash with us passing through to other destinations in the West. But in Anchorage we’d finally upgraded to a guest room with a real bed and a door that closed. The pain of leaving our communities in the West was eased by the knowledge that we’d be able to host people on their way to the Alaska Range, that we could lure visitors in with backcountry skiing and wild-picked berry pancakes and conversation around the breakfast table. And we’d always be able to go back to the lower 48, to our twinkling constellation of landing pads all over the country.