Off-Road and Off-Grid in a $500,000 Overlanding RV

Car enthusiasts have a saying: You can’t drive a house, but you can live in a car. It’s used to justify irrational spending on this hobby of ours, whether that’s a $3,000 Trans Am found on Facebook Marketplace or a $3,000-a-month lease for an Italian exotic. It’s also a fun little escapism thought exercise. What would you buy with your rent or mortgage money? A Ferrari? That ’64 GTO you’ve dreamed of since high school?

How about a Storyteller Overland GXV Hilt? Picking an RV might come off as the obvious rational choice, except the Hilt isn’t your typical white and beige house on wheels. This Alabama-built overlanding rig is designed to take you beyond civilization and provide all the comforts of home when you get there with 120 gallons of clean water, 16.8 kilowatt-hours of lithium-ion batteries, a full bath and kitchen, and two queen beds packed into its posh and surprisingly spacious 140 square feet.

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At $499,722, the Hilt is either crazy expensive or reasonably priced; it depends on whether you think of it as twice the cost of a Porsche 911 GT3 or half the price of a Southern California starter home. Either way, the Hilt undercuts the segment standard-bearer, the EarthRoamer LTX, by some $300,000, which basically makes it free according to gearhead math. See, honey, we’re essentially losing money if we don’t buy it.

Living the #Vanlife Dream

In July, I got to live out the fantasy—briefly—with my wife and two toddlers when we traded our 1,800-square-foot Brady Bunch–era ranch for three days and two nights in a GXV Hilt traversing Utah’s postcard landscapes. Our adventures started at Lone Rock Beach on Lake Powell’s southern shore, where we set off in a 90,000-pound convoy—two Hilts, two Mercedes-Benz Sprinter–based Storyteller Beast Mode vans, a modified Jeep Gladiator, and a Storyteller GXV Epic built on a Kenworth cabover chassis.

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Utah is famous for its Martian reds, pinks, and oranges, but to get there we first pass through a moonscape where some hooligans have ventured off the road, leaving what looks like the undisturbed tire tracks of a lunar rover in the soft, dusty gray silt. Save for a few washboard sections, the gravel road into the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area moves fast. I carry 30 and 40 mph through gentle curves and rolling undulations in the Ram 5500–based Hilt. My wife Lauren, sitting between our boys in the back seat, says exactly what I’m thinking: “I didn’t think we’d be driving this fast.” A fully loaded Hilt weighs nearly 10 tons, and the roof towers more than 12 feet above the road, and yet there’s nothing slow or lumbering about our pace. It’s not quite reckless abandon, but it’s not far from it, and the Hilt is utterly unfazed.

Most RV manufacturers build a fiberglass box on top of a chassis they want nothing to do with. Storyteller Overland takes the opposite tack, ruggedizing its vehicles above and beyond what you’d expect. Take the suspension. Storyteller replaces the factory springs and dampers with a LiquidSpring suspension, which is both a brand name and an accurate (but highly simplified) description of the product. The beefy LiquidSpring strut looks and functions like a conventional nonadjustable shock, but rather than the incompressible oil in your car’s dampers, it’s filled with a compressible, silicone-based fluid. The squish of that fluid carries the Hilt’s hulking weight and cushions impacts. Each strut is also plumbed through an electronically controlled valve to its own frame-mounted reservoir that contains more compressible fluid. Closing the valve removes 80 percent of the fluid volume from action for the stiffest ride; fully opening it delivers the softest ride.

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A touchscreen controller mounted to the Ram’s headliner allows the driver to cycle through three modes and five ride heights, but the magic is evident even if you never fiddle with the settings. The LiquidSpring controller monitors steering, accelerator, and brake inputs along with wheel movements 1,000 times per second and pulses the valves to continuously tailor the spring rate in response. The effect is hard to overstate. In fast sweepers and over slow technical crawls, this towering RV has tighter body control than a GMC Hummer EV.

There are moments when we’re moving slightly too fast for the narrow powerband of the 360-hp Cummins diesel inline-six. On some of the steeper inclines, I get caught traveling too fast for first gear but below second gear’s sweet spot. With my foot on the floor, there’s nothing to do but watch the speedometer roll backwards until the engine revs drop enough for the transmission to downshift into first. Manually shifting the eight-speed automatic transmission with the steering-wheel-mounted buttons helps, as does carrying more speed into a climb whenever possible, but ultimately there’s only so much you can do to mitigate a weight-to-power ratio of more than 50 pounds per horsepower.

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Our pace naturally slows when the graded road turns into a lumpy, hardpacked trail for the final few miles leading to the night’s camp. Steve Kruse, Storyteller’s VP of operations and our sherpa for this adventure, has set expectations high by describing our destination as the most beautiful place he’s ever slept. He may have undersold Alstrom Point, with its sweeping panoramas of Lake Powell some 1,000 feet below. It’s a spot painted in the full palette—sandstone streaked with every hue of pink, red, and orange; deep Caribbean blue water; dabs of sage green vegetation. As the sun sinks, a golden glow dials up the saturation and reveals the texture of the land in soft highlights and long shadows.

Home Is Where the Views Are

Making camp in the Hilt is as easy as pushing a button. One tap of the LiquidSpring control panel triggers the power module to pump fluid into and out of each corner, leveling the Hilt so your tomatoes don’t roll off the counter, and you can sleep with your head and feet in the same plane. After a full day baking in the Southwest summer sun, the cabin is a toasty 105 degrees, and while there’s a 15,000-BTU air conditioner on the roof, you need to have a strategy and discipline if you want the battery to power it through the night. That means opening the windows and letting the camper cool while you cook on the kitchen’s removable two-burner induction cooktop in the long shadow cast by the Hilt and its power-deployed awning.

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With the sun dipping below the horizon and the air conditioning humming, we convert the dinette into a queen bed and snuggle in with the kids for stories and bedtime snacks. The Hilt’s cabin is huge by the standards of an off-roader but relatively modest compared to bus-sized motorhomes with slide-outs on every side. It manages to feel roomy, though, thanks to a main walkway that’s wide enough to slip past someone prepping food in the galley kitchen and the loft bed opposite the dinette that offers a second out-of-the-way spot for racing Hot Wheels.

Compared to your typical RV, the interior finishes are high-end but unflashy. The stainless-steel backsplash etched with a world map is the closest thing to glitz you’ll find. The real extravagances when you’re off grid in a Hilt are things you take for granted in daily life: a cold beer, a warm shower, a comfortable bed, and air conditioning that fills the cabin with cool air and white noise. I sleep better than I do in my own bed that first night, which is the ultimate luxury when you’re camping with kids.

When a Trip Becomes an Adventure

The next morning, we zigzag north toward Escalante. A couple hours into the drive, the road traces a five-mile, 1,200-foot switchback climb up Smoky Mountain with stunning vistas that will take your breath away if the nerve-fraying drop-offs don’t do so first. We shuttled up the pass in two groups, which gave me a chance to drive a Storyteller Beast Mode van. The Sprinter-based camper is a mountain goat compared to the Hilt, feeling lithe even if the body rolls and jostles more on its steel springs. The downside of the van, though, is that you hear every pan, plate, and spoon clattering over every bump and divot.

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Back in the Hilt, I’m grateful for the peace and quiet provided by the separate cab and camper as the trail becomes slower and more technical. The Hilt’s off-road hardware is pretty basic stuff—just a low-range transfer case, 10.5 inches of ground clearance, burly 41-inch Continental MPT 81 tires, and a 20,000-pound winch if things go sideways. Even without locking differentials, the Ram 5500 easily conquers slick sand-dusted rock and short gravel-strewn scrambles. What’s most impressive is how gracefully it walks up and down uneven stair steps, where one side of the truck drops or lifts before the other side. How can a vehicle so tall with a center of gravity that’s probably over my five-year-old’s head feel so planted? Along with the LiquidSpring suspension, Storyteller’s other stroke of genius was mounting the camper to the frame through three pivot points that allow the box to pitch and roll independently of the truck. Instead of yanking the rig around as it tilts and tips, the composite box rocks atop the frame. On the rough stuff, it feels like we’re driving a Ram 5500 with a pickup bed behind it rather than a towering box loaded with everything including the kitchen sink.

With frequent stops to stretch little toddler legs, our long day gets longer when we take a wrong turn on the trail. By the time we realize our mistake, we’re committed to pushing on rather than turning back, which is exactly the kind of adventure the Hilt is made for. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re sleeping when you’re traveling with a fully outfitted apartment—at least in theory. Our problem is that the path is constantly narrowing and the vegetation is growing thicker as we drop lower into the watershed. Finding a spot to park six rigs for the night is proving impossible, and toddler impatience is starting to wear down adult resolve. Spirits soar, though, when we drop into a tight canyon roughly twice as wide as our trucks. Sandwiched between vertical sandstone walls ragged at the bottom from flash flooding and worn smooth at the top from millennia of erosion, it feels like we’ve stumbled on a secret we weren’t supposed to find. For the next hour, every turn reveals a new marvel.

I emerge from the canyon wide-eyed with wonder and filled with the deep sense of calm that comes from feeling cosmically small. Sitting around a quiet campfire that night, life’s concerns feel farther away than the stars peppering the ink-black sky.

Selling a Story

It’s a short but grueling drive out to Escalante in the morning on washboard roads that would rattle most RVs into fiberglass fusilli. Our conga line is repeatedly reduced to single-digit speeds, and it takes more than an hour to cover a dozen or so miles. The violence only ends when we finally reach the pavement, where a sign invites drivers to report the road conditions, which seems so absurd, I figure it’s someone’s twisted idea of a joke.

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We reenter civilization and return to reality at the first gas station in Escalante. The Cummins diesel has averaged 5 mpg according to the Ram’s trip computer, and the Hilt’s fuel tanks, capable of holding 74 gallons, collect their toll.

On the drive back to Lone Rock Beach, the Hilt cruises comfortably at 65 mph on two-lane highways that wind through more magnificent ocher majesty. The truth is you don’t have to venture off the beaten path to find raw beauty or rugged adventure in this part of the country, but the GXV Hilt has taken us on a singularly unique trip. We’ll tell and retell the story for years to come, but it will only ever be fully experienced by the people who were there.

That’s why they named the company Storyteller Overland, of course. They don’t just build overlanding rigs in Alabama; they create machines that connect you with people and places in ways that make stories inevitable. It sounds a little hokey to an outsider—it did to me at first—but having experienced the GXV Hilt, I get it. And now that you’ve heard my story, maybe you do, too. — Additional Photography by Steve Kruse