As we enter 2025, with a new Overland Expo taking place in SoCal, and lots of fantastic opportunities to learn, explore, and dream big, we thought this is a great opportunity to share with you the story of the History of Overland Expo, originally published in the 2024 Overland Expo Sourcebook. Jump to an era using a link below, or read along from top to bottom to gain the full story of our epic tale.
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2012-2016: Mormon Lake, Snoverland Expo, and the Birth of “East”
2017 – Present: Here We Are Now
2009: Humble Beginnings
It was the early spring of 2009. I had recently gotten into off-roading, perhaps only a year or two before. Exploring Southern California’s many trails, I had, by necessity, begun assembling recovery gear, camping equipment, and a growing collection of both maps and desert pinstripes. More importantly, I began reading everything I could on the subject, as only an obsessive hobbyist does. A close friend would end up loaning me his copy of an early Overland Journal issue with a passing, “let me know what you think.” Opening those pages would introduce me to the concept of “overlanding” and would begin a cascading series of events that would ultimately bring me to writing this article some 32 Overland Expos and 16 years later. Those many events have fostered an enduring love for vehicle-based exploration and resulted in meeting some of my dearest friends along the way.
At the time, the term “Overland” wasn’t the ubiquitous word it is today. Now, you can find it plastered on everything from camp chairs to wallets. Back then it was something foreign to popular culture and shrouded in a bit of mystery. For me, it conjured up images of long-forgotten caravans of spice merchants, T.E. Lawrence riding his camel from Aba el Lissan to Cairo, trans-African safaris, and expeditions to the Arctic Circle. Those early issues of Overland Journal did little to dissuade me from those connotations. It was those mental images that drew me to the first Overland Expo with the hope of absorbing just a little bit of those adventures, even if it was by proximity.
I was certainly met with tales of exactly the type of adventures I had hoped for. Roseann and Jonathan Hanson, the founders of the event, would present on their conservation work with the Masai people of Kenya. Graham Jackson and his wife Connie would talk of their extended trip across Africa in their Defender 110. I listened to Lois Pryce talk about learning to ride a motorcycle, shipping it disassembled in a crate to Alaska, reassembling it in the airport parking lot, and proceeding to make a 20,000-mile journey to the tip of Argentina. In the evening, Scott Brady would recount his team’s 3,000-mile expedition from Arizona to the Arctic Circle in a solitary Tacoma. The following night would bring a Camel Trophy Retrospective by none other than Tom Collins. It was all there from an adventure standpoint, and I was hooked.
This would be coupled with a robust training and education program the team would put together. I remember driving my 4Runner through the short driving course built in the infield of the horse racetrack at the center of the venue. Though simple compared to what it would become in future years, the undulations and off-camber parts were thrilling when paired with the excitement of being trained by people who had really been out there adventuring across continents and people with whom I would later develop friendships.
The more exciting driving and recovery classes were counterbalanced by the comparatively mundane but no less essential classes on tire repair, loading and lashing, travel security, and a bevy of others. These were lessons I would be thankful for in coming years as I expanded my own explorations. One class in particular — Getting Your Stories Published, taught by then editor-in-chief of Overland Journal, Jonathan Hanson — directly set me on a path to doing some freelance writing for an off-road magazine and ultimately would bring me here hacking away on my keyboard today.
Nearly as impressive was the vendor area and all its exotic kit. For someone accustomed to ice chests, ground tents, and wearing a hat to keep the sun off, I would be introduced to the world of 12-volt fridges, roof-top tents, awnings, roof racks, and off-road trailers. Today these things are everywhere. Fifteen years ago, you simply didn’t come across these types of things unless you were planning an expedition.
Among the vendors were several young companies, some of whom were barely starting out and many of whom have grown alongside Overland Expo over the years. There, I would have my first encounters with Equipt Expedition Outfitters, Adventure Trailers (now AT Overland), Sportsmobile, Four Wheel Campers, and a number of others. All would go on to make major impacts in the overland market, but it’s hard to overstate what an impact AT would have with the Adventure Trailers Chaser. That trailer would spark an entire industry of off-road trailers in the coming years, with so many manufacturers driving further innovation today.
Beyond the education, adventure inspiration, training, and lust-worthy gear was something even more valuable. The beginnings of a community; something that would form the core of the Overland Expo experience for so many. My introduction to this started before I had even walked into the gates of the event. Arriving the afternoon before, my first order of business had been setting up camp. I had picked a spot next to a fellow early arriver by the name of Mark Montigo and immediately struck up a conversation about our shared excitement for off-road travel and the event itself. That fortunate meeting would turn into a friendship that would find us coordinating neighboring campsites for many Overland Expos to come. Over the years, our group would expand and evolve into a great group of friends, many of whom I’ve been able to stay in contact with ever since.
2010-2011: The Amado Years
Having already outgrown the Yavapai Fairgrounds that first year, the event would move south to the Amado Territory Ranch about halfway between Tucson and the Mexican border for the second and third years of the show. There every aspect of Overland Expo would have room to expand with notable increases in attendees, vendors, classes, and the size and complexity of the training area.
Where that first year was about meeting people, developing early friendships, and finding a place in that fledgling community, it was those two years at Amado where the sense of community really developed and began taking on a familial feel that would be central to the Overland Expo experience for so many in the years to come. It was this that would bring me back year after year.
That first year at Amado Territory Ranch would also be the start of an enduring part of the event — the film festival. Lois Pryce returned as an instructor and brought her husband, Austin Vince, an adventure filmmaker who brought an early version of his Adventure Film Festival to the event. I don’t remember what films were shown those first couple of years, but I do remember being mesmerized by the stories of (mostly) ordinary people doing extraordinary things as they explored the planet. That love for documentary travel film would follow me throughout my Overland Expo experience and would give me the opportunity to take over running the film festival some years later.
Even more memorable was the evolution of the training area, which went from a relatively simple configuration that first year to an increasingly advanced and challenging off-road driving course. Much of this was made possible with the help of Bob Burns from the Land Rover training team, who assisted with the design and would share the course at Amado. As the third year of the event came along, the growing team of trainers would come to include two Camel Trophy Alumni, with Andy Dacey joining Duncan Barbour, who had been a core part of the team since its inception. Andy would challenge the team to take things further and create what would become the Camel Trophy Skills Area in the coming years. The CTSA became an iconic part of the event, with the team attempting to outdo the previous year’s course design year after year. Beyond the driving portion of the area, that part of the venue would also exhibit structures and techniques inspired by those used in the Camel Trophy competitions. As an expanding cadre of CT alumni joined the training team, the area would see ever more impressive construction of bridges, floating vehicle barges, and perhaps most memorably, a skyway that conveyed a suspended motorcycle and its rider from one side of a small lake to the other.
As the changes to the training area were taking shape, another major change was happening elsewhere at Overland Expo. Anyone who was there that first year at Amado is likely to remember a small group of young girls known as the “Rover Divas” having the time of their lives amidst the wonderful chaos of everything at the event. At the core of their gang was 9-year-old Grace Howard, who, despite all the ad hoc fun the Divas had, was hoping for more. Following the event, Grace would deliver an impressive pitch to Roseann about the need for a kids’ program at Overland Expo and how she thought it ought to function. From that meeting, an enduring friendship between Roseann and Grace would form and Grace would go on to run the Kids Adventure Program for the next 12 years, well into her college days. If you or your kids have learned how to use a compass, learned to tie knots, enjoyed the infamous scavenger hunt, or had a love for adventure sparked through that program, you can thank Grace next time you see her. Still a Rover Diva at heart, you can catch her and her Land Rover at the occasional Overland Expo.
READ MORE: 9 Reasons to Camp at Overland Expo West
2012-2016: Mormon Lake, Snoverland Expo, and the Birth of “East”
By the time 2012 rolled around, the event had again outgrown the venue and would be moved to Mormon Lake, where it would have plenty of elbow room to grow its programs and exhibitor and training areas.
While the event in Arizona was growing ever larger and gaining more notoriety, it was growing in other ways as well. 2014 would be the launch of Overland Expo East and expansion to the other side of the country with a sister event happening at Taylor Ranch outside Asheville, North Carolina. Though starting with almost an entirely different audience, the event would have the same feel and fledgling community pulled together by the event that the early West events fostered.
While plenty of memories were made at Overland Expo West while it was Mormon Lake, 2015 stands out among the rest. There are a number of reasons that year was unique. For me, that was the year that the event first felt gargantuan. It was obvious that attendance had been steadily growing each year and that it was getting bigger and bigger, but there was something about seeing the footprint of the event — large in and of itself, absolutely dwarfed by the camping and parking areas around. I remember thinking that that must have been a little of what Woodstock felt like some 40 years earlier. As any rock historian will remember, Woodstock was famous for three things: the musicians, the huge crowd, and the unbelievable mud bog it became after torrential rains fell.
Just like Bethel, New York, in the summer of 1969, Overland Expo 2015 would become a muddy mess as it began to snow that Saturday. As attendees adapted to the freezing temperatures in May, the cold gave way to slightly warmer weather whereby the snow melted, and the dry lakebed on which the event took place turned into, well, just a lakebed. The ensuing gelatinous mess of clay and dirt would swallow vehicles, tents, and, in my case, a boot, as it stayed put, thoroughly married to the earth, while I kept walking. Standing there in one boot and one muddy sock, you couldn’t help but laugh a little and simply go back to enjoying an otherwise good time with great people.
Beyond what would come to be called Snoverland Expo, that year would mark an important milestone for the event. By 2015, the idea of overlanding had begun to permeate popular culture, and both the idea of overlanding and Overland Expo itself would come to be on the radar of vehicle manufacturers like RAM, who would announce their new Rebel at the event. To think that just a few years earlier, the event had started with fewer than a thousand attendees, and now a new vehicle was being launched, was surreal.
Like the 2015 event out west, the 2015 event in Asheville would also feature memorable weather — the confluence of several tropical storms off the coast would dump a truly impressive amount of rain on the venue over the course of the second day. While I remember being soaked head to toe despite wearing what was at least labeled “waterproof” outerwear, the most memorable part of the event was seeing some of the cars parked on the hills that surrounded the venue, begin to slowly slide down said hills without their owners inside. Thankfully, the staff assigned to parking quickly saw the problem and began choking wheels with anything they could find, which somehow, miraculously resulted in no vehicles being damaged, though I suspect there were more than a few people who would come back to their cars and find them chocked in a location other than where they were parked.
2017 – Present: Here We Are Now
As the years passed, the events would continue to grow. East would move to the Biltmore Estate in 2016 and 2017, where Land Rover had a permanent driving course. As it outgrew that location, Overland Expo East moved to Rheeb Ranch on the other side of Asheville in 2018, where it would again get the worst of an October rainstorm. From Asheville, it would move to Arrington, Virginia, in 2019, where it has its home to this day and would see crowds in excess of 15,000 in later years.
Meanwhile, out west, Overland Expo West would be joined by the Mountain West show in Loveland, Colorado, in 2021 and another event in Redmond, Oregon, in 2022, known as Overland Expo PNW. As of 2023, the four events would combine to host over 66,000 attendees — a number that was hardly imaginable back in 2009 when I first stepped in front of the fold-up plastic table that served as the event registration in Prescott, Arizona. 2025 brings the birth of a fifth event, expanding to Southern California.
Reflections
So much has changed since that first Overland Expo. In 2009, you could circumnavigate the entire vendor area in 20 minutes if you didn’t stop too long to talk or dream too much about the rigs on display. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to simply walk up and down all the exhibitor rows in half a day, much less stop to talk or shop. Gone are the days when you could take most of the classes offered over the course of a single event. If my math is correct, it would now take about 500 hours or 3 continuous weeks to attend all the instruction hours offered at Overland Expo West last year. Attendees now regularly come back a few years after an initial Overland Expo experience to teach a class or do a presentation on their adventures stemming from their earlier time at an event.
While plenty of things have changed, so much has stayed the same. For me, the heart of Overland Expo has always been its community. There is something about a shared love of adventure, travel, and exploration that has brought people together year after year and event after event. To this day, strangers at the event will strike up a conversation about those new tires on display, ask me where I hope to travel next, offer me a cup of coffee as I pass by their campsite, or help carry that awkward, heavy piece of kit I just bought from the exhibitor area. Some of those people I’ll get to know as I see them at future events and some of them I’ll only get the chance to meet in passing. Either way, these are my people, and they’ll keep me coming back event after event.