Destination Daily — Justin Cooper | Alaska to Australia in a 4x4 Camper

The Rig

Nobody sells the truck I needed.

So I bought one the army was finished with, stripped it, and spent a very long time making it somewhere I could live and work out of for years at a stretch.

The M1079 is the van-bodied version of the army's medium tactical truck — permanent four-wheel drive, central tyre inflation, and a box on the back big enough to stand up in. It was built to go where roads are a rumour and to be fixed at the roadside by somebody cold and tired. That is precisely the specification, and nobody in the camper business sells it.

Everything behind the cab is a photographer's problem solved slowly: somewhere to sleep, somewhere to work, water, power, and space for enough camera equipment to be useful two thousand miles from a shop. The paint is the one thing I did not change. It came olive drab and it stays olive drab.

The M1079 mid-build at the ranch, still in camouflage with bare aluminium panels, Justin leaning out of the window opening — Mid-build — the working-out still on the side

M10791996 Stewart & Stevenson 4×4

28,000 lbWhat it weighs

3 yearsTo build

395/85R20Pirellis, all four corners

116 galDiesel

1,000 miOn a tank

100 galFresh water

14.5 kWhBattery bank

820 WSolar, into 48 volts

400 AAlternator

3 kWDC charging

12 kWDiesel generator

The camper parked at the edge of a still lake, cloud sitting on the mountain behind it — The camper, with six of its parts marked and named.

Dusk at low tide, the camper stopped at the roadside with a recovery strap off the front bumper and a shovel in hand — The half of it nobody photographs

The Route

Alaska to Australia, the long way.

Not a holiday with a return leg. A route run in phases, over years, with the photographs as the reason and the truck as the means.

Phase One
Alaska and the North Done
Fifteen thousand miles of it, self-directed, photographing some of the most remote country left on the continent and tracking grizzly populations while I was in it. The Yukon, Denali, the Kenai Fjords. Most of the wildlife work in the gallery came out of this.
Phase Two
Central America Next
The truck is being prepared for it now. South through Mexico and down, at the speed the light dictates rather than the speed the map suggests.
Phase Three
The Darién Gap
Sixty miles of roadless jungle between Panama and Colombia, and the one place on the whole route where the truck cannot follow. There is a kayak for it. Nearly everything else still has to be worked out.
Then
South America, and a very long way west
Down the spine of the Andes and then the part that cannot be driven at all. Australia is on the far side of an ocean, which is the single most ridiculous thing about this plan and the reason it is worth doing.

Straight down on the camper, alone on a gravel road cut through dense forest — Most of it looks like this

Every photograph in the gallery is a by-product of this. I do not go somewhere in order to photograph it; I go, and stay until the place decides to show me something, and occasionally that takes three years and two return visits.

The truck is what makes waiting possible. A hotel gives you a morning. A camper gives you a season.

See what came of it →

Watch

The build, and the driving of it.

Everything goes up on the Destination Daily channel — the build, the breakdowns, and the parts of this that are less photogenic than the photographs.

Slot · Video one — the truck

The build film. Send me the link and I will drop the embed in.

The build — army truck to camper

Slot · Video two — the road

Your pick. The one that makes people want to come with you.

On the road

Every episode on YouTube →

The Creed

Life without liberty is misery.

Adopted 2015, and not revised since

I picked that up on a solo backpacking trip through Europe in 2015. I went over with no plan worth the name and came back with a thirst for the unknown that has not let up since, and a fairly firm view that a life arranged around other people's permission is not much of a life.

Everything after it — the cameras, the truck, the route — is just the working-out of that one sentence.

The Story

It started in Yosemite Valley.

I was born in Los Angeles. The thing that set all of this going was standing in Yosemite Valley as a kid and then finding Ansel Adams' work afterwards — the realisation that somebody had gone and stood in that exact cold and brought it back, and that this was a thing a person could decide to do with their life.

Then Europe in 2015, alone, with a bag. Then Alaska — fifteen thousand miles of it, tracking grizzlies and photographing country that most people will only ever see in a frame. Then the slow realisation that the pictures I wanted were always another week further in than I could get to, and that what I actually needed was not a better lens. It was somewhere to live while I waited.

Mother Nature is the greatest fine art artist there has ever been. I am not doing anything clever. I am going to where she is working, standing there long enough to be shown something, and bringing back what I can.

There is one more sentence under all of it and it is not mine. “Do the things I can’t do.” That was said by a friend who is no longer here, and it is the statement that took me on this adventure — to share it with people who may never get to see the world themselves. It is also why any of this gets published rather than just kept.

The prints pay for the fuel. The fuel gets me to the next one.

The camper on a dune with the dirt bike loaded on its front rack, under an empty blue sky — Where it tends to end up

Gear

What is actually on the truck.

Nothing here bought its way on. Some of these brands are also partners — Work With Me names them, and it would be strange to pretend otherwise when their gear is what is bolted to the truck. These are the things bolted to it or living in it, that have been through Baja and back, and that I would replace with the same thing tomorrow. Where something broke or disappointed me it is not here, which is the only editorial policy this page has.

Some of these are affiliate links. If you buy through one, a small commission comes back to me at no extra cost to you, and that is a real part of how the fuel gets paid for. It does not change what is on this list — nothing gets added because it pays, and nothing that let me down gets left on because it does.

Where a card shows a code, it is mine and it takes something off for you. That is the better half of the arrangement and the reason to use it.

I built a truck to drive to the other side of the world.

Nobody sells the truck I needed.

Alaska to Australia, the long way.

The build, and the driving of it.

It started in Yosemite Valley.

What is actually on the truck.

Things to take with you.

The journey, as it happens.