This photo is probably twenty years “in the making”, as they say. I first heard about this bus – at the time, I didn’t know if it was a bus, a van, or a truck – many years ago. A friend told me its story: In the late 1960s, around the time I was born, my friend was a young boy working at his uncle’s concession stand aside a rural North Dakota lake. He saw some hippies driving around the other side of the lake in a bus they’d converted into a rudimentary camper. The bus stalled, and they tinkered with it for quite some time before abandoning it forever.

The bus has since occupied that field, not very far from Bismarck-Mandan, for over half a decade. I knew I had to investigate. My friend has since purchased a significant portion of the land surrounding that lake, so he told me how to hike out to the area on his private land.