I rode a Surly LHT from Key West, Fl up to the Great Lakes and west to California then back home to New Mexico a few years ago. I was on the road for a little over 7 months and stealth camped in a tent each night. Yes, it can be done but the ease with which you can do it depends on the US region you find yourself in at any given moment. The east coast and eastern woodlands extending west to central Missouri were the easiest. Lots of unfenced woods at the side of the road in which to hide. The Midwest extending to New Mexico was the most difficult. No woodlands to hide in and extremely rare is a piece of property that doesn't have a barbed wire fence around it. Do not climb fences to camp. Only camp on land that is not fenced. Otherwise, if you are caught, you lose all deniability of knowing you were on private property. I was told to "move along" by cops three or four times at the early stages of my trip before I wised up to the fact that any "citizen" driving by who happens to see you from the road camping is going to pull out a cell phone and call the cops. We live in a culture of do-gooder anonymous snitches. So make sure no one sees you leaving the shoulder of the road to enter the treeline and go deep enough into the trees that your tent can't be seen from the road. Once I entered the Midwest and cattle country it became virtually impossible to find unfenced land or woods. Your entire day is basically limited to pedaling down a ribbon of blacktop road between two never-ending barbed wire fences. To deal with this I would pedal up to the local city hall building of whatever small town or village I had entered at the end of the day, telling them who I was and what I was doing, and asking to pitch for the night in their local municipal park. They always said yes and were very nice about it. Once I had made it across the Midwest and into BLM country, I went back to stealth camping. When asking for permission to camp in a small town's community park, always ask at city hall. Never ask at the local police station. City Hall's contain politicians and they are more prone to welcoming you. Cops reside at police stations and their first instinct is to say no to anything that falls outside their limited scope of life experience. Plus, cops just like to say no to prove their manhood. But by far and away, my biggest piece of advice for commando camping is to think like a hunted animal. Because in a culture as socially backwards as ours, the infinite layers of law enforcement won't make the slightest distinction between you and a homeless person and we all know how the homeless are treated in our country. I was riding a $4,500 custom bike with $2,500 worth of state-of-the-art camping gear and dressed in cycling clothes. No matter. The cops, especially in the dixieland south, stopped me and ran my driver's license on a regular basis. On one particular day in Georgia I was stopped five times by local police in various towns. In southern Alabama I was surrounded on the side of the highway by five police cars and cops with drawn weapons and accused of committing a **** that had just happened as I was cycling through their town. In Arkansas I found myself in a vicious fist-fight with an Ozark hillbilly in front of a convenience store for no other reason than he thought I was a homeless man and jumped on me for fun. In Kansas I was repeatedly refused entry into a certain chain of grocery stores for being "indecently dressed". I was wearing standard cycling clothes. Having said all this, most days were fairly good days and some were sublime. But anyone attempting a long bicycle trip in America should be wise to the fact that in large part cross-country cycling is a European thing and the average American has never seen such a creature much less comprehends why you would want to do such a thing. The familiar explanation for them? You must be a homeless person. So do what I did and TAKE IT AS A PERSONAL CHALLENGE NOT TO LIVE THE LIFE OF A HERD ANIMAL AND STEALTH CAMP UNTIL YOU'RE TOO DAMN OLD TO DO IT ANYMORE.
