Scooter Camping Stove

Note: The stove top fits over the fuel/burner section and is the size of a large soup can in your scooter. You can see how it slips over the top of itself.
Unless your a hardcore backpacker, you probably don't have a hardcore backpack stove and you probably don't want to shell out the cash for a super high-end one, but you should enough to get one that will last and also runs on multiple fuels -- even the gas from your scooter. My dad owns the stove picture above. It's a "Optimus SVEA 1-2-3". He is a backpacker and his college buddy who backpacks with him bought the same stove back in 1970 and the stove still works perfectly and the design has changed very little. It's a solid little stove. You can buy it for under $80 brand new and under $50 used.
If you want to live the high life while camping, you can also buy an espresso maker, like this one pictured above.

In my scooter camping slideshows you will see that I have a different stove and espresso maker. My maker is cheaper and less hardy. You can buy mine fore a few bucks at Ross or Marshalls. My stove is more complicated than my dads and costs me about $70, but I also had to buy a fuel tank to use with and it takes up more space; therefore I recommend the Optius SVEA 1-2-3. If you have a Coleman Outlet store or similar you may luck out -- I once saw a similar stove to the Optimus for $20 refurbished there and picked it up for a friend. That was a bargain.

Scooter Camping 2007

Dave and me on our annual scooter camping weekend along the Appalacian Trail. Not as many slides from this trip as in the previous "Scooter Camping 2006" slide show, but you can see we had a good time. This time we went geocaching and that was a fun treasure hunt for the scoots. No cars. We pack like backpackers with single burner stove, etc. At one point Dave ran out of gas and had to fill a camp stove fuel bottle with gasoline on our way home; though my camp stove will run off of unleaded gasoline as well so the bike and stove could share the same fuel.

Scooter Camping 2006

This is a ton of fun! Two rules: (1) no cars, absolutely no cars and (2) stay at least two nights. This idea came from a watch of Easy Rider and reading about ol'school dirt bike campers, who packed their bikes up with every drop of gas and camping item they could carry and rode deep into the canyons. Dirt biked all day and beer, fire, and camp at night. Nice way to spend a week!



This slide show has two camping trips on it and a friend drove up for an evening. The car was NOT a chase car. I have a scooter camping list you are welcome to request. It's thorough. It's a MS Word. Email me at jeremy at bassmonkey dot com.

*Note: It is much safer to pack your weight on a front rack. Riding the way we have is not as safe. In fact, just hitting a small bump in the rode will result in doing a wheelie, which as you can imagine is dangerous around corners. I aim to buy one in the future.


When scooter camping . . . you can see the view like this guy did on the Red Rocks run. Now doesn't this make you want to go out and ride/camp right now?!