We Spent Four Days Alone in the Woods With the Mammoth Overland TL Tall Boy Adventure Trailer—and Didn’t Die

Vehicle-based backcountry adventure travel has always been popular among those wishing to get out and explore nature. For nearly as long as there have been four-wheel-drive vehicles, people have used rugged trailers as their home away from home. Originating in the Australian Outback and Africa’s wilds, the trend in the last decade has exploded in popularity in the U.S. with many companies popping up to import adventure trailers from places like Australia, South Africa, and Asia. 

Most adventure trailer brands remain imported, but a few U.S.-based manufacturers have sprouted, including Mammoth Overland. Mammoth Overland trailers are designed and built by the aerospace engineers behind Vashon Aircraft, which manufactures the bestselling light sport aircraft in the world. Each trailer is assembled in Washington state alongside the company’s aircraft parts. Much like its planes, the company builds each of its overland trailers with durable materials and extreme precision with the intention that each one will last for many generations.

Mammoth Overland bowed its latest creation, the TL Tall Boy, at the 2024 Overland Expo West show in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Tall Boy features a steel frame with aluminum cab construction, rides on 33-inch off-road tires, sleeps four, and most impressively offers enough room inside for most adults to stand upright.

When we received an invitation to spend a few days getting to know the Tall Boy better in its natural environment, we headed to Seattle and set to work assembling the gear we thought would prove important.

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Bigger Than a Teardrop, Smaller Than a Travel Trailer

Teardrop-style adventure trailers have been popular among explorers for years due to their diminutive stature. But even though they’re easier to navigate along tight trails, these small trailers most often provide only the most basic shelter for one or two travelers. In fact, Mammoth Overland launched in 2021 with its take on a teardrop adventure trailer, the HV.

Looking to offer the same ruggedness and luxury as its HV but with greater room inside, the company developed the TL Tall Boy. The Tall Boy stands at just more than 9 feet tall, is 7 feet, 4 inches wide, and spans 16 feet, with 5 inches from the tip of the trailer’s tongue to its tail. The real party piece, however, is the trailer’s 6-foot, 3-inch interior height.

Unlike most adventure trailers, Mammoth’s Tall Boy offers sleeping space for four adults (five if you want to get real cozy). Up front is a king size bed spanning the interior’s width. At the rear are a pair of bunks that measure 2 feet wide and 6 feet, 2 inches long. A net with buckle latches provides security for those who choose the upper bunk. Also built into the Tall Boy is an indoor bathroom complete with a sink, shower, and space to store a cassette toilet. The bathroom occupies a tight 15 by 25 inches, but hey, it’s better than pooping in the woods.

Storage is quite limited inside, as most of the available space goes to living quarters. There’s a small nook below the bunks along with a single cabinet that can be accessed from both inside and outside the trailer. The idea is rather than pack everything inside, that necessary gear will either live in the storage well below the trailer or in the tow vehicle.

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Towing the Tall Boy

Since we flew into town for our weekend expedition, we needed to borrow a vehicle to tow the Mammoth Tall Boy into the woods. Thankfully, the Tall Boy has a dry curb weight of just 2,900 pounds and a maximum gross weight of 5,200 pounds. This means nearly any truck or midsize SUV can tow it. However, knowing the weather was going to be dicey, at best, we needed something solidly capable. A local friend’s 2019 Chevy Colorado ZR2 Bison proved to be perfect for the job.

Configured as an extended cab and fitted with the company’s 3.6-liter V-6 engine, the Colorado ZR2 Bison offers a maximum tow rating of 5,000 pounds. With 308 hp and 275 lb-ft of torque, along with its 3.42:1 axle ratio, the Colorado had little issue lugging the Tall Boy through Washington’s foothills. Because the Mammoth Tall Boy comes fit with an articulating off-road trailer hitch and claims a mere 400 pounds of tongue weight, it took a few miles of driving to get used to the trailer’s unique handling characteristics. Chief among these is the distinct lack of trailer-induced vehicle sway, which was a pleasant surprise.

You need to pay close attention to the trailer’s gross weight if you intend to load more than a couple suitcases full of gear, but for our quick adventure we were confidently under the trailer’s and truck’s maximums.

Off-road is where trailers such as this really shine. The Tall Boy is supported by a dual heavy-duty Timbren 5,200-pound independent suspension. This type of suspension is built specifically for off-road work and utilizes Aeon rubber springs for maximum suspension travel without compromising durability. Another great feature is the massive ground clearance, which, when combined with the 33-inch BFGoodrich KO2 all-terrain tires on the Tall Boy, measures out to 22 inches. This, combined with the articulating hitch, meant that off-road we barely felt any trailer movement as the suspension soaked up the biggest bumps and smoothed out nasty rutted roads. Off-camber sections presented no issues, either; however, that experience was always slightly unnerving thanks to the trailer’s massive 9-foot height.

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Overlanding Isn’t Always Easy

If you’ve paid any attention to the overlanding space in the past few years, you know the activity is as much about the gear as it is the adventure. Seeing as we were heading more than 1,200 miles north of home and into unfamiliar territory with a vehicle and camper that aren’t our own, we were fully reliant on the Tall Boy being equipped with the gear necessary to make it back from the woods safely. To that end, Mammoth Overland fits the Genessis Edition Tall Boy with a host of goodies. They included a modular roof rack with steel ladder, Molle exterior rack panels, a trio of Rotopax jerricans, a Hi-Lift jack, traction boards, a hatchet, and a shovel. There are also two spare tires mounted on the rear. A pair of flexible 100-watt solar panels come with the trailer to top up the 400-amp-hour Renogy lithium battery if need be. And a 50-gallon freshwater tank ensures there’s plenty of H2O on board to sustain life for a long time.

Still, there were a few things from our personal kit we weren’t willing to head into the unknown without, the most important being our Starlink Mini satellite. Driving deep in woods with no cellular communication in an unfamiliar location seemed like a recipe for disaster. With rain and snow in the forecast, we also made sure to pack our Huk Performance Scale jacket, which is lightweight and easy to stuff in a backpack while offering solid wind resistance and water repellency. A pair of Moab Speed 2 hiking boots from Merrell are our go-to for keeping our feet dry and providing grip in the mud and muck. And not knowing exactly the cooking situation, we packed our set of four PrimalForge kitchen knives by True Design. These knives are less than $200 for a set of four and pack tightly in a slim wax canvas roll, making them perfect for off-the-grid use.

With our gear situation more or less sorted out, we devised a plan of where to head with the Tall Boy. Using suggestions from the team at Mammoth Overland and paying close attention to the weather, we mapped a route that would take us roughly 50 miles north of the company’s headquarters and into the Mount Pilchuck wilderness area in the western Cascades. The onX off-road mapping app once again proved invaluable in plotting our course—and with the ability to save offline maps, we didn’t need to worry about losing cell coverage while driving.

After a long day of travel, as the sun set in the early afternoon sky, we got a quick tour of the Mammoth Overland manufacturing facility, grabbed the keys to the Tall Boy prototype, and headed off into the wilds.

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The Joys of Outdoor Cooking

As we departed civilization the first night, the sun had already set. With the promise of two camp-cooked dinners ahead and several hours of driving still to come, we opted for a dinner that any good road-tripper would approve of: takeout pizza. This proved to be a clutch decision as our first attempt with the outdoor kitchen went sideways.

A big contributor to the Tall Boy’s copious interior living space, the trailer’s outdoor kitchen uses a spring-loaded latch that holds the massive swing-out kitchen space neatly in place under the trailer’s king size bed. When articulated, the kitchen surface spans nearly 5 feet at a 90-degree angle to the trailer. Included in this space are a 42-quart 12-volt fridge/freezer, a small sink, and a two-burner stove. You’ll want to bring along a bucket to catch the sink water as the drain doesn’t flow to a holding tank.

When the weather is nice, the concept of an outdoor kitchen is grand. Pull up a chair, pour a beverage, and commune with nature. However, when it becomes less than ideal outside, the novelty fades quickly. It’s a misery we experienced firsthand.

Bedding down the first night, the sky was clear with a full moon shining brightly. By morning, however, clouds arrived, and light snow flurries began to fall. The tall evergreens swayed gently in the breeze as the forest slowly transformed into a winter wonderland. By midmorning we had packed up and were on the move down the trail to the next point on our adventure.

Night two brought us to a new camping spot a bit higher in elevation. As light snow continued, we dutifully deployed the trailer’s 23Zero 270-degree awning only to discover it covered neither the stovetop nor the trailer’s entry door entirely. We should have taken this as a sign of what was to come. As what little daylight was present began to fade and temperatures plummeted quickly, it was time to cook dinner. One click of the stove’s igniter was all it took to light the burner before the light wind proceeded to blow it out. The ensuing battle of determination between man and nature lasted several minutes before the cold and wind sent us scrambling back inside for shelter with our cold leftover pizza from the night before in hand.

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Riding Out the Storm

Thanks to our Starlink setup, we kept tabs on the incoming storm. The call for light winds shifted suddenly to a gale warning with 35-plus-mph winds in the forecast. We went into crisis mode as the awning, which can typically handle wind up to 20 mph, remained deployed. For better or worse, the fallen snow’s weight did a good job of holding the awning in place. But with the wind ripping and snow giving way to sleet, we wrestled the awning back into its storage bag while getting as close to frostbitten fingers as we ever have.

The wind continued to howl through the night while rain and snow fell continually harder. Thankfully, the Tall Boy provided a comfortable refuge from the storm. That is, until the Dickenson propane heater decided it didn’t want to cooperate with the wind. Left without a heater, we were reliant on the trailer’s R5 insulation to keep the heat inside, which anyone who knows anything about insulation will tell you is not quite enough for sub-freezing temperatures. By morning, condensation on the interior walls left outlines of all the areas where there was and wasn’t insulation behind the aluminum skin.

As we sat in the trailer and pondered what had just happened along with a forecast that called for increasing chances of more snow and wind, we knew it was best to leave the mountains and head toward the coast for our final night in the Tall Boy. At the lower altitude, away from the wind and rain, we were finally able to fully utilize the trailer’s outdoor kitchen along with enjoying the heater’s warming glow.

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What Works and What Doesn’t

Our three nights with the Mammoth Overland Tall Boy were eventful but really allowed us to sample the flavor of not only this remarkable trailer but the whole notion of an overland trailer, as well. Because we spent so much of our time inside the tailer, we came to really appreciate how open it felt thanks to the large number of windows, white walls, and bright LED lighting. That said, the eight porthole windows that line the upper edge of the trailer, while lightly tinted, offer no covering. On bright full-moon nights such as our first in the Tall Boy it was difficult to get the interior dark enough for our liking. Custom window shades would be our first purchase upon taking delivery of a Tall Boy.

We also really appreciated the 400-amp-hour lithium battery and 2,000-watt power inverter, which allowed us to not only run the trailer but also power computers, phones, and the Starlink satellite for three days without coming anywhere close to discharging the battery. For increased peace of mind, we’d likely want a set of permanently mounted solar panels on the roof.

The indoor bathroom, while small, proved to be a godsend. With the storm raging, there was little desire to head outside when nature inevitably called. The on-demand hot-water heater, however, left a bit to be desired. It performed its duties of heating water, but the way these devices work in general doesn’t mesh well with trailer life. There needs to be water flow in order to signal the heater into action, which inevitably leads to wasted cold water before the heater gets up to temp and provides hot water. Dumping potentially gallons down the drain in the pursuit of warmer water feels like a fool’s errand with a finite quantity on board.

Also, the indoor/outdoor passthrough pantry seemed like a grand idea until the wind kicked up and we could feel the cold breeze coming through the storage area. It’s far from ideal when outside temperatures are below the freezing point. An improvement in the exterior door’s sealing surface would help mitigate this discomfort while retaining the functionality.

Our other real quibble involves the outdoor kitchen. Although we understand the need to save space inside, our desires for a frosty beverage during the unsavory weather meant donning all our winter garb, opening the trailer’s door and stairwell—thereby letting heat escape—and venturing out into the cold to swing out the kitchen and access the refrigerator. Surely there must be a way to satisfy the parched with less discomfort.

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Did We Learn Anything From This Adventure?

Interest in RVs, travel trailers, and the overland scene has exploded in recent years. We imagine a lot of people are jumping blindly into the hobby simply based on what they see on social media. As we experienced in our time with the Mammoth Overland Tall Boy, even with the best equipment and luxuries of home, you need to be not only adventurous but also adaptable, a bit rugged, and a bit crazy to really get the most out of the backcountry. You must be ready and able to problem-solve on the fly, willing to change plans at a moment’s notice, and possess the ability to remain calm under extreme pressure.

Having the proper quality equipment certainly helps, too. And we couldn’t picture doing this expedition again in anything less than the Mammoth Overland Tall Boy. Despite our grumbling about some of its details, the Tall Boy remained steadfast throughout our time with it. We never worried about having issues with it on the trail, all its systems worked flawlessly while parked, and aside from the heater losing its battle with the wind, the trailer worked exactly as designed.

The first 10 Mammoth TL Tall Boy trailers built will be the company’s Genesis Edition. At $72,000, these models will feature every luxury and overlanding option the company offers. Once they are delivered, customers will be able to order lesser-equipped standard TL Tall Boy models at a lower cost. But why would anyone want to?