The first rig Luke knew was an old white moving van his dad converted into a kayak vehicle when Luke was eleven. Horse trailer windows, scrapyard seats, a couple of hammocks and two La-Z-Boy recliners along one side. It seated about fifteen people and held twelve kayaks, and all through Luke's high school they chased whitewater in it, until it burned down in the hay barn it was parked in.

Luke met Ross through a friend he kayaked with in the Boulder flood, Spencer. Spencer had a 1990 International school bus, yellow, and would round people up at weekends for rivers, skiing and bikes. Luke was driving it to the Westwater put-in at two in the morning when it died. They slept on the road in front of it in the rain.

Ross was on that trip. He was a full-blown adult and Luke was still in college, but they spent the next several years on rivers together.

Luke and Caroline, his girlfriend and now his wife, bought a Ram 1500 off Craigslist for a thousand dollars and spent six weeks on the road that May with kites, bikes and climbing gear. South of Santa Cruz they camped on top of a four-hundred-foot cliff over the ocean that a few surfers had told them about.

This was early enough that you could scroll to the bottom of the vanlife hashtag in one sitting. The van broke down the way a thousand-dollar van does, and that is when Luke first asked Ross whether he would help build a proper one.

The next year, coming into Delta on the way to Telluride, a woman pulled out in front of them. They hit her at sixty-five miles an hour and rolled four or five times. The van was totaled and still sits in a junkyard about half a mile from where it happened.

Luke bought a diesel ProMaster and parked it in the driveway of one of Ross’s job sites in Steamboat. Luke was working an engineering internship at the Air Force base in Ogden, Utah, so he would leave on Thursday night, work Friday through Sunday with Ross, and be back at work at 4.30 on Monday morning. They did that for about ten weekends. They listed it on Craigslist and it sold.

They emptied the bank account, took eighty thousand dollars in cash to California and bought a fleet of Vanagons from a woman retiring her rental business. As rentals they were a disaster. But the idea held for six years: hand someone the keys and let them find out whether this life suits them — the same thing Dave Farny was doing with a ranch and five-week summers.

Ross is a truck guy. He got it into his head that he could build a better truck camper than anything on the market, and nobody fully took him seriously until they walked into the front room of the shop and found he had cut a pass-through into a brand-new F-150.

Luke had been circling the same idea from the other direction. After totaling his van he had found a couple who built a composite shell for the back of a Tacoma and documented the whole process.

So they picked the F-150, drew it on a whiteboard and built one. The first Baja was plywood, fiberglassed over like a prototype boat, and it is still on the road today. They drove it for a year and learned they were wrong about the chassis. Julio, who still does paint repair here, used to build hot tub molds in Uruguay. They built the molds in the front room at 611 and pulled two shells. Those were the white and black Bajas.

Everyone who built those two units went to Mexico in them. A core part of the crew drove from Longmont to the tip of Baja to find out what would break. We camped every night and ate what we caught. We spent almost a month down there and did our honest best to destroy both trucks.

When they came home we pulled one apart and inspected every frame point and body mount. It had held. Then we commissioned proper molds, and then another set for the longer side-entry version. That is the Baja you can buy today.

Lagom is the other Swedish word in the building, and this one we borrowed on purpose, because it means just the right amount. A hard-walled aluminum folding topper, four season, between 350 and 450 pounds. It was the closest thing we have built to the do-more-with-less rule the Skyline climbers still credit Dave Farny for. Justin has Luke’s old one on his truck right now.

The Baja Series went out through Van City RV as the EX, LX and Plus, and the wholesale side of the business started to become most of the business.

March. We introduced the Skye, a 170-inch Sprinter built to be the most capable version of that van on the market.

June. We launched the Havn at Overland Expo Pacific Northwest, on a Mercedes-Benz 3500. One floorplan, on purpose. We would rather do one layout properly than six of them adequately.

August. We moved to 501 South Francis Street, from twenty-three thousand square feet to thirty-six thousand, and from seven production bays to twenty.

The Löft arrived in June, the first American-made molded-body 144-inch Sprinter built for this kind of travel. The shell is vacuum-infused composite rather than panels bonded into a box. The queen elevator bed lifts clear and the space underneath becomes a living area and a dinette, or opens into a full-width garage.

Every vehicle in this story was built by someone who needed it first. Luke’s dad built the rig to get twelve kayaks and fifteen people to a race. Luke built the Ram to spend six weeks on the coast. Ross cut into his own truck because he was tired of the campers he could buy. The Baja exists because people who ski, kayak and climb wanted something small enough to reach the places worth reaching, and nothing on the market was that.

That is also why, five years on, nobody has built another one. You can copy a shape. It is harder to copy the reason for it.