Overland the Red 2024: Red River Gorge with the Comanche and the Camper
October 2024 | Red River Gorge, Kentucky | 3 Days
There's a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from loading up a rig you built yourself, pointing it south, and letting the miles unspool. When the destination is the Red River Gorge in October and the event is Overland the Red, that satisfaction compounds. We'd been eyeing this one for a while. When we finally pulled in to Callie's Lake and Campground, it was clear the drive was worth it.
We made the run down from Minnesota as a crew — a friend of mine, a couple people from the company, and myself — and brought both rigs: the 1986 Jeep Comanche for trail duty, and our custom fire truck camper to serve as base camp. If you've seen the fire truck, you know it's a conversation starter wherever it goes. If you haven't, the short version is that it started as a decommissioned fire apparatus and ended up as a fully custom overland camper that we built in-house at DirtBound. It's heavy, it's deliberate, and it does exactly what it was designed to do: make camp feel less like roughing it and more like a forward operating base.
The Event
Overland the Red is a Northology production, and Northology runs a tight ship. The format will be familiar to anyone who's attended an overland gathering — group trail runs organized by difficulty, vendor village, classes, evening camp life — but the Red River Gorge gives it a backdrop that elevates the whole thing. This isn't a flat, dusty fairground event. The terrain is right there, immediate and serious, and you feel it from the moment you arrive.
Callie's Lake and Campground is a solid venue choice for this event. It's a 50-acre property with a stocked lake, a restaurant, and a concert stage — the infrastructure is already there for a crowd, which makes logistics easier for both organizers and attendees. The campground has its own dedicated off-road focus beyond just the event, which tells you something about the customer they're set up to host.
Turnout this year was strong. The vendor village had a solid showing, worth walking through unhurried between runs. The kind of vendors worth talking to, not just browsing past. The Northology crew clearly put work into curation here — the quality of the exhibitors matched the quality of the event.
The Rigs
The Comanche handled trail duty all three days and didn't give us a moment of grief. There's something to be said for a platform that age — the '86 MJ is simple enough that when something goes sideways in the field, you can usually sort it without specialty tooling or a laptop. It also helps that ours has been built with trail use in mind from the ground up. The MJ body-on-frame design gives you a lot to work with, and the longer wheelbase compared to a CJ or early YJ keeps things composed on the off-camber stuff.
The fire truck stayed in camp and performed exactly as intended. Three days of comfortable base camp without the nickel-and-dime annoyances that come with under-built setups. When we eat dinner, we eat dinner. When it's time to sleep, it's quiet and level and dry. Building your own rig means you get to solve for your actual use case rather than someone else's average — and that shows in the field.
The Trails
Red River Gorge is not Moab. It's not trying to be. What it is — rocky, rooted, layered with mud after any rain — makes for trails that are genuinely engaging without requiring you to have a spotter on every other line. The terrain keeps you honest. Traction management matters. Clearance matters. But the consequence of a wrong line is usually a recovery strap moment, not a rollover situation.
We ran a variety of routes across all three days, mixing organized group runs with a couple of self-guided stretches. Nothing that required a winch pull, but enough to confirm that the Comanche's setup is dialed in the right direction. The mix of exposed rock and slick clay transitions is the kind of thing you don't get in the upper Midwest, which made it a useful calibration run for the rig.
Group trail runs at events like this are a good opportunity to watch how other people drive — you learn as much from that as you do from the terrain itself.
Off the Trails
We made time to get out of the vehicles and into the gorge on foot. The overlooks in this part of Kentucky are not incidental — they're legitimate destinations, and in October, with the canopy doing what it does, they're hard to overstate. The Red River drainage turns in a way that creates these long, elevated sight lines through the hardwoods. Scarlet, orange, yellow, still some green in the understory. If you time a trip to Red River Gorge right — and mid-October is right — the scenery alone justifies the fuel cost.
This is a corner of the country that doesn't always get its due in overland coverage. The Southeast tends to get flattened into a generic "rocks and mud" descriptor, but the Red River Gorge has genuine character. It rewards slowing down.
Camp Life
Staying at Callie's kept logistics simple, which is how we prefer it. The campground has its own restaurant on site — we ate there one evening, and the food was good. Pizza, BBQ, the kind of straightforward campground cooking that hits right after a full day on trail. No need to coordinate a convoy into town when the food is already there.
The social scene around camp was consistently good. Overland events self-select for people who are interested in the same things you are, which makes conversation easy. We spent time talking with other attendees, comparing notes on builds and trails and gear, the usual. Vendors who were worth talking to came out of the village after hours. That overlap between the commercial and the community side of an event is where you find the interesting conversations.
Final Thoughts
Overland the Red earns a return visit. The Northology crew produces a well-organized event in a location that delivers on multiple fronts — the trails are real, the scenery is legitimate, and the community that shows up for it is the kind of crowd worth spending a weekend with.
For us, the trip also served a practical purpose: the Comanche got real trail time, the fire truck camper got proven out in field conditions, and we came back with confirmation that the builds are pointed in the right direction. That's the dual value of an event like this — you're there for the experience, but you come home with data.
Worth the drive from Minnesota. We'll be back.
