Broomfield's EarthRoamer goes where RVs can't.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Attitude at Altitude - Xpedition vehicles

Recreational vehicles are not meant for off-road, off-grid travel. If you don't have an electrical hookup or level blacktop, you're pretty much out of luck.

For those who crave a bit more freedom, Broomfield's EarthRoamer makes "Xpedition Vehicles" (XVs), burly motor homes built to go places an RV can't: up unpaved mountains, across sandy beaches, over frozen snowfields--pretty much anywhere.

And thanks to a bank of heavy-duty batteries, dual alternators and roof-mounted solar panels, the XV doesn't need to be tethered to an electrical hookup.

The company was originally born out of a career change, a switch that was fueled in part by the then-booming stock market. EarthRoamer COO/Chief Designer Bill Swails left a marketing gig at Qwest in 1999 to become a freelance writer and photographer, taking off on an Alaskan adventure in a Dodge Ram with an off-the-shelf camper shell and all sorts of goodies.

But Swails found his put-together rig left many creature comforts still to be desired. "During that four-month trip, I really started seeing the limitations of that vehicle," he said, citing poor insulation and propane problems.

Swails teamed with a now-defunct Canadian design firm to build "the next iteration" of an EarthRoamer (no propane, even better components) as a personal vehicle in 2000, and then took it on a journey down Baja in Mexico. The XV still needed some work, so in 2002, Swails teamed with Michele Connolly, who he'd met a decade earlier while both were in UCLA's MBA program, and started a company, EarthRoamer.com LLC.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Swails and Connolly financed the startup out of pocket. The pair saw the XV as a unique marketing vehicle (pun intended) and set out to ink manufacturers of aftermarket truck accessories as clients. That business plan didn't fly, but a new one--manufacturing XVs--emerged in its place.

"We had been batting around the idea (of becoming a manufacturer)," said Connolly, the company's president and CEO. "It's obviously a major undertaking." The duo wrangled "a truck and promotional dollars" from Ford and finished the third and final XV prototype in June 2003. Molds were then cast from that vehicle's Fiberglas shell, and the first EarthRoamer XVs shipped before year's end.

As of this writing, the eight-employee company had delivered four units and had a backlog of 14 orders, thanks to word of mouth and magazine coverage in Outside and Popular Mechanics.

Not only is it rough and tumble (built on a...