This is the story about how we recovered a 1972 Dodge Tradesman B200 Camper Van from the wild in Rexford, Montana.
How did we find it?
I was attending a weekly coffee ☕️ talk at Keller Williams Realty Northwest Montana one Friday morning, and we were chatting about things we like to do. I mentioned wanting to restore an old VW bus. One of the agents in the circle mentioned that one of her sellers had one sitting on a listing, and it needed to be gone. If I wanted it, I could go get it.
A little recon!
Before I committed to taking it, I wanted to go see what was there, so I made the hour-ish drive from Kalispell up to Rexford (just outside of Eureka, MT, near the Canadian Border). When I got there, I was disappointed to find an old 1972 Dodge Tradesman B200 Camper Van, not a Volkswagen.
However I couldn’t deny that this van was cool, but I wasn’t intersted in taking it on as my own. But a good friend of ours was wanting a camper, so we made a deal that we would go recover it, bring it home and get it running and driving, then she would take over and remodel the camper.
Lets go get it!
This 1972 Dodge Tradesman B200 Camper Van had been sitting in the same place for a very long time. We didn’t know what to expect or which tools to bring. So we planned for the worst and brought extra tools we did not end up needing.
We don’t own a vehicle trailer so we had to rent a U-Haul which ran about 60 bucks for the day and drove up to recover it.
The legend behind it?
The story goes that the last owner won the van in a poker game and then parked it up on his property to use it as a summer house. The van was locked up tight and the only residents in recent years appeared to have been mice. Overall the van was in pretty good shape for its age.
Since it was locked up tight, we had to break in. We brought a drill with various bits and were easily able to remove one of the larger windows & put James in through the opening. After a little bit of a struggle we were able to get all the doors open and get inside.
How do we move it?
All the tires were flat, but we brought a small compressor and were able to get them all filled up and able to roll. We used the tow strap and hooked it onto our F150 & pulled it off the property through a little ditch and onto the road. We lined up the U-Haul trailer & used the come-along to pull the van up onto the trailer. Now I know a winch would’ve been easier, but we have very little use for one, and a come-along was a fraction of the cost, so we went that route.
We got it secured onto the trailer & made the trip back to Kalispell. When we got to town, we decided it was a good idea to go through the car wash with it on the trailer and get all the gunk off from it it’s been sitting for so long.
