Overland the real Cascades. High Clearance: Lookout Road puts you on 20 × 28 km of Washington's Gifford Pinchot backroads, mapped from 1 m lidar. Lock your diffs, air down, winch out, make camp, or ride along and watch the country go by while the map fills in.
Try the beta. It runs on the Steam Deck and on Linux. Leave an
address and you'll get a way in when there's room.
Used only to send you the beta. Ask and it's deleted.
A real place, a metre at a time. Lookout Road is the country around Lookout Mountain in southern Washington: Siouxon Peak, Bare Mountain, Gumboot Mountain and Lookout Mountain, the Forest Service's high-clearance roads, the creeks and lakes, and the trackless Siouxon watershed you can only walk into. Every slope is the real one, from the U.S. Geological Survey's 1 m lidar; every road is on the Forest Service's map.
The rig is the puzzle. Two-high, four-high, four-low. Open diffs, a rear locker, both. Air down for grip, air back up for the road home. Shift a three-on-the-tree in a 1949 pickup, double-clutch a crash box, mind the temperature on a long climb, and when it's stuck, it's stuck: winch to a tree, rig a snatch block, or walk to high ground for a bar of signal and call the tow.
The detail adds up. Fuel and heat, tyre pressure and wear, ruts and mud, the time of day, headlights and fog. Hints come from rules, and you can ask why. Camp by a fire you built, fish, cook, drum, watch the stars, listen for what's out there.
Learn overlanding by doing it. Lessons from under the truck, a garage for the rigs with a lift you can walk under, a practice yard, and a workshop of engines and gearboxes to take apart.
The lookout's log
What's changed, version by version, as the fire lookout on the peak wrote it down.
The game's settings link to the entry for the build you have.
Logged at 1400, visibility good. Somebody has put the whole country down there into the game: Siouxon Peak, Bare Mountain, Gumboot, and this mountain under my chair, every slope a metre at a time from the Survey's lidar, every Forest Service road where the Forest Service says it is. I checked my own ridge. It is correct. The trees are thick enough that you will stay on the road, which is where you should be anyway.
Ride along: press K on a road and the rig follows it. You pick the way at the junctions and the pace with Up and Down; E hurries the world along when the views get repetitive. They do not, but I am told some people disagree.
A map, N: where you are, the way you came, and what you have seen. The rest stays grey until you go and look at it. That is how maps work up here too.
The garage has the rigs, a lift and a practice yard; the river leg and the pass still teach low range, lockers, airing down and the winch; the tow truck still comes when you call it, from high ground or in Morse.
The game updates itself now, from Settings. It also knows which build it is, to the minute. I wrote the minute down.
