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I stayed at Lone Rock Road in Glen Canyon Rec area for a week and drove Valley of the Gods Road (16 miles, fun) stayed a couple nights. While at Lake Powell there was a huge dust storm, this will wreak havoc, gets into the window seals and track and every crevice, buy not really inside until you open something. Driving the road, has the same affect. However, as noted earlier, the refrigerator vents are huge collectors of it all. I power washed it three times, at a local car wash, that week, red dust everywhere. I expected to vacuum quite a bit out of between the hulls, to protect the electronics, but found virtually nothing, including the areas even close to the weep holes. So yes, if you can fashion a filter to reverse the Maxx Air, you should really have no issue there.

I'm very interested in hearing other people's experiences and tips as well. My intuitive answer would be that if you can find or make a really good filter for the maxx air fan, then you can run it on low in reverse while driving to pressurize the cabin. If you could make that work, then I think it would go a long way toward keeping dust from getting sucked in through the window seals and such. Beyond that, the fridge vents seem like a prime spot for gathering trail dust, and if you can't seal those then at least remove them at your destination to inspect and blow the dust out so that it doesn't affect the fridge's efficiency. One other spot of concern would be the weeps at the bottom. I suspect that you could get a good bit of dust in between the hulls through those. Which would them become mud the next time you get any condensation. I'm considering replacing them on ours with something I can cap off. But if you can stuff something into them then that might be good enough.

John, Just a few more thoughts to throw in the mix: I had a spring over on my toy hauler of the same length and with tandem axles . it was more of a pain than benefit with the higher steps, higher hitch and extremely limited times I really needed it. Ollies are really good in stock form when off road because they have no hanging down pipe and are tandem axles. I've already taken mine over some surprisingly rough roads and watched very carefully how it did. The springs on these axles are just really for utility trailers and are very low tech. They don't seems to be able to take a lot of abuse in other situations and bending them farther than designed is not a good plan. Asking Oliver to accept responsibility for reducing the stability is asking a lot. It is probably better if you do it yourself or have it done somewhere else. You might try it out first in stock form and see if you really think it's necessary. A relatively short trailer with tandem axles is very good on rough roads. Given all of that, it would be a cool mod for more extreme use.

I've been camping all my life. My parents had an old tent, then an Apache tent trailer. I used to go with just my truck and sleep on the ground next to my dirt bike. Colder weather got me over doing that. Besides, I don't feel the need to rough-it these days. It's nice to be warm and it's fun to cook great meals while out camping. My favorite places are in the high desert. My daughter and I were in Death Valley in a big wind storm and had the chance to stay in a nice little trailer for the night. It was so nice that I really started looking at them more seriously. I've had a pop-up camper and several trailers now and none of them were very good quality or even practical. My Toy Hauler made one trip to Death Valley and had a lot of damage from the vibration, etc. Plus drafty and hard to heat. It was disappointing to sort of give up on trailers. I saw an Oliver here locally. An older Elite and really liked it, but it didn't have enough headroom. Then I started searching and discovered the new Elite ll. I was hooked. Expensive, but it would probably last the rest of my life and be so efficient in a number of ways. I had pretty much decided to order one when I found a like new one that was close by. It looked like it had never been used. That did it! There was the opportunity staring me right n the face, so I went for it. Earlier, I finished out a 42' fiberglass Ketch. I designed and put up the rig, did all the systems and learned how to sail on it. I put thousands of miles on that boat in the San Francisco Bay and sailed it to Mexico and back. Meanwhile, I lived on-board for about 17 years. I recently finished building our home in Northern Nevada and will be retiring at the end of this year. Ollie is in the garage, waiting for Spring and for me to have a bit more time to start making some short trips. Bullards Beach, Oregon this July, for instance, and lots of trips around the Eastern Sierras and hot springs in the next few months. Next year we'll be off wandering with no schedule. No buyers remorse here. Just the promise of a some really fun times in our beautiful little home on wheels. With the Oliver, I really appreciate the quality, ease of towing and general usefulness. The stickies I've had were all about building the cheapest thing they could get away with, and pretty much, were disposable. I've always admired Airstreams too, but the cost is higher, they are not really designed to be practical so much as designed to look good and the 8' width makes them a lot harder to tow.