Steve Wallis is doing his best to prepare his abode for the night — the inside of an old water-pipe main in Sooke.
“Obviously, don’t do this. I don’t recommend this as an actual shelter,” he said to a camera, in a video that’s since been viewed 2.5 million times.
He blanketed the area with mosquito spray, put up three umbrellas to block out wind and used an air-horn to flush out unwanted critters. But he still woke up a little worse for wear.
“It was strange noises, pretty cold,” said the Alberta-based video creator. “It’s basically the same temperature outside.”
Wallis is known for his laid back and humorous approach to urban and wilderness camping. He recently spent time in the West Shore, sleeping in unconventional spots, which he documented in a series of YouTube videos that have accumulated close to six million views.
Victoria resident Ross Stuart said he gave Wallis the co-ordinates of where he could sleep in a section of the defunct 44-kilometre Sooke flowline.
“He really liked the idea of it,” Stuart said.
Stuart, an avid outdoorsman who has hiked most of the trails on Vancouver Island, said he got into watching Wallis’ camping videos around five years ago.
“He kind of feels like a friend more than some random Youtuber you’re watching,” said Stuart. “My wife calls him our neighbour — you know, he’d be a guy that you’d like to have as your neighbour, a guy that you go have a beer with and yak with.”
He said Wallis, who has been posting videos for more than a decade, helped set off a sub-genre of video creators camping in unusual places.
Some creators try and play up the fact that they are trespassing and camping in extreme or dangerous places, but Wallis keeps it pretty straightforward, Stuart said.
“It’s more about his personality and the way he approaches it.”
There’s usually a bit of a slapdash DIY approach when Wallis goes stealth camping.
Last Sunday, Wallis was in the back of a dump truck parked off the side of a road in Colwood, making pan pizza in a toaster oven hooked up to a lithium-ion battery.
He wore a high-vis vest and carried a few bags of trash as camouflage — in case anyone started asking why he was out on the side of the road.
Later that night, after a trip to a grocery store for the bathroom, Wallis fell asleep in the truck bed, in a sleeping bag hidden under a tarp.
Truck owner Eddy Cooper of Beecher Bay First Nation said Wallis asked to borrow his vehicle for the video.
“They had it pretty planned out,” he said.
Earlier that Sunday, Cooper had parked his truck on the shoulder of Metchosin Road, put out his traffic cones as if the vehicle had broken down and left the truck bed uncovered so that Wallis could camp there overnight.
“I don’t even know if anyone even noticed. I had it gone in the morning,” Cooper said.
Wallis acknowledges in his videos that what he does is not necessarily too different from the daily life of a homeless person.
“I literally was loitering in a McDonald’s for a little bit, for a place to warm up and sit down. So [it’s] not an easy life out there for anyone living out on the streets, that’s for sure,” he said in a video, while staying overnight in bushes at the busy intersection of McCallum and Millstream roads in Langford.
Wallis used to work as a furnace repair man in Edmonton, but quit that job when he started working full-time as a video content creator.
Before that, he lived on Vancouver Island for several years in an RV, bouncing in between Jordan River, Sooke and Campbell River. He worked odd jobs, such as a night shift at Home Depot, which he later turned into a self-produced documentary.
On Christmas Day, Wallis announced to his followers on social media that he had purchased the same RV model that he used years ago on the Island. “The new year will see this identical motor-home to the one I had 12 years ago go on a very special adventure with me,” he wrote on social media.
The Times Colonist was unable to reach Wallis for comment regarding his future steps.
But a recent one-word social media post left a clue as to where he might go next: “Camping.”
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